Modernizing Legacy Physics Applications for Reuse in Web and SOA

This paper concerns the application of recent information technologies for creating a software system for numerical simulations in the domain of plasma physics and in particular metal vapor lasers. The presented work is connected with performing modernization of legacy physics software for reuse on the web and inside a Service-Oriented Architecture environment. Applied and described is the creation of Java front-ends of legacy C++ and FORTRAN codes. Then the transformation of some of the scientific components into web services, as well as the creation of a web interface to the legacy application, is presented. The use of the BPEL language for managing scientific workflows is also considered.

Digitization and Preservation of City Landmarks Using Limited and Free Web Services

This paper presents a practical approach for digitizing city landmarks based on free and limited Web resources. The digital replicas are then placed on the Web using popular services, like Google earth, and are accessible to a huge user base. The method is easily applicable and quite valuable to organizations with limited funding.

Online Genetic Algorithms

This paper present a technique based on genetic algorithms for generating online adaptive services. Online adaptive systems provide flexible services to a mass of clients/users for maximising some system goals, they dynamically adapt the form and the content of the issued services while the population of clients evolve over time. The idea of online genetic algorithms (online GAs) is to use the online clients response behaviour as a fitness function in order to produce the next generation of services. The principle implemented in online GAs, “the application environment is the fitness”, allow modelling highly evolutionary domains where both services providers and clients change and evolve over time. The flexibility and the adaptive behaviour of this approach seems to be very relevant and promising for applications characterised by highly dynamical features such as in the web domain (online newspapers, e- markets, websites and advertising engines). Nevertheless the proposed technique has a more general aim for application environments characterised by a massive number of anonymous clients/users which require personalised services, such as in the case of many new IT applications.

Online Education: What Works in Mathematics

Florida State University and University of Helsinki Information technology has the potential to deliver education to everybody by high quality online courses and associated services, and to enhance traditional face-to-face instruction by, e.g., web services offering virtually unlimited practice and step-bystep solutions to practice problems. Regardless of this, tools of information technology have not yet penetrated mathematics education in any meaningful way. This is mostly due to the inertia of academia: instructors are slow to change their working habits. This paper reports on an experiment where all the instructors (seven instructors and six teaching assistants) of a large calculus course were required to base their instruction on online content. The paper will analyze the effectiveness of various solutions used, and finishes with recommendations regarding best practices.

Planning Technologies for the Web Environment: Perspectives and Research Issues

This work will explore and motivate perspectives and research issues related with the applications of automated planning technologies in order to support innovative web applications. The target for the technology transfer, i.e. the web, and, in a broader sense, the new Information Technologies (IT) is one of the most changing, evolving and hottest areas of current computer science. Nevertheless many sub-area in this field could have potential benefits from Planning and Scheduling (P&S) technologies, and, in some cases, technology transfer has already started. This paper will consider and explore a set of topics, guidelines and objectives in order to implement the technology transfer a new challenges, requirements and research issues for planning which emerge from the web and IT industry. Sample scenarios will be depicted to clarify the potential applications and limits of current planning technology. Finally we will point out some new P&S research challenge issues which are required to meet more advanced applicative goals.

Encyclopaedia Slavica Sanctorum: Activity, Users, Statistics

Encyclopaedia slavica sanctorum (eslavsanct.net) is designed as a complex heterogenous multimedia product. It is part of the project Encyclopaedia Slavica Sanctorum: Saints and Holy Places in Bulgaria (in electronic and Guthenberg versions). Until 2013, its web-based platform for online management and presentation of structured digital content has been prepared and numerous materials have been input. The platform is developed using the server technologies PHP, MySQL and HTML, JavaScript, CSS on the client side. The search in the e-ESS can be made by different parameters (12, or combinations of parameters), such as saints’ or feasts’ names, type of sainthood, types of texts dedicated to the saints, dates of saints’ commemorations, and several others. Both guests and registered users can search in the e-ESS but the latter have access to much more information including the publications of original sources. The e-platform allows for making statistics of what have been searched and read. The software used for content and access analysis is BI tool QlikView. As an analysis services provider, it is connected to the e-ESS objects repository and tracking services by a preliminary created data warehouse. The data warehouse is updated automatically, achieving real time analytics solution. The paper discusses some of the statistics results of the use of the e-ESS: the activities of the editors, users, and guests, the types of searches, the most often viewed object, such as the date of January 1 and the article on St. Basil the Great which is one of the richest encyclopaedia articles and includes both matadata and original sources published, both from medieval Slavonic manuscripts and popular culture records.