LabChain: an Interactive Prototype for Synthetic Peer-to-Peer Trade Research in Experimental Energy Economics

Blockchain-based peer-to-peer (P2P) electricity markets received considerable attention in the past years, leading to a rich variety of proposed market designs. Yet, little comparability and consensus exists on optimal market design, also due to a lack of common evaluation and benchmarking infrastructure. This article describes LabChain, an interactive prototype as research infrastructure for conducting experiments in (simulated) P2P electricity markets involving real human actors. The software stack comprises: (i) an (open) data layer for experiment configuration, (ii) a blockchain layer to reliably document bids and transactions, (iii) an experiment coordination layer and (iv) a user interface layer for participant interactions. As evaluation environment for human interactions within a laboratory setting, researchers can investigate patterns based on energy system and market setup and can compare and evaluate designs under real human behavior allowing alignment of intentions and outcomes. This contributes to the evaluation and benchmarking infrastructure discourse

Starting by Starting! Fortschritt im europäischen Open Data Strategieprozess durch das neue Europäische Datenportal

Open Data befindet sich noch in den Kinderschuhen. Mit dem Europäischen Datenportal ist ein weiterer Schritt in Richtung der flächendeckenden Umsetzung von Open Data im europäischen Raum gemacht. Im Rahmen dieses Prozesses werden noch viele politische und wirtschaftliche Abstimmungen und Maßnahmen sowie technologische Verbesserungen erforderlich sein. Die Herausforderungen liegen u. a. darin, das Bewusstsein für die Chancen und den Nutzen von offenen Daten bei Datenbereitstellern und –nutzern zu schaffen, praktische Hilfestellung für beide Seiten zu bieten und gemeinsam, neue Open Databasierte Geschäftsmodelle und Anwendungen zu entwickeln. Flankiert wird das europäische Projekt deshalb von weiteren Aktivitäten, die der Unterstützung von Datenbereitstellern und Datennutzern dienen. Das reicht von der Erstellung von Trainingsunterlagen und der Durchführung von Workshops bis hin zu High-Level-Veranstaltungen, bei denen fortgeschrittene EU-Länder die „Anfänger“ in Sachen Open Data an ihren Erfahrungen und Erfolgsrezepten teilhaben lassen

The European Data Portal: Scalable harvesting and management of Linked Open Data

The European Data Portal fosters the adoption and distribution of Linked Open Data by offering more than 130 million RDF triples. It applies DCAT-AP, the RDF vocabulary for public sector datasets in Europe. Many Open Data solutions do not satisfactorily support this metadata specification. To address this problem, we designed and implemented a novel platform for harvesting and managing native DCAT-AP-compliant RDF. Our approach uses a triplestore as main database and applies state-of-the-art development and deployment patterns to ensure performance and scalability

On the interplay of open data, cloud services and network providers towards electric mobility in smart cities

Quality of life in an urban environment depends strongly on ecological, social and mobility aspects. A major innovation in that context is given by the emergence of electric vehicles. Additionally, the explosive growth of social networks has shown how the Internet can be used to maintain and create communities, thereby bringing mutual benefits to the involved participants. Combining both, there is an obvious potential for the realization of collaborative electric vehicle sharing within a city. In this paper, we investigate one of the key aspects required to realize the vision of electric vehicle sharing - a cloud infrastructure for handling the required data. We propose a distributed architecture for the realization of such data cloud. Further, we demonstrate how ISP networks and the elect ric mobility data cloud can collaborate in order to provide efficient streaming of continuous data

Linked data in the European Data Portal: A comprehensive platform for applying DCAT-AP

The European Data Portal (EDP) is a central access point for metadata of Open Data published by public authorities in Europe and acquires data from more than 70 national data providers. The platform is a starting point in adopting the Linked Data specification DCAT-AP, aiming to increase interoperability and accessibility of Open Data. In this paper, we present the design of the central data management components of the platform, responsible for metadata storage, data harvesting and quality assessment. The core component is based on CKAN, which is extended by the support for native Linked Data replication to a triplestore to ensure legacy compatibility and the support for DCAT-AP. Regular data harvesting and the creation of detailed quality reports are performed by custom components adressing the requirements of DCAT-AP. The EDP is well on track to become the core platform for European Open Data and fostered the acceptance of DCAT-AP. Our platform is available here: https://www.europeandataportal.e

The concept of a mobility data cloud: Design, implementation and trials

The mobility data cloud is an Internet based platform for the integration of mobility related data from different data providers. It offers a framework for the acquisition, aggregation, provisioning, and analysis of mobility relevant data originating from various sources, e.g. Charging stations, gas stations, position of vehicles, battery charge condition of electric vehicles, utilization of vehicles, and data regarding public transport. These various types of data should facilitate the collaborative shared utilization of mobility resources such as electric vehicles, charging stations, etc. This paper presents the design and implementation of such an Internet based mobility data cloud. In addition, the presented prototype is evaluated based on trials in a European city

Small noncoding differentially methylated copy-number variants, including IncRNA genes, cause a lethal lung developmental disorder

An unanticipated and tremendous amount of the noncoding sequence of the human genome is transcribed. Long noncoding RNAs (IncRNAs) constitute a significant fraction of non-protein-coding transcripts; however, their functions remain enigmatic. We demonstrate that deletions of a small noncoding differentially methylated region at 16q24.1, including IncRNA genes, cause a lethal lung developmental disorder, alveolar capillary dysplasia with misalignment of pulmonary veins (ACD/MPV), with parent-of-origin effects. We identify overlapping deletions 250 kb upstream of FOXF1 in nine patients with ACD/MPV that arose de novo specifically on the maternally inherited chromosome and delete lung-specific IncRNAgenes. These deletions define a distant cis-regulatory region that harbors, besides lncRNAgenes, also a differentially methylated CpGisland, binds GLI2 depending on the methylation status of this CpG island, and physically interacts with and up-regulates the FOXF1 promoter. Wesuggest that lung-transcribed 16q24.1 IncRNAs may contribute to long-range regulation of FOXF1 by GLI2 and other transcription factors. Perturbation of IncRNA-mediated chromatin interactions may, in general, be responsible for position effect phenomena and potentially cause many disorders of human development