Federated management of information for TeleCARE

Distributed information management plays a fundamental role within the base infrastructure supporting the elderly care domain. Specificities of this domain include the autonomy and independence of its involved actors, the critical data that is handled about individuals, and the variety of hardware/software resources supporting the elderly care environment. A federated information management system coping with these requirements is designed and integrated as a core component of a mobile agent-based infrastructure, to support collaborative networks for elderly care. Functionalities for: federated schema management, federated query processing, HW/SW resource management, specification and enforcement of visibility/access rights to data and resources, and an ontology-based automatic schema generation facility are introduced, and their implementation details are briefly discussed

Support for Cooperative Experiments in e-Science: From Scientific Workflows to Knowledge Sharing

The term e-Science describes computational and data-intensive science. It has become a complementary experiment paradigm alongside the traditional in vivo and in vitro experiment paradigms. e-Science opens new doors for scientists and with it, it exposes a number of challenges such as how to organize huge datasets and coordinate distributed execution. For these challenges, a plethora of technologies and innovations have come together to enable e-Science (Foster and Kesselman 2006). Nowadays, complex scientific experiments designed following the e-Science paradigm are preformed using geographically distributed instruments, data and computing resources. The newly designed scientific experiments are costly, time-consuming, and multidisciplinary. Complex scientific experiments not only require access to geographically distributed hardware and software resources, but also extensive support to foster best practices, dissemination, and re-use

Collaborative network for district energy operation and semantic technologies: A case study

The growing interest toward renewable energies and alternative energy sources has led to the development of an increasingly complex district energy landscape with multiple agents and systems. In this new prospect, some frameworks such as USEF [1] or holonic multi-agent systems [2] propose new approaches, where, in the way of a Virtual Organisation Breeding Environment (VOBE) [3], diverse organizations cooperate on a long-term basis to run an energy system. This study focuses on the THERMOSS project, an EU-funded project that investigates the efficient operation of district heating and cooling networks, and demonstrates that such organisation can be integrated into the Collaborative Networks (CNs) paradigm. Additionally, a semantic approach is briefly introduced as a mean to support and improve data transfer and communication between the different entities of THERMOSS as a CN