Managing Things and Services with Semantics: A Survey

This paper presents a survey on the usage, opportunities and pitfalls of semantic technologies in the Internet of Things. The survey was conducted in the context of a semantic enterprise integration platform. In total we surveyed sixty-one individuals from industry and academia on their views and current usage of IoT technologies in general, and semantic technologies in particular. Our semantic enterprise integration platform aims for interoperability at a service level, as well as at a protocol level. Therefore, also questions regarding the use of application layer protocols, network layer protocols and management protocols were integrated into the survey. The survey suggests that there is still a lot of heterogeneity in IoT technologies, but first indications of the use of standardized protocols exist. Semantic technologies are being recognized as of potential use, mainly in the management of things and services. Nonetheless, the participants still see many obstacles which hinder the widespread use of semantic technologies: Firstly, a lack of training as traditional embedded programmers are not well aware of semantic technologies. Secondly, a lack of standardization in ontologies, which would enable interoperability and thirdly, a lack of good tooling support.

REST-based sensor networks with OData

RESTful services gained a lot of attention recently, even in the enterprise world, which is traditionally more web-service centric. Data centric RESfFul services, as previously mainly known in web environments, established themselves as a second paradigm complementing functional WSDL-based SOA. In the Internet of Things, and in particular when talking about sensor motes, the Constraint Application Protocol (CoAP) is currently in the focus of both research and industry. In the enterprise world a protocol called OData (Open Data Protocol) is becoming the future RESTful data access standard. To integrate sensor motes seamlessly into enterprise networks, an embedded OData implementation on top of CoAP is desirable, not requiring an intermediary gateway device. In this paper we introduce and evaluate an embedded OData implementation. We evaluate the OData protocol in terms of performance and energy consumption, considering different data encodings, and compare it to a pure CoAP implementation. We were able to demonstrate that the additional resources needed for an OData/JSON implementation are reasonable when aiming for enterprise interoperability, where OData is suggested to solve both the semantic and technical interoperability problems we have today when connecting systems

Trade Versus Culture in the Digital Environment : An Old Conflict in Need of a New Definition

Following the recent UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, the first wave of scholarly work has focused on clarifying the interface between the Convention and the WTO Agreements. Building upon these analyses, the present article takes however a different stance. It seeks a new, rather pragmatic definition of the relationship between trade and culture and argues that such a re-definition is particularly needed in the digital networked environment that has modified the ways markets for cultural content function and the ways in which cultural content is created, distributed and accessed. The article explores first the significance of the UNESCO Convention (or the lack thereof) and subsequently outlines a variety of ways in which the WTO framework can be improved in a ‘neutral’, not necessarily culturally motivated, manner to become more conducive to the pursuit of cultural diversity and taking into account the changed reality of digital media. The article also looks at other facets of the profoundly fragmented culture-related regulatory framework and underscores the critical importance of intellectual property rights and of other domains that appear at first sight peripheral to the trade and culture discussion, such as access to infrastructure, interoperability or net neutrality. It is argued that a number of feasible solutions exist beyond the politically charged confrontation of trade versus culture and that the new digital media landscape may require a readjustment of the priorities and the tools for the achievement of the widely accepted objective of cultural diversity.

A Case for CDN-as-a-Service in the Cloud: A Mobile Cloud Networking Argument

Content Distribution Networks are mandatory components of modern web architectures, with plenty of vendors offering their services. Despite its maturity, new paradigms and architecture models are still being developed in this area. Cloud Computing, on the other hand, is a more recent concept which has expanded extremely quickly, with new services being regularly added to cloud management software suites such as OpenStack. The main contribution of this paper is the architecture and the development of an open source CDN that can be provisioned in an on-demand, pay-as-you-go model thereby enabling the CDN as a Service paradigm. We describe our experience with integration of CDNaaS framework in a cloud environment, as a service for enterprise users. We emphasize the flexibility and elasticity of such a model, with each CDN instance being delivered on-demand and associated to personalized caching policies as well as an optimized choice of Points of Presence based on exact requirements of an enterprise customer. Our development is based on the framework developed in the Mobile Cloud Networking EU FP7 project, which offers its enterprise users a common framework to instantiate and control services. CDNaaS is one of the core support components in this project as is tasked to deliver different type of multimedia content to several thousands of users geographically distributed. It integrates seamlessly in the MCN service life-cycle and as such enjoys all benefits of a common design environment, allowing for an improved interoperability with the rest of the services within the MCN ecosystem.

An Application-Layer RESTful Sleepy Nodes Implementation For Internet of Things Systems

Two of the main issues in wireless industrial Internet of Things applications are interoperability and network lifetime. In this work we extend a semantic interoperability platform and introduce an application-layer sleepy nodes protocol that can leverage on information stored in semantic repositories. We propose an integration platform for managing the sleep states and an application layer protocol based upon the Constraint Application Layer protocol. We evaluate our system on windowing based task allocation strategies, aiming for lower overall energy consumption that results in higher network lifetime.

Context Aware e-Learning Objects and their Types from the Perspective of the Object-Oriented Paradigm

The contribution of this article demonstrates how to identify context-aware types of e-Learning objects (eLOs) derived from the subject domains. This perspective is taken from an engineering point of view and is applied during requirements elicitation and analysis relating to present work in constructing an object-oriented (OO), dynamic, and adaptive model to build and deliver packaged e-Learning courses. Consequently, three preliminary subject domains are presented and, as a result, three primitive types of eLOs are posited. These types educed from the subject domains are of structural, conceptual, and granular nature. Structural objects are responsible for the course itself, conceptual objects incorporate adaptive and logical interoperability, while granular objects congregate granular assets. Their differences, interrelationships, and responsibilities are discussed. A major design challenge relates to adaptive behaviour. Future research addresses refinement on the subject domains and adaptive hypermedia systems.

Information-Centric Content Retrieval for Delay-Tolerant Networks

The shift from host-centric to information-centric networking (ICN) promises seamless communication in mobile networks. However, most existing works either consider well-connected networks with high node density or introduce modifications to {ICN} message processing for delay-tolerant Networking (DTN). In this work, we present agent-based content retrieval, which provides information-centric {DTN} support as an application module without modifications to {ICN} message processing. This enables flexible interoperability in changing environments. If no content source can be found via wireless multi-hop routing, requesters may exploit the mobility of neighbor nodes (called agents) by delegating content retrieval to them. Agents that receive a delegation and move closer to content sources can retrieve data and return it back to requesters. We show that agent-based content retrieval may be even more efficient in scenarios where multi-hop communication is possible. Furthermore, we show that broadcast communication may not be necessarily the best option since dynamic unicast requests have little overhead and can better exploit short contact times between nodes (no broadcast delays required for duplicate suppression).

BIOMEDICAL LANGUAGE UNDERSTANDING AND EXTRACTION (BLUE-TEXT): A MINIMAL SYNTACTIC, SEMANTIC METHOD

Clinical text understanding (CTU) is of interest to health informatics because critical clinical information frequently represented as unconstrained text in electronic health records are extensively used by human experts to guide clinical practice, decision making, and to document delivery of care, but are largely unusable by information systems for queries and computations. Recent initiatives advocating for translational research call for generation of technologies that can integrate structured clinical data with unstructured data, provide a unified interface to all data, and contextualize clinical information for reuse in multidisciplinary and collaborative environment envisioned by CTSA program. This implies that technologies for the processing and interpretation of clinical text should be evaluated not only in terms of their validity and reliability in their intended environment, but also in light of their interoperability, and ability to support information integration and contextualization in a distributed and dynamic environment. This vision adds a new layer of information representation requirements that needs to be accounted for when conceptualizing implementation or acquisition of clinical text processing tools and technologies for multidisciplinary research. On the other hand, electronic health records frequently contain unconstrained clinical text with high variability in use of terms and documentation practices, and without commitmentto grammatical or syntactic structure of the language (e.g. Triage notes, physician and nurse notes, chief complaints, etc). This hinders performance of natural language processing technologies which typically rely heavily on the syntax of language and grammatical structure of the text. This document introduces our method to transform unconstrained clinical text found in electronic health information systems to a formal (computationally understandable) representation that is suitable for querying, integration, contextualization and reuse, and is resilient to the grammatical and syntactic irregularities of the clinical text. We present our design rationale, method, and results of evaluation in processing chief complaints and triage notes from 8 different emergency departments in Houston Texas. At the end, we will discuss significance of our contribution in enabling use of clinical text in a practical bio-surveillance setting.

La edición en instituciones académicas : Normalización e interoperabilidad para favorecer el acceso y la visibilidad de la información publicada en revistas científicas

Este trabajo, que se encauza en una experiencia particular de cooperación entre bibliotecarios y editores de revistas científicas de humanidades y ciencias sociales, suscitada en la Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación de la Universidad Nacional de La Plata -Argentina- se propone: 1) reflexionar sobre el rol de los bibliotecarios en los equipos de edición científica y académica, resaltando la importancia de su participación para la correcta identificación y descripción de las contribuciones a las revistas a partir de la utilización de estándares internacionales que permitan su normalización y también la interoperabilidad con otros sistemas; 2) exponer y sistematizar la metodología de trabajo emprendida en la Facultad con sus revistas para favorecer el acceso y la visibilidad de la información en ellas publicada, en la que se involucran diversos actores y sectores de la institución para lograr la interoperabilidad entre los sistemas de información bibliográfica existentes tanto internos como externos a la institución. Como resultado del trabajo se explica la sistematización de la experiencia a fin de que pueda ser aprovechada por instituciones de características similares. Para concluir, se realizan una serie de comentarios finales sobre el rol central que ocupan los bibliotecarios en metodologías de trabajos como la aquí compartida. Se enfatiza en que los conocimientos acerca del control bibliográfico, la normalización de información y la ductilidad para interoperar sistemas de información posicionan a este profesional para trabajar junto a los editores en razón de lograr una efectiva accesibilidad al conocimiento científico editorial generado por la institución académica y una mayor visibilidad nacional, regional e internacional

La edición en instituciones académicas : Normalización e interoperabilidad para favorecer el acceso y la visibilidad de la información publicada en revistas científicas

Este trabajo, que se encauza en una experiencia particular de cooperación entre bibliotecarios y editores de revistas científicas de humanidades y ciencias sociales, suscitada en la Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación de la Universidad Nacional de La Plata -Argentina- se propone: 1) reflexionar sobre el rol de los bibliotecarios en los equipos de edición científica y académica, resaltando la importancia de su participación para la correcta identificación y descripción de las contribuciones a las revistas a partir de la utilización de estándares internacionales que permitan su normalización y también la interoperabilidad con otros sistemas; 2) exponer y sistematizar la metodología de trabajo emprendida en la Facultad con sus revistas para favorecer el acceso y la visibilidad de la información en ellas publicada, en la que se involucran diversos actores y sectores de la institución para lograr la interoperabilidad entre los sistemas de información bibliográfica existentes tanto internos como externos a la institución. Como resultado del trabajo se explica la sistematización de la experiencia a fin de que pueda ser aprovechada por instituciones de características similares. Para concluir, se realizan una serie de comentarios finales sobre el rol central que ocupan los bibliotecarios en metodologías de trabajos como la aquí compartida. Se enfatiza en que los conocimientos acerca del control bibliográfico, la normalización de información y la ductilidad para interoperar sistemas de información posicionan a este profesional para trabajar junto a los editores en razón de lograr una efectiva accesibilidad al conocimiento científico editorial generado por la institución académica y una mayor visibilidad nacional, regional e internacional

La edición en instituciones académicas : Normalización e interoperabilidad para favorecer el acceso y la visibilidad de la información publicada en revistas científicas

Este trabajo, que se encauza en una experiencia particular de cooperación entre bibliotecarios y editores de revistas científicas de humanidades y ciencias sociales, suscitada en la Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación de la Universidad Nacional de La Plata -Argentina- se propone: 1) reflexionar sobre el rol de los bibliotecarios en los equipos de edición científica y académica, resaltando la importancia de su participación para la correcta identificación y descripción de las contribuciones a las revistas a partir de la utilización de estándares internacionales que permitan su normalización y también la interoperabilidad con otros sistemas; 2) exponer y sistematizar la metodología de trabajo emprendida en la Facultad con sus revistas para favorecer el acceso y la visibilidad de la información en ellas publicada, en la que se involucran diversos actores y sectores de la institución para lograr la interoperabilidad entre los sistemas de información bibliográfica existentes tanto internos como externos a la institución. Como resultado del trabajo se explica la sistematización de la experiencia a fin de que pueda ser aprovechada por instituciones de características similares. Para concluir, se realizan una serie de comentarios finales sobre el rol central que ocupan los bibliotecarios en metodologías de trabajos como la aquí compartida. Se enfatiza en que los conocimientos acerca del control bibliográfico, la normalización de información y la ductilidad para interoperar sistemas de información posicionan a este profesional para trabajar junto a los editores en razón de lograr una efectiva accesibilidad al conocimiento científico editorial generado por la institución académica y una mayor visibilidad nacional, regional e internacional

A user-centric approach to service creation and delivery over next generation networks

Next Generation Networks (NGN) provide Telecommunications operators with the possibility to share their resources and infrastructure, facilitate the interoperability with other networks, and simplify and unify the management, operation and maintenance of service offerings, thus enabling the fast and cost-effective creation of new personal, broadband ubiquitous services. Unfortunately, service creation over NGN is far from the success of service creation in the Web, especially when it comes to Web 2.0. This paper presents a novel approach to service creation and delivery, with a platform that opens to non-technically skilled users the possibility to create, manage and share their own convergent (NGN-based and Web-based) services. To this end, the business approach to user-generated services is analyzed and the technological bases supporting the proposal are explained.

Standards and specifications to manage accessibility issues in e-learning

Despite the acknowledged need of providing a personalized and adaptive learning process for all, current learning management systems do not properly cover personalization and accessibility issues and they are still struggling to support the reusability requirements coming from the pervasive usage of standards. There is a lack of frameworks for providing layered-based infrastructure covering the interoperability required to manage the whole range of standards, applications and services needed to meet accessibility and adaptations needs of lifelong learning services.

Multi Domain-Specific Modeling of the Security Concerns of Service-Oriented Architectures

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), and Web Services (WS), the technology generally used to implement them, achieve the integration of heterogeneous technologies, providing interoperability, and yielding the reutilization of pre-existent systems. Model-driven development methodologies provide inherent benefits such as increased productivity, greater reuse, and better maintainability, to name a few. Efforts on achieving model-driven development of SOAs already exist, but there is currently no standard solution that addresses non-functional aspects of these services as well. This paper presents an approach to integrate these non-functional aspects in the development of web services, with an emphasis on security.

Communication Architecture for Tracking and Interoperable Services at Hospitals: A Real Deployment Experience

Any new hospital communication architecture has to support existing services, but at the same time new added features should not affect normal tasks. This article deals with issues regarding old and new systems’ interoperability, as well as the effect the human factor has in a deployed architecture. It also presents valuable information, which is a product of a real scenario. Tracking services are also tested in order to monitor and administer several medical resources.