Prototype of a web-based participative decision support platform in natural hazards and risk management

This paper presents the current state and development of a prototype web-GIS (Geographic Information System) decision support platform intended for application in natural hazards and risk management, mainly for floods and landslides. This web platform uses open-source geospatial software and technologies, particularly the Boundless (formerly OpenGeo) framework and its client side software development kit (SDK). The main purpose of the platform is to assist the experts and stakeholders in the decision-making process for evaluation and selection of different risk management strategies through an interactive participation approach, integrating web-GIS interface with decision support tool based on a compromise programming approach. The access rights and functionality of the platform are varied depending on the roles and responsibilities of stakeholders in managing the risk. The application of the prototype platform is demonstrated based on an example case study site: Malborghetto Valbruna municipality of North-Eastern Italy where flash floods and landslides are frequent with major events having occurred in 2003. The preliminary feedback collected from the stakeholders in the region is discussed to understand the perspectives of stakeholders on the proposed prototype platform.

An interactive web-GIS tool for risk analysis: a case study in the Fella River basin, Italy

This paper presents a prototype of an interactive web-GIS tool for risk analysis of natural hazards, in particular for floods and landslides, based on open-source geospatial software and technologies. The aim of the presented tool is to assist the experts (risk managers) in analysing the impacts and consequences of a certain hazard event in a considered region, providing an essential input to the decision-making process in the selection of risk management strategies by responsible authorities and decision makers. This tool is based on the Boundless (OpenGeo Suite) framework and its client-side environment for prototype development, and it is one of the main modules of a web-based collaborative decision support platform in risk management. Within this platform, the users can import necessary maps and information to analyse areas at risk. Based on provided information and parameters, loss scenarios (amount of damages and number of fatalities) of a hazard event are generated on the fly and visualized interactively within the web-GIS interface of the platform. The annualized risk is calculated based on the combination of resultant loss scenarios with different return periods of the hazard event. The application of this developed prototype is demonstrated using a regional data set from one of the case study sites, Fella River of northeastern Italy, of the Marie Curie ITN CHANGES project.

Web and education, a successful open entanglement

E-learning, understood as the intensive use of Information and Communication Technologies in mainly but not only) distance education, has radically changed the meaning of the latter. E-learning is an overused term which has been applied to any use of technology in education. Today, the most widely accepted meaning ofe-learning coincides with the fourth generation described by Taylor (1999), where there is an asynchronousprocess that allows students and teachers to interact in an educational process expressly designed in accordance with these principles. We prefer to speak of Internet-Based Learning or, better still, Web-Based Learning, for example, to explain the fact that distance education is carried out using the Internet, with the appearance of the virtual learning environment concept, a web space where the teaching and learning process is generated and supported (Sangrà, 2002). This entails overcoming the barriers of space and time of brickand mortar education (although we prefer the term face-to-face) or of classical distance education using broadcasting and adopting a completely asynchronous model that allows access to education by many more users, at any level (including secondary education, but primarily higher education and lifelong learning).

UDDI palvelurekisterin merkitys Web palveluissa

Tietojärjestelmien integraatio on nykypäivänä tärkeä osa alue yritysten toiminnassa ja kilpailukyvyn ylläpitämisessä. Palvelukeskeinen arkkitehtuuri ja Web palvelut on uusi joustava tapa tehdä tietojärjestelmien välinen integraatio. Web palveluiden yksi ydinkomponentti on UDDI, Universal Description, Discovery and Integration. UDDI toimii palvelurekisterin tavoin. UDDI määrittää tavan julkaista, löytää ja ottaa käyttöön Web palveluja. Web palveluja voidaan hakea UDDI:sta erilaisin kriteerein, kuten esimerkiksi palvelun sijainnin, yrityksen nimen ja toimialan perusteella. UDDI on myös itsessään Web palvelu, joka perustuu XML kuvauskieleen ja SOAP protokollaan. Työssä paneudutaan tarkemmin UDDI:in. UDDI:ta käsitellään tarkemmin myös teknisesti. Oleellinen osa UDDI:ta on ollut julkaisijoiden ja käyttäjien mielestä tietoturvan puute, joka on rajoittanut huomattavasti UDDI:n käyttöä ja käyttöönottamista. Työssä tarkastellaankin tarkemmin juuri tietoturvaan liittyviä asioita ja ratkaisuja sekä myös UDDI:n merkitystä yrityksille.

Web 2.0 technology assisted global knowledge network as an organizations key asset

Aim of the Thesis is to study and understand the theoretical concept of Metanational corporation and understand how the Web 2.0 technologies can be used to support the theory. Empiric part of the study compares the theory to the case company’s current situation Goal of theoretical framework is to show how the Web 2.0 technologies can be used in the three levels of the Metanational corporation. In order to do this, knowledge management and more accurately knowledge transferring is studied to understand what is needed from the Web 2.0 technologies in the different functions and operations of the Metanational corporation. Final synthesis of the theoretical framework is to present a model where the Web 2.0 technologies are placed on the levels of the Metanational corporation. Empirical part of the study is based on interviews made in the case company. Aim of the interviews is to understand the current state of the company related to the theoretical framework. Based on the interviews, the differences between the theoretical concept and the case company are presented and studied. Finally the study presents the found problem areas, and where the adoption of the Web 2.0 tools is seen as beneficiary, based on the interviews and theoretical framework.

HTML-teknologian hyödyntäminen Web-sovelluksen prototypoinnissa

Käyttöliittymä on rajapinta käyttäjän ja järjestelmän tarjoamien toimintojen välillä ja sen toimivuus vaikuttaa toimintojen suorittamiseen joko positiivisesti tai negatiivisesti. Täten sovelluksen suunnitteluvaiheessa on hyvä arvioida käyttöliittymän ja sen toimintojen laatua ja kokeilla ideoiden toimivuutta rakentamalla asiasta prototyyppejä. Prototypoinnilla voidaan tunnistaa ja korjata mahdolliset ongelmat jo suunnittelupöydällä. Tämä diplomityö käsittelee Web-sovelluksen kehityksen aikana toteutettua käyttöliittymän ja sen toimintojen prototypointia. Käyttöliittymien mallintamista voidaan toteuttaa erilaisilla menetelmillä, joita työssä käydään läpi teknologisista näkökulmista eli miten prototypointimenetelmiä voidaan soveltaa projektin eri vaiheissa. Prototypoinnin apuna käytettäviin työkaluihin luodaan lyhyt katsaus esitellen yleisellä tasolla muutamia eri sovelluskategorian ohjelmistoja ja lisäksi käsitellään suunnittelumallien hyödyntämistä. Työ osoittaa, että yleisiä prototypointimenetelmiä ja -periaatteita voidaan soveltaa Web-sovellusten prototypoinnissa. Prototypointi on hyödyllistä aloittaa luonnostelemalla ja jatkaa aikaisessa vaiheessa HTML-malleihin, joilla päästään lähelle toteutuksen teknologioita ja mallintamaan sovelluksen luonnetta, ilmettä, tuntumaa ja vuorovaikutusta. HTML-prototyypeistä voidaan jalostaa sekoitetun tarkkuuden malleja ja ne toimivat toteutuksen perustana. Jatkokehityksessä ideoita voidaan esittää useilla eri tarkkuuden tekniikoilla.

Engineering of Business Critical Web Applications

Research focus of this thesis is to explore options for building systems for business critical web applications. Business criticality here includes requirements for data protection and system availability. The focus is on open source software. Goals are to identify robust technologies and engineering practices to implement such systems. Research methods include experiments made with sample systems built around chosen software packages that represent certain technologies. The main research focused on finding a good method for database data replication, a key functionality for high-availability, database-driven web applications. Research included also finding engineering best practices from books written by administrators of high traffic web applications. Experiment with database replication showed, that block level synchronous replication offered by DRBD replication software offered considerably more robust data protection and high-availability functionality compared to leading open source database product MySQL, and its built-in asynchronous replication. For master-master database setups, block level replication is more recommended way to build high-availability into the system. Based on thesis research, building high-availability web applications is possible using a combination of open source software and engineering best practices for data protection, availability planning and scaling.

Web-makrot ja käyttäjäautomaatio web-sovelluksessa: prototyypin suunnittelu ja toteutus

Tämän kandidaatintyön aiheena on web-sovelluksen käyttäjäautomaatio web-makrojen avulla. Työssä esitellään prototyyppitoteutus SaaS-sovellukseen kohdistetusta web-makrojärjestelmästä. Työn teoriaosa esittelee web-automaation ja web-ympäristön keskeisen teknologian. Ratkaisuosa pohjustaa ratkaisuun käytetyn lähestymistavan, esittelee työn prototyyppiratkaisun ja arvioi ratkaisun lopputulosta. Lopputuloksena havaitaan, että prototyyppiratkaisu onnistuu selvittämään makrotoiminnallisuuden toteuttamiseen liittyvät tekniset haasteet. Ratkaisun merkittävimmäksi tekniseksi haasteeksi arvioidaan selainyhteensopivuuden saavutus ja ylläpito. Ratkaisun hyödynnettävyys koko web-sovelluksen mittakaavassa todetaan kuitenkin heikoksi, koska sovelluksen liiketoimintalogiikka rajoittaa makroparadigman käyttöä.

Post-industrial 2.0 – Social Web as the second coming of the post-industrial society

This study presents a review of theories of the so-called post-industrial society, and proposes that the concept of post-industrial society can be used to understand the recent developments of the World Wide Web, often described as Web 2.0 or social Web. The study combines theories ranging from post-war management science and cultural studies to software development, and tries to build a holistic view of the development of the post-industrial society, and especially the Internet. The discourse on the emergence of a post-industrial society after the World Wars has addressed the ways in which the growing importance of information, and innovations in digital communications technology, are changing our society. It is furthermore deeply connected with the discourse on the postmodern society, which emphasizes cultural fragmentation, intertextuality, and pluralism. The Internet age is characterized by increasing masses of information that are managed through various technologies. While 1990s Internet technologies often used the network as a traditional broadcasting channel with added interactivity, Web 2.0 technologies are specifically designed to utilize the network model by facilitating communication between various services and devices, and analyzing the relationships between users and objects in order to produce intelligent insight. The wide adoption of the Internet, and recently of Internet-enabled mobile devices, is furthermore continuously producing new ways of communicating, consuming, and producing. Applications of the social Web, such as social media or social networking services, are permanently changing our traditional social, cultural, and economic practices. The study first presents an overview of the post-industrial society, the Internet, and the concept of Web 2.0. Then the concept of social Web is described with an analysis of the term social media, the brief histories of the interactive Web and social networking services, and a description of the concept ―long tail‖, used to represent the masses of information available in the Web that do not receive mainstream attention. Finally, methods for retrieving and filtering information, modeling social and cultural relationships, and communicating with customers, are presented.

Viitearkkitehtuuri Windows-sovelluksen käyttöliittymän modernisoimiseksi web-sovellukseksi

IT-järjestelmillä on tärkeä rooli organisaation liiketoiminnassa. Koska organisaation liiketoimintavaatimukset ja strategia muuttuvat ympäröivän maailman mukaan, täytyy järjestelmän arkkitehtuurin sopeutua vallitsevaan tilanteeseen sekä mahdollisiin muutoksiin lyhyellä ja pitkällä aikavälillä. Modernin web-sovelluksen arkkitehtuuri sopeutuu organisaation liiketoiminnan haasteisiin. Erityisesti hallinnolliseksi ongelmaksi organisaatiossa muodostuvat Windows-sovellukset, koska niiden ylläpito sitoo henkilöresursseja ja niiden käyttökonteksti on rajallinen. Tästä syystä organisaatiot ovat käyneet etsimään ratkaisuja kuinka korvata Windows-sovellukset web-sovelluksilla. Kustannustehokas ratkaisu on modernisoida Windows-sovelluksen käyttöliittymä web-sovellukseksi. Tämän diplomityön tavoitteena oli laatia Logica Suomi Oy yritykselle viitearkkitehtuuri Win-dows-sovelluksen käyttöliittymän modernisoimiseksi web-sovellukseksi. Työ suoritettiin Proof of Concept projektissa, jossa modernisointiin Logican pääkäyttäjäsovellus. Työn tarkoituksena oli tunnistaa laajalti käytetyt arkkitehtuurimallit ja menetelmät jotka mahdollistavat modernisoinnin toteutuksen. Lisäksi tarkoitus oli tunnistaa menetelmät ja ohjelmistot jotka mahdollistavat kustannustehokkaan ja laadukkaan web-sovelluksen kehittämisen ja toteuttamisen. Työn osatavoitteena oli laatia modernisoitavan pääkäyttäjäsovelluksen kokonaisarkkitehtuuri. Työn tuloksena saatiin viitearkkitehtuuri jota voidaan käyttää ja hyödyntää ohjelmistokehitysprojekteissa, asiakkaan dokumentaatiossa, myynnissä ja markkinoinnissa. Viitearkkitehtuurissa on esitelty modernit web-teknologiat joilla on mahdollista toteuttaa web-sovellus jonka käyttökokemus vastaa Windows-sovellusta. Lisäksi tuloksena saatiin pääkäyttäjäsovelluksen kokonaisarkkitehtuuri, jonka tärkeimpiä tuloksia ovat modernisoinnin tavoitetila ja sovellusarkkitehtuuri. Tärkeimpiä jatkotoimenpiteitä ovat viitearkkitehtuuriin pohjautuvan modernisointiviitekehyksen laadinta sekä modernisointiprojektin arviointiin käytettävien mittareiden määrittely, suunnittelu ja toteutus. Relevanttien mittareiden avulla voidaan todeta, vastaako modernisoitu sovellus organisaation liiketoimintavaatimuksia ja strategiaa.

Design and validation of stateful composite RESTful web services

A web service is a software system that provides a machine-processable interface to the other machines over the network using different Internet protocols. They are being increasingly used in the industry in order to automate different tasks and offer services to a wider audience. The REST architectural style aims at producing scalable and extensible web services using technologies that play well with the existing tools and infrastructure of the web. It provides a uniform set of operation that can be used to invoke a CRUD interface (create, retrieve, update and delete) of a web service. The stateless behavior of the service interface requires that every request to a resource is independent of the previous ones facilitating scalability. Automated systems, e.g., hotel reservation systems, provide advanced scenarios for stateful services that require a certain sequence of requests that must be followed in order to fulfill the service goals. Designing and developing such services for advanced scenarios with REST constraints require rigorous approaches that are capable of creating web services that can be trusted for their behavior. Systems that can be trusted for their behavior can be termed as dependable systems. This thesis presents an integrated design, analysis and validation approach that facilitates the service developer to create dependable and stateful REST web services. The main contribution of this thesis is that we provide a novel model-driven methodology to design behavioral REST web service interfaces and their compositions. The behavioral interfaces provide information on what methods can be invoked on a service and the pre- and post-conditions of these methods. The methodology uses Unified Modeling Language (UML), as the modeling language, which has a wide user base and has mature tools that are continuously evolving. We have used UML class diagram and UML state machine diagram with additional design constraints to provide resource and behavioral models, respectively, for designing REST web service interfaces. These service design models serve as a specification document and the information presented in them have manifold applications. The service design models also contain information about the time and domain requirements of the service that can help in requirement traceability which is an important part of our approach. Requirement traceability helps in capturing faults in the design models and other elements of software development environment by tracing back and forth the unfulfilled requirements of the service. The information about service actors is also included in the design models which is required for authenticating the service requests by authorized actors since not all types of users have access to all the resources. In addition, following our design approach, the service developer can ensure that the designed web service interfaces will be REST compliant. The second contribution of this thesis is consistency analysis of the behavioral REST interfaces. To overcome the inconsistency problem and design errors in our service models, we have used semantic technologies. The REST interfaces are represented in web ontology language, OWL2, that can be part of the semantic web. These interfaces are used with OWL 2 reasoners to check unsatisfiable concepts which result in implementations that fail. This work is fully automated thanks to the implemented translation tool and the existing OWL 2 reasoners. The third contribution of this thesis is the verification and validation of REST web services. We have used model checking techniques with UPPAAL model checker for this purpose. The timed automata of UML based service design models are generated with our transformation tool that are verified for their basic characteristics like deadlock freedom, liveness, reachability and safety. The implementation of a web service is tested using a black-box testing approach. Test cases are generated from the UPPAAL timed automata and using the online testing tool, UPPAAL TRON, the service implementation is validated at runtime against its specifications. Requirement traceability is also addressed in our validation approach with which we can see what service goals are met and trace back the unfulfilled service goals to detect the faults in the design models. A final contribution of the thesis is an implementation of behavioral REST interfaces and service monitors from the service design models. The partial code generation tool creates code skeletons of REST web services with method pre and post-conditions. The preconditions of methods constrain the user to invoke the stateful REST service under the right conditions and the post condition constraint the service developer to implement the right functionality. The details of the methods can be manually inserted by the developer as required. We do not target complete automation because we focus only on the interface aspects of the web service. The applicability of the approach is demonstrated with a pedagogical example of a hotel room booking service and a relatively complex worked example of holiday booking service taken from the industrial context. The former example presents a simple explanation of the approach and the later worked example shows how stateful and timed web services offering complex scenarios and involving other web services can be constructed using our approach.

Useamman monitorin web-sovellukset: tekniset haasteet ja mahdollisuudet

Työssä tutkikaan, miten web-teknologiat soveltuvat usean monitorin sovelluksiin web-ympäristössä, ja todeta tähän liittyvät ongelmat sekä niiden mahdolliset ratkaisut teknisellä tasolla. Tutkituista teknologioista valitaan parhaiten soveltuva ratkaisu ja sen avulla luodaan usean monitorin sovellus, jonka avulla pureudutaan teknillisiin mahdollisuuksiin ja rajoitteisiin. Työn tuloksena nähdään, että usean monitorin web-sovellukset sisältävät monia ohjelmistoteknillisiä ongelmia ja ne sopivat lähinnä järjestelmiin, joiden ympäristö, esimerkiksi käyttöjärjestelmä tai selain, tiedetään. Tällöin voidaan turvautua käyttökokemusta parantaviin selaimen laajennuksiin tai ulkopuolisiin liitännäisiin, jotka toimivat kyseisessä ympäristössä.

HiberActive: Pro-Active Archiving of Web References from Scholarly Articles

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

Adopting the Vaadin Java framework to rebuild VTT’s Web Interfaces and Database Applications

With the growth in new technologies, using online tools have become an everyday lifestyle. It has a greater impact on researchers as the data obtained from various experiments needs to be analyzed and knowledge of programming has become mandatory even for pure biologists. Hence, VTT came up with a new tool, R Executables (REX) which is a web application designed to provide a graphical interface for biological data functions like Image analysis, Gene expression data analysis, plotting, disease and control studies etc., which employs R functions to provide results. REX provides a user interactive application for the biologists to directly enter the values and run the required analysis with a single click. The program processes the given data in the background and prints results rapidly. Due to growth of data and load on server, the interface has gained problems concerning time consumption, poor GUI, data storage issues, security, minimal user interactive experience and crashes with large amount of data. This thesis handles the methods by which these problems were resolved and made REX a better application for the future. The old REX was developed using Python Django and now, a new programming language, Vaadin has been implemented. Vaadin is a Java framework for developing web applications and the programming language is extremely similar to Java with new rich components. Vaadin provides better security, better speed, good and interactive interface. In this thesis, subset functionalities of REX was selected which includes IST bulk plotting and image segmentation and implemented those using Vaadin. A code of 662 lines was programmed by me which included Vaadin as the front-end handler while R language was used for back-end data retrieval, computing and plotting. The application is optimized to allow further functionalities to be migrated with ease from old REX. Future development is focused on including Hight throughput screening functions along with gene expression database handling