A model for analysing data portal performance: The biodiversity case

Currently, many museums, botanic gardens and herbariums keep data of biological collections and using computational tools researchers digitalize and provide access to their data using data portals. The replication of databases in portals can be accomplished through the use of protocols and data schema. However, the implementation of this solution demands a large amount of time, concerning both the transfer of fragments of data and processing data within the portal. With the growth of data digitalization in institutions, this scenario tends to be increasingly exacerbated, making it hard to maintain the records updated on the portals. As an original contribution, this research proposes analysing the data replication process to evaluate the performance of portals. The Inter-American Biodiversity Information Network (IABIN) biodiversity data portal of pollinators was used as a study case, which supports both situations: conventional data replication of records of specimen occurrences and interactions between them. With the results of this research, it is possible to simulate a situation before its implementation, thus predicting the performance of replication operations. Additionally, these results may contribute to future improvements to this process, in order to decrease the time required to make the data available in portals. © Rinton Press.

SOAP processing performance and enhancement

The web services (WS) technology provides a comprehensive solution for representing, discovering, and invoking services in a wide variety of environments, including Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and grid computing systems. At the core of WS technology lie a number of XML-based standards, such as the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), that have successfully ensured WS extensibility, transparency, and interoperability. Nonetheless, there is an increasing demand to enhance WS performance, which is severely impaired by XML's verbosity. SOAP communications produce considerable network traffic, making them unfit for distributed, loosely coupled, and heterogeneous computing environments such as the open Internet. Also, they introduce higher latency and processing delays than other technologies, like Java RMI and CORBA. WS research has recently focused on SOAP performance enhancement. Many approaches build on the observation that SOAP message exchange usually involves highly similar messages (those created by the same implementation usually have the same structure, and those sent from a server to multiple clients tend to show similarities in structure and content). Similarity evaluation and differential encoding have thus emerged as SOAP performance enhancement techniques. The main idea is to identify the common parts of SOAP messages, to be processed only once, avoiding a large amount of overhead. Other approaches investigate nontraditional processor architectures, including micro-and macrolevel parallel processing solutions, so as to further increase the processing rates of SOAP/XML software toolkits. This survey paper provides a concise, yet comprehensive review of the research efforts aimed at SOAP performance enhancement. A unified view of the problem is provided, covering almost every phase of SOAP processing, ranging over message parsing, serialization, deserialization, compression, multicasting, security evaluation, and data/instruction-level processing.

The SB-index and the HSB-index: efficient indices for spatial data warehouses

Spatial data warehouses (SDWs) allow for spatial analysis together with analytical multidimensional queries over huge volumes of data. The challenge is to retrieve data related to ad hoc spatial query windows according to spatial predicates, avoiding the high cost of joining large tables. Therefore, mechanisms to provide efficient query processing over SDWs are essential. In this paper, we propose two efficient indices for SDW: the SB-index and the HSB-index. The proposed indices share the following characteristics. They enable multidimensional queries with spatial predicate for SDW and also support predefined spatial hierarchies. Furthermore, they compute the spatial predicate and transform it into a conventional one, which can be evaluated together with other conventional predicates by accessing a star-join Bitmap index. While the SB-index has a sequential data structure, the HSB-index uses a hierarchical data structure to enable spatial objects clustering and a specialized buffer-pool to decrease the number of disk accesses. The advantages of the SB-index and the HSB-index over the DBMS resources for SDW indexing (i.e. star-join computation and materialized views) were investigated through performance tests, which issued roll-up operations extended with containment and intersection range queries. The performance results showed that improvements ranged from 68% up to 99% over both the star-join computation and the materialized view. Furthermore, the proposed indices proved to be very compact, adding only less than 1% to the storage requirements. Therefore, both the SB-index and the HSB-index are excellent choices for SDW indexing. Choosing between the SB-index and the HSB-index mainly depends on the query selectivity of spatial predicates. While low query selectivity benefits the HSB-index, the SB-index provides better performance for higher query selectivity.

Data Mining in Clinical Practice for the Quantification of Motor Impairment in Parkinson's Disease

Advances in biomedical signal acquisition systems for motion analysis have led to lowcost and ubiquitous wearable sensors which can be used to record movement data in different settings. This implies the potential availability of large amounts of quantitative data. It is then crucial to identify and to extract the information of clinical relevance from the large amount of available data. This quantitative and objective information can be an important aid for clinical decision making. Data mining is the process of discovering such information in databases through data processing, selection of informative data, and identification of relevant patterns. The databases considered in this thesis store motion data from wearable sensors (specifically accelerometers) and clinical information (clinical data, scores, tests). The main goal of this thesis is to develop data mining tools which can provide quantitative information to the clinician in the field of movement disorders. This thesis will focus on motor impairment in Parkinson's disease (PD). Different databases related to Parkinson subjects in different stages of the disease were considered for this thesis. Each database is characterized by the data recorded during a specific motor task performed by different groups of subjects. The data mining techniques that were used in this thesis are feature selection (a technique which was used to find relevant information and to discard useless or redundant data), classification, clustering, and regression. The aims were to identify high risk subjects for PD, characterize the differences between early PD subjects and healthy ones, characterize PD subtypes and automatically assess the severity of symptoms in the home setting.

Using Context Information to Re-architect a System

Successful software systems cope with complexity by organizing classes into packages. However, a particular organization may be neither straightforward nor obvious for a given developer. As a consequence, classes can be misplaced, leading to duplicated code and ripple effects with minor changes effecting multiple packages. We claim that contextual information is the key to rearchitecture a system. Exploiting contextual information, we propose a technique to detect misplaced classes by analyzing how client packages access the classes of a given provider package. We define locality as a measure of the degree to which classes reused by common clients appear in the same package. We then use locality to guide a simulated annealing algorithm to obtain optimal placements of classes in packages. The result is the identification of classes that are candidates for relocation. We apply the technique to three applications and validate the usefulness of our approach via developer interviews.

The German business and information technologies project

The Business and Information Technologies (BIT) project strives to reveal new insights into how modern IT impacts organizational structures and business practices using empirical methods. Due to its international scope, it allows for inter-country comparison of empirical results. Germany — represented by the European School of Management and Technologies (ESMT) and the Institute of Information Systems at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin — joined the BIT project in 2006. This report presents the result of the first survey conducted in Germany during November–December 2006. The key results are as follows: • The most widely adopted technologies and systems in Germany are websites, wireless hardware and software, groupware/productivity tools, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. The biggest potential for growth exists for collaboration and portal tools, content management systems, business process modelling, and business intelligence applications. A number of technological solutions have not yet been adopted by many organizations but also bear some potential, in particular identity management solutions, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), biometrics, and third-party authentication and verification. • IT security remains on the top of the agenda for most enterprises: budget spending was increasing in the last 3 years. • The workplace and work requirements are changing. IT is used to monitor employees' performance in Germany, but less heavily compared to the United States (Karmarkar and Mangal, 2007).1 The demand for IT skills is increasing at all corporate levels. Executives are asking for more and better structured information and this, in turn, triggers the appearance of new decision-making tools and online technologies on the market. • The internal organization of companies in Germany is underway: organizations are becoming flatter, even though the trend is not as pronounced as in the United States (Karmarkar and Mangal, 2007), and the geographical scope of their operations is increasing. Modern IT plays an important role in enabling this development, e.g. telecommuting, teleconferencing, and other web-based collaboration formats are becoming increasingly popular in the corporate context. • The degree to which outsourcing is being pursued is quite limited with little change expected. IT services, payroll, and market research are the most widely outsourced business functions. This corresponds to the results from other countries. • Up to now, the adoption of e-business technologies has had a rather limited effect on marketing functions. Companies tend to extract synergies from traditional printed media and on-line advertising. • The adoption of e-business has not had a major impact on marketing capabilities and strategy yet. Traditional methods of customer segmentation are still dominating. The corporate identity of most organizations does not change significantly when going online. • Online sales channel are mainly viewed as a complement to the traditional distribution means. • Technology adoption has caused production and organizational costs to decrease. However, the costs of technology acquisition and maintenance as well as consultancy and internal communication costs have increased.

Enterprise software adoption and perceived business performance — an empirical investigation in Germany and the U.S.

This work contributes to the ongoing debate on the productivity paradox by considering CIOs’ perceptions of IT business value. Applying regression analysis to data from an international survey, we study how the adoption of certain types of enterprise software affects the CIOs’ perception of the impact of IT on the firm’s business activities and vice versa. Other potentially important factors such as country, sector and size of the firms are also taken into account. Our results indicate a more significant support for the impact of perceived IT benefits on adoption of enterprise software than vice versa. CIOs based in the US perceive IT benefits more strongly than their German counterparts. Furthermore, certain types of enterprise software seem to be more prevalent in the US.

Granular computing as a tool of human data interaction - a cognitive cities use case

The article proposes granular computing as a theoretical, formal and methodological basis for the newly emerging research field of human–data interaction (HDI). We argue that the ability to represent and reason with information granules is a prerequisite for data legibility. As such, it allows for extending the research agenda of HDI to encompass the topic of collective intelligence amplification, which is seen as an opportunity of today’s increasingly pervasive computing environments. As an example of collective intelligence amplification in HDI, we introduce a collaborative urban planning use case in a cognitive city environment and show how an iterative process of user input and human-oriented automated data processing can support collective decision making. As a basis for automated human-oriented data processing, we use the spatial granular calculus of granular geometry.

Information Technology Outsourcing: Towards Sustainable Business Value

This book attempts to synthesize research that contributes to a better understanding of how to reach sustainable business value through information systems (IS) outsourcing. Important topics in this realm are how IS outsourcing can contribute to innovation, how it can be dynamically governed, how to cope with its increasing complexity through multi-vendor arrangements, how service quality standards can be met, how corporate social responsibility can be upheld, and how to cope with increasing demands of internationalization and new sourcing models, such as crowdsourcing and platform-based cooperation. These issues are viewed from either the client or vendor perspective, or both. The book should be of interest to all academics and students in the fields of Information Systems, Management, and Organization as well as corporate executives and professionals who seek a more profound analysis and understanding of the underlying factors and mechanisms of outsourcing.

Public Commons for Geospatial Data: A Conceptual Model

A wide variety of spatial data collection efforts are ongoing throughout local, state and federal agencies, private firms and non-profit organizations. Each effort is established for a different purpose but organizations and individuals often collect and maintain the same or similar information. The United States federal government has undertaken many initiatives such as the National Spatial Data Infrastructure, the National Map and Geospatial One-Stop to reduce duplicative spatial data collection and promote the coordinated use, sharing, and dissemination of spatial data nationwide. A key premise in most of these initiatives is that no national government will be able to gather and maintain more than a small percentage of the geographic data that users want and desire. Thus, national initiatives depend typically on the cooperation of those already gathering spatial data and those using GIs to meet specific needs to help construct and maintain these spatial data infrastructures and geo-libraries for their nations (Onsrud 2001). Some of the impediments to widespread spatial data sharing are well known from directly asking GIs data producers why they are not currently involved in creating datasets that are of common or compatible formats, documenting their datasets in a standardized metadata format or making their datasets more readily available to others through Data Clearinghouses or geo-libraries. The research described in this thesis addresses the impediments to wide-scale spatial data sharing faced by GIs data producers and explores a new conceptual data-sharing approach, the Public Commons for Geospatial Data, that supports user-friendly metadata creation, open access licenses, archival services and documentation of parent lineage of the contributors and value- adders of digital spatial data sets.

AN OCCUPATIONAL INJURY MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS HEALTH SCIENCE CENTER AT HOUSTON

The purpose of this research and development project was to develop a method, a design, and a prototype for gathering, managing, and presenting data about occupational injuries.^ State-of-the-art systems analysis and design methodologies were applied to the long standing problem in the field of occupational safety and health of processing workplace injuries data into information for safety and health program management as well as preliminary research about accident etiologies. The top-down planning and bottom-up implementation approach was utilized to design an occupational injury management information system. A description of a managerial control system and a comprehensive system to integrate safety and health program management was provided.^ The project showed that current management information systems (MIS) theory and methods could be applied successfully to the problems of employee injury surveillance and control program performance evaluation. The model developed in the first section was applied at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHSCH).^ The system in current use at the UTHSCH was described and evaluated, and a prototype was developed for the UTHSCH. The prototype incorporated procedures for collecting, storing, and retrieving records of injuries and the procedures necessary to prepare reports, analyses, and graphics for management in the Health Science Center. Examples of reports, analyses, and graphics presenting UTHSCH and computer generated data were included.^ It was concluded that a pilot test of this MIS should be implemented and evaluated at the UTHSCH and other settings. Further research and development efforts for the total safety and health management information systems, control systems, component systems, and variable selection should be pursued. Finally, integration of the safety and health program MIS into the comprehensive or executive MIS was recommended. ^

Generating Awareness from Collaborative Working Environment using Social Data

Nowadays, Internet is a place where social networks have reached an important impact in collaboration among people over the world in different ways. This article proposes a new paradigm for building CSCW business tools following the novel ideas provided by the social web to collaborate and generate awareness. An implementation of these concepts is described, including the components we provide to collaborate in workspaces, (such as videoconference, chat, desktop sharing, forums or temporal events), and the way we generate awareness from these complex social data structures. Figures and validation results are also presented to stress that this architecture has been defined to support awareness generation via joining current and future social data from business and social networks worlds, based on the idea of using social data stored in the cloud.

Contribution to multiuser videoconferencing systems based on cloud computing

Multi-user videoconferencing systems offer communication between more than two users, who are able to interact through their webcams, microphones and other components. The use of these systems has been increased recently due to, on the one hand, improvements in Internet access, networks of companies, universities and houses, whose available bandwidth has been increased whilst the delay in sending and receiving packets has decreased. On the other hand, the advent of Rich Internet Applications (RIA) means that a large part of web application logic and control has started to be implemented on the web browsers. This has allowed developers to create web applications with a level of complexity comparable to traditional desktop applications, running on top of the Operating Systems. More recently the use of Cloud Computing systems has improved application scalability and involves a reduction in the price of backend systems. This offers the possibility of implementing web services on the Internet with no need to spend a lot of money when deploying infrastructures and resources, both hardware and software. Nevertheless there are not many initiatives that aim to implement videoconferencing systems taking advantage of Cloud systems. This dissertation proposes a set of techniques, interfaces and algorithms for the implementation of videoconferencing systems in public and private Cloud Computing infrastructures. The mechanisms proposed here are based on the implementation of a basic videoconferencing system that runs on the web browser without any previous installation requirements. To this end, the development of this thesis starts from a RIA application with current technologies that allow users to access their webcams and microphones from the browser, and to send captured data through their Internet connections. Furthermore interfaces have been implemented to allow end users to participate in videoconferencing rooms that are managed in different Cloud provider servers. To do so this dissertation starts from the results obtained from the previous techniques and backend resources were implemented in the Cloud. A traditional videoconferencing service which was implemented in the department was modified to meet typical Cloud Computing infrastructure requirements. This allowed us to validate whether Cloud Computing public infrastructures are suitable for the traffic generated by this kind of system. This analysis focused on the network level and processing capacity and stability of the Cloud Computing systems. In order to improve this validation several other general considerations were taken in order to cover more cases, such as multimedia data processing in the Cloud, as research activity has increased in this area in recent years. The last stage of this dissertation is the design of a new methodology to implement these kinds of applications in hybrid clouds reducing the cost of videoconferencing systems. Finally, this dissertation opens up a discussion about the conclusions obtained throughout this study, resulting in useful information from the different stages of the implementation of videoconferencing systems in Cloud Computing systems. RESUMEN Los sistemas de videoconferencia multiusuario permiten la comunicación entre más de dos usuarios que pueden interactuar a través de cámaras de video, micrófonos y otros elementos. En los últimos años el uso de estos sistemas se ha visto incrementado gracias, por un lado, a la mejora de las redes de acceso en las conexiones a Internet en empresas, universidades y viviendas, que han visto un aumento del ancho de banda disponible en dichas conexiones y una disminución en el retardo experimentado por los datos enviados y recibidos. Por otro lado también ayudó la aparación de las Aplicaciones Ricas de Internet (RIA) con las que gran parte de la lógica y del control de las aplicaciones web comenzó a ejecutarse en los mismos navegadores. Esto permitió a los desarrolladores la creación de aplicaciones web cuya complejidad podía compararse con la de las tradicionales aplicaciones de escritorio, ejecutadas directamente por los sistemas operativos. Más recientemente el uso de sistemas de Cloud Computing ha mejorado la escalabilidad y el abaratamiento de los costes para sistemas de backend, ofreciendo la posibilidad de implementar servicios Web en Internet sin la necesidad de grandes desembolsos iniciales en las áreas de infraestructuras y recursos tanto hardware como software. Sin embargo no existen aún muchas iniciativas con el objetivo de realizar sistemas de videoconferencia que aprovechen las ventajas del Cloud. Esta tesis doctoral propone un conjunto de técnicas, interfaces y algoritmos para la implentación de sistemas de videoconferencia en infraestructuras tanto públicas como privadas de Cloud Computing. Las técnicas propuestas en la tesis se basan en la realización de un servicio básico de videoconferencia que se ejecuta directamente en el navegador sin la necesidad de instalar ningún tipo de aplicación de escritorio. Para ello el desarrollo de esta tesis parte de una aplicación RIA con tecnologías que hoy en día permiten acceder a la cámara y al micrófono directamente desde el navegador, y enviar los datos que capturan a través de la conexión de Internet. Además se han implementado interfaces que permiten a usuarios finales la participación en salas de videoconferencia que se ejecutan en servidores de proveedores de Cloud. Para ello se partió de los resultados obtenidos en las técnicas anteriores de ejecución de aplicaciones en el navegador y se implementaron los recursos de backend en la nube. Además se modificó un servicio ya existente implementado en el departamento para adaptarlo a los requisitos típicos de las infraestructuras de Cloud Computing. Alcanzado este punto se procedió a analizar si las infraestructuras propias de los proveedores públicos de Cloud Computing podrían soportar el tráfico generado por los sistemas que se habían adaptado. Este análisis se centró tanto a nivel de red como a nivel de capacidad de procesamiento y estabilidad de los sistemas. Para los pasos de análisis y validación de los sistemas Cloud se tomaron consideraciones más generales para abarcar casos como el procesamiento de datos multimedia en la nube, campo en el que comienza a haber bastante investigación en los últimos años. Como último paso se ideó una metodología de implementación de este tipo de aplicaciones para que fuera posible abaratar los costes de los sistemas de videoconferencia haciendo uso de clouds híbridos. Finalmente en la tesis se abre una discusión sobre las conclusiones obtenidas a lo largo de este amplio estudio, obteniendo resultados útiles en las distintas etapas de implementación de los sistemas de videoconferencia en la nube.

On a meaningful integration of web services in data-intensive biomedical environments: The DICODE approach

This paper reports on an innovative approach that aims to reduce information management costs in data-intensive and cognitively-complex biomedical environments. Recognizing the importance of prominent high-performance computing paradigms and large data processing technologies as well as collaboration support systems to remedy data-intensive issues, it adopts a hybrid approach by building on the synergy of these technologies. The proposed approach provides innovative Web-based workbenches that integrate and orchestrate a set of interoperable services that reduce the data-intensiveness and complexity overload at critical decision points to a manageable level, thus permitting stakeholders to be more productive and concentrate on creative activities.