Is agriculture the engine of growth?

We seek to address formally the question raised by Gardner (2003) in his Elmhirst lecture as to the direction of causality between agricultural value added per worker and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita. Using the Granger causality test in the panel data analyzed by Gardner for 85 countries, we find overwhelming evidence that supports the conclusion that agricultural value added is the causal variable in developing countries, while the direction of causality in developed countries is unclear. We also examine further the use of the Granger causality test in integrated data and provide evidence that the performance of the test can be increased in small samples through the use of the bootstrap.

A middleware independent grid workflow builder for scientific applications

Grid workflow authoring tools are typically specific to particular workflow engines built into Grid middleware, or are application specific and are designed to interact with specific software implementations. g-Eclipse is a middleware independent Grid workbench that aims to provide a unified abstraction of the Grid and includes a Grid workflow builder to allow users to author and deploy workflows to the Grid. This paper describes the g-Eclipse Workflow Builder and its implementations for two Grid middlewares, gLite and GRIA, and a case study utilizing the Workflow Builder in a Grid user's scientific workflow deployment.

Accessing biodiversity resources in computational environments from workflow applications

In the Biodiversity World (BDW) project we have created a flexible and extensible Web Services-based Grid environment for biodiversity researchers to solve problems in biodiversity and analyse biodiversity patterns. In this environment, heterogeneous and globally distributed biodiversity-related resources such as data sets and analytical tools are made available to be accessed and assembled by users into workflows to perform complex scientific experiments. One such experiment is bioclimatic modelling of the geographical distribution of individual species using climate variables in order to predict past and future climate-related changes in species distribution. Data sources and analytical tools required for such analysis of species distribution are widely dispersed, available on heterogeneous platforms, present data in different formats and lack interoperability. The BDW system brings all these disparate units together so that the user can combine tools with little thought as to their availability, data formats and interoperability. The current Web Servicesbased Grid environment enables execution of the BDW workflow tasks in remote nodes but with a limited scope. The next step in the evolution of the BDW architecture is to enable workflow tasks to utilise computational resources available within and outside the BDW domain. We describe the present BDW architecture and its transition to a new framework which provides a distributed computational environment for mapping and executing workflows in addition to bringing together heterogeneous resources and analytical tools.

Workflow data exchange semantics, object discovery & integration architecture for cross media production & distribution

There has been a clear lack of common data exchange semantics for inter-organisational workflow management systems where the research has mainly focused on technical issues rather than language constructs. This paper presents the neutral data exchanges semantics required for the workflow integration within the AXAEDIS framework and presents the mechanism for object discovery from the object repository where little or no knowledge about the object is available. The paper also presents workflow independent integration architecture with the AXAEDIS Framework.

Workflow-oriented collaborative grid portals

The paper presents how workflow-oriented, single-user Grid portals could be extended to meet the requirements of users with collaborative needs. Through collaborative Grid portals different research and engineering teams would be able to share knowledge and resources. At the same time the workflow concept assures that the shared knowledge and computational capacity is aggregated to achieve the high-level goals of the group. The paper discusses the different issues collaborative support requires from Grid portal environments during the different phases of the workflow-oriented development work. While in the design period the most important task of the portal is to provide consistent and fault tolerant data management, during the workflow execution it must act upon the security framework its back-end Grids are built on.

Integrative workflow-embedded support for process automation and management

This paper presents the on-going research performed in order to integrate process automation and process management support in the context of media production. This has been addressed on the basis of a holistic approach to software engineering applied to media production modelling to ensure design correctness, completeness and effectiveness. The focus of the research and development has been to enhance the metadata management throughout the process in a similar fashion to that achieved in Decision Support Systems (DSS) to facilitate well-grounded business decisions. The paper sets out the aims and objectives and the methodology deployed. The paper describes the solution in some detail and sets out some preliminary conclusions and the planned future work.

Analysing Google rankings through search engine optimization data

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to identify the most popular techniques used to rank a web page highly in Google. Design/methodology/approach - The paper presents the results of a study into 50 highly optimized web pages that were created as part of a Search Engine Optimization competition. The study focuses on the most popular techniques that were used to rank highest in this competition, and includes an analysis on the use of PageRank, number of pages, number of in-links, domain age and the use of third party sites such as directories and social bookmarking sites. A separate study was made into 50 non-optimized web pages for comparison. Findings - The paper provides insight into the techniques that successful Search Engine Optimizers use to ensure a page ranks highly in Google. Recognizes the importance of PageRank and links as well as directories and social bookmarking sites. Research limitations/implications - Only the top 50 web sites for a specific query were analyzed. Analysing more web sites and comparing with similar studies in different competition would provide more concrete results. Practical implications - The paper offers a revealing insight into the techniques used by industry experts to rank highly in Google, and the success or other-wise of those techniques. Originality/value - This paper fulfils an identified need for web sites and e-commerce sites keen to attract a wider web audience.

Rationality of service composition of Workflow Net in a service oriented architecture

Users’ requirements change drives an information system evolution. Consequently, such evolution affects those atomic services which provide functional operations from one state of their composition to another state of composition. A challenging issue associated with such evolution of the state of service composition is to ensure a resultant service composition remaining rational. This paper presents a method of Service Composition Atomic-Operation Set (SCAOS). SCAOS defines 2 classes of atomic operations and 13 kinds of basic service compositions to aid a state change process by using Workflow Net. The workflow net has algorithmic capabilities to compose the required services with rationality and maintain any changes to the services in a different composition also rational. This method can improve the adaptability to the ever changing business requirements of information systems in the dynamic environment.

The BioDICE Taverna plugin for clustering and visualization of biological data: a workflow for molecular compounds exploration

Background: In many experimental pipelines, clustering of multidimensional biological datasets is used to detect hidden structures in unlabelled input data. Taverna is a popular workflow management system that is used to design and execute scientific workflows and aid in silico experimentation. The availability of fast unsupervised methods for clustering and visualization in the Taverna platform is important to support a data-driven scientific discovery in complex and explorative bioinformatics applications. Results: This work presents a Taverna plugin, the Biological Data Interactive Clustering Explorer (BioDICE), that performs clustering of high-dimensional biological data and provides a nonlinear, topology preserving projection for the visualization of the input data and their similarities. The core algorithm in the BioDICE plugin is Fast Learning Self Organizing Map (FLSOM), which is an improved variant of the Self Organizing Map (SOM) algorithm. The plugin generates an interactive 2D map that allows the visual exploration of multidimensional data and the identification of groups of similar objects. The effectiveness of the plugin is demonstrated on a case study related to chemical compounds. Conclusions: The number and variety of available tools and its extensibility have made Taverna a popular choice for the development of scientific data workflows. This work presents a novel plugin, BioDICE, which adds a data-driven knowledge discovery component to Taverna. BioDICE provides an effective and powerful clustering tool, which can be adopted for the explorative analysis of biological datasets.

Search engine liability for autocomplete suggestions: personality, privacy and the power of the algorithm

This article is concerned with the liability of search engines for algorithmically produced search suggestions, such as through Google’s ‘autocomplete’ function. Liability in this context may arise when automatically generated associations have an offensive or defamatory meaning, or may even induce infringement of intellectual property rights. The increasing number of cases that have been brought before courts all over the world puts forward questions on the conflict of fundamental freedoms of speech and access to information on the one hand, and personality rights of individuals— under a broader right of informational self-determination—on the other. In the light of the recent judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union (EU) in Google Spain v AEPD, this article concludes that many requests for removal of suggestions including private individuals’ information will be successful on the basis of EU data protection law, even absent prejudice to the person concerned.