An ontology to automated learning scenarios? an approach to its knowledge domain

Automation or semi-automation of learning scenariospecifications is one of the least exploredsubjects in the e-learning research area. There isa need for a catalogue of learning scenarios and atechnique to facilitate automated retrieval of stored specifications. This requires constructing anontology with this goal and is justified inthis paper. This ontology must mainlysupport a specification technique for learning scenarios. This ontology should also be useful in the creation and validation of new scenarios as well as in the personalization of learning scenarios or their monitoring. Thus, after justifying the need for this ontology, a first approach of a possible knowledge domain is presented. An example of a concrete learning scenario illustrates some relevant concepts supported by this ontology in order to define the scenario in such a way that it could be easy to automate.

Kuormitustestausvälineen valinta Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 – toteutuksessa

Kuormitustestaus on osa web-sovellusten kehitystä ja käyttöönottoa. Sillä varmistetaan sovellusten toimivuus ennalta määrätyn kuorman alla. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) on palvelintuote nykyaikaisten web-sovellusten luontiin ja ylläpitoon. Työssä vertaillaan kahta eri uormitustestaustyökalua: SilkPerformer 2008 ja Visual Studio Team System 2008 Test Edition ja valitaan MOSS – web-sovelluksille paremmin sopiva työkalu. Työssä vertaillaan työkaluja niiden ominaisuuksien perusteella sekä suorittamalla kuormitustestausta testausta varten luodulle MOSS – web-sovellukselle. Vaikuttavien tekijöiden perusteella työkaluja arvioidaan ja tämän perusteella saadaan tulos vertailulle. Työn tuloksena Visual Studio Team System 2008 Test Edition sopii paremmin MOSS – web-sovelluksen kuormitustestausvälineeksi. Vertailussa kuitenkin havaittiin, että työkalut ovat melko tasavertaisia, ja käytännön tilanteesta riippuu, kumpi sopii paremmin. Tämä työ auttaa valinnan teossa.

Quality and analysis of administration processes in server operations

IT outsourcing refers to the way companies focus on their core competencies and buy the supporting functions from other companies specialized in that area. Service is the total outcome of numerous of activities by employees and other resources to provide solutions to customers' problems. Outsourcing and service business have their unique characteristics. Service Level Agreements quantify the minimum acceptable service to the user. The service quality has to be objectively quantified so that its achievement or non-achievement of it can be monitored. Usually offshoring refers to the transferring of tasks to low-cost nations. Offshoring presents a lot of challenges that require special attention and they need to be assessed thoroughly. IT Infrastructure management refers to installation and basic usability assistance of operating systems, network and server tools and utilities. ITIL defines the industry best practices for organizing IT processes. This thesis did an analysis of server operations service and the customers’ perception of the quality of daily operations. The agreed workflows and processes should be followed better. Service providers’ processes are thoroughly defined but both the customer and the service provider might disobey them. Service provider should review the workflows regarding customer functions. Customer facing functions require persistent skill development, as they communicate the quality to the customer. Service provider needs to provide better organized communication and knowledge exchange methods between the specialists in different geographical locations.

Design and Implementation of MUPE Server Context Tool for Eclipse IDE

The development of software tools begun as the first computers were built. The current generation of development environments offers a common interface to access multiple software tools and often also provide a possibility to build custom tools as extensions to the existing development environment. Eclipse is an open source development environment that offers good starting point for developing custom extensions. This thesis presents a software tool to aid the development of context-aware applications on Multi-User Publishing Environment (MUPE) platform. The tool is implemented as an Eclipse plug-in. The tool allows developer to include external server side contexts to their MUPE applications. The tool allows additional context sources to be added through the Eclipse's extension point mechanism. The thesis describes how the tool was designed and implemented. The implementation consists of tool core component part and an additional context source extension part. Tool core component is responsible for the actual context addition and also provides the needed user interface elements to the Eclipse workbench. Context source component provides the needed context source related information to the core component. As part of the work an update site feature was also implemented for distributing the tool through Eclipse update mechanism.

Da Costa on ontology: a naturalistic interpretation

Da Costa's conception of being modifies that of Quine to incorporate relativization to non-classical logics. A naturalistic view of this conception is discussed. This view tries to extend to logic some ideas of Maddy's naturalism concerning mathematics.

Tietovaraston latausprosessin kehittämisen osittainen automatisointi Microsoft SQL Server 2008 -ympäristössä

Tässä työssä tutkitaan tietovaraston latausprosessin kehittämisen nopeuttamista Mic-rosoft SQL Server 2008 -ympäristössä. Työn teoriaosuudet on tarkoitettu tukemaan sekä työn tutkimus- että käytännönosia. Aiheeseen liittyviä tutkimuksia käytiin läpi parhaiden latausprosessin kehittämiseen kuluvaa aikaa vähentävien tapojen selvittä-miseksi. Nykytutkimus keskittyy valmistajasta riippumattomien mallien kehittämiseen ja valmistajakohtaisen latausprosessin luomiseen näiden mallien pohjalta. Yleinen konsensus parhaan mallin suhteen kuitenkin puuttuu. Aiheeseen liittyvien tutkimusten pohjalta esitetään arkkitehtuuri, joka saattaisi tule-vaisuudessa vähentää latausprosessin kehittämiseen kuluvaa aikaa huomattavasti. Tästä arkkitehtuurista luotiin yksinkertaistettu versio sekä siihen pohjautuva sovellus nopeuttamaan latausprosessin kehittämistä Microsoftin ETL-työkalulla.

Consistency of UML based designs using ontology reasoners

Software plays an important role in our society and economy. Software development is an intricate process, and it comprises many different tasks: gathering requirements, designing new solutions that fulfill these requirements, as well as implementing these designs using a programming language into a working system. As a consequence, the development of high quality software is a core problem in software engineering. This thesis focuses on the validation of software designs. The issue of the analysis of designs is of great importance, since errors originating from designs may appear in the final system. It is considered economical to rectify the problems as early in the software development process as possible. Practitioners often create and visualize designs using modeling languages, one of the more popular being the Uni ed Modeling Language (UML). The analysis of the designs can be done manually, but in case of large systems, the need of mechanisms that automatically analyze these designs arises. In this thesis, we propose an automatic approach to analyze UML based designs using logic reasoners. This approach firstly proposes the translations of the UML based designs into a language understandable by reasoners in the form of logic facts, and secondly shows how to use the logic reasoners to infer the logical consequences of these logic facts. We have implemented the proposed translations in the form of a tool that can be used with any standard compliant UML modeling tool. Moreover, we authenticate the proposed approach by automatically validating hundreds of UML based designs that consist of thousands of model elements available in an online model repository. The proposed approach is limited in scope, but is fully automatic and does not require any expertise of logic languages from the user. We exemplify the proposed approach with two applications, which include the validation of domain specific languages and the validation of web service interfaces.

Multitenant-arkkitehtuurin mukainen Microsoft BizTalk Server palveluna virtuaaliympäristöstä

Tässä työssä selvitettiin Microsoft BizTalk Server -tuotteen sopivuutta moniasiakasjärjestelmänä toimivan sovellusintegraatioympäristön toteuttamiseen. Työssä ei otettu kantaa ympäristössä suoritettaviin integraatioihin, niihin liittyviin asiakkuuksiin tai integraatioympäristöön liittyviin järjestelmiin ja sovelluksiin. Selvityksessä ilmeni, että Microsoft BizTalk Server -tuotetta on mahdollista käyttää moniasiakasjärjestelmänä, sillä lisenssiehdot eivät rajoita tuotteen käyttömahdollisuuksia. Moniasiakasjärjestelmän haasteet liittyvät tietoturvaan ja sovellustietojen näkyvyyteen. Toisaalta haasteena on moniasiakasjärjestelmän kannattavuus liiketoiminnan näkökulmasta.

Fuzzy ontology for knowledge mobilisation and decision support

A growing concern for organisations is how they should deal with increasing amounts of collected data. With fierce competition and smaller margins, organisations that are able to fully realize the potential in the data they collect can gain an advantage over the competitors. It is almost impossible to avoid imprecision when processing large amounts of data. Still, many of the available information systems are not capable of handling imprecise data, even though it can offer various advantages. Expert knowledge stored as linguistic expressions is a good example of imprecise but valuable data, i.e. data that is hard to exactly pinpoint to a definitive value. There is an obvious concern among organisations on how this problem should be handled; finding new methods for processing and storing imprecise data are therefore a key issue. Additionally, it is equally important to show that tacit knowledge and imprecise data can be used with success, which encourages organisations to analyse their imprecise data. The objective of the research conducted was therefore to explore how fuzzy ontologies could facilitate the exploitation and mobilisation of tacit knowledge and imprecise data in organisational and operational decision making processes. The thesis introduces both practical and theoretical advances on how fuzzy logic, ontologies (fuzzy ontologies) and OWA operators can be utilized for different decision making problems. It is demonstrated how a fuzzy ontology can model tacit knowledge which was collected from wine connoisseurs. The approach can be generalised and applied also to other practically important problems, such as intrusion detection. Additionally, a fuzzy ontology is applied in a novel consensus model for group decision making. By combining the fuzzy ontology with Semantic Web affiliated techniques novel applications have been designed. These applications show how the mobilisation of knowledge can successfully utilize also imprecise data. An important part of decision making processes is undeniably aggregation, which in combination with a fuzzy ontology provides a promising basis for demonstrating the benefits that one can retrieve from handling imprecise data. The new aggregation operators defined in the thesis often provide new possibilities to handle imprecision and expert opinions. This is demonstrated through both theoretical examples and practical implementations. This thesis shows the benefits of utilizing all the available data one possess, including imprecise data. By combining the concept of fuzzy ontology with the Semantic Web movement, it aspires to show the corporate world and industry the benefits of embracing fuzzy ontologies and imprecision.

Invenio customization for CERN Document Server

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

Parasitic Order Machine. A Sociology and Ontology of Information Securing

This study examines information security as a process (information securing) in terms of what it does, especially beyond its obvious role of protector. It investigates concepts related to ‘ontology of becoming’, and examines what it is that information securing produces. The research is theory driven and draws upon three fields: sociology (especially actor-network theory), philosophy (especially Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of ‘machine’, ‘territory’ and ‘becoming’, and Michel Serres’s concept of ‘parasite’), and information systems science (the subject of information security). Social engineering (used here in the sense of breaking into systems through non-technical means) and software cracker groups (groups which remove copy protection systems from software) are analysed as examples of breaches of information security. Firstly, the study finds that information securing is always interruptive: every entity (regardless of whether or not it is malicious) that becomes connected to information security is interrupted. Furthermore, every entity changes, becomes different, as it makes a connection with information security (ontology of becoming). Moreover, information security organizes entities into different territories. However, the territories – the insides and outsides of information systems – are ontologically similar; the only difference is in the order of the territories, not in the ontological status of entities that inhabit the territories. In other words, malicious software is ontologically similar to benign software; they both are users in terms of a system. The difference is based on the order of the system and users: who uses the system and what the system is used for. Secondly, the research shows that information security is always external (in the terms of this study it is a ‘parasite’) to the information system that it protects. Information securing creates and maintains order while simultaneously disrupting the existing order of the system that it protects. For example, in terms of software itself, the implementation of a copy protection system is an entirely external addition. In fact, this parasitic addition makes software different. Thus, information security disrupts that which it is supposed to defend from disruption. Finally, it is asserted that, in its interruption, information security is a connector that creates passages; it connects users to systems while also creating its own threats. For example, copy protection systems invite crackers and information security policies entice social engineers to use and exploit information security techniques in a novel manner.

Glutamatergic transmission in the nucleus tractus solitarii: from server to peripherals in the cardiovascular information superhighway

Afferent nerves carrying signals from mechanoreceptors in the aortic arch and carotid sinus terminate predominantly in the nucleus tractus solitarii (NTS). Signal transduction and neurotransmission in the NTS are critical for central cardiovascular reflex control, but little was known about either until the late 1970's. None of the numerous neuroactive chemicals found in the NTS had met strict criteria as a neurotransmitter in the baroreflex arc until data suggested that the excitatory amino acid L-glutamate (GLU) might be released from baroreceptor afferent terminals in the NTS. In anesthetized animals microinjection into the NTS of GLU, which can be demonstrated in terminals in the NTS, produces cardiovascular responses like those seen with activation of the baroreceptor reflex. Similar responses occur in awake animals if the chemoreceptor reflex is eliminated; otherwise, in conscious animals responses mimic those of chemoreceptor reflex activation. GLU is released in the NTS upon selective activation of the baroreceptor, and possibly the chemoreceptor, reflex. Responses to selective agonists as well as baroreflex responses are eliminated by GLU antagonists microinjected into the NTS. Non-NMDA (N-methyl-D-aspartic acid) receptors seem to predominate at primary baroreceptor synapses in the NTS while NMDA receptors may be involved at later synapses. Although inhibition of soluble guanylate cyclase attenuates responses to ionotropic glutamate agonists in the NTS, nitric oxide does not seem to play a role in glutamate transmission in the NTS. GLU may also participate in transmission at cardiovascular neurons beyond the NTS. For example, a role has been suggested for GLU in the ventrolateral medulla and spinal cord. Work continues concerning GLU signal transduction and mechanisms that modulate that transduction both at the NTS and at other cardiovascular nuclei