Chapter 25 - A Knowledge-based Collaborative Environment for Geovisualization: Ontologies for Multiple Perspectives on Distributed Data Resources

One of the important research and technological issues in data warehouse performance is the optimization of analytical queries. Most of the research have been focusing on optimizing such queries by means of materialized views, data and index partitioning, as well as various index structures including: join indexes, bitmap join indexes, multidimensional indexes or index-based multidimensional clusters. These structures neither well support navigation along dimension hierarchies nor optimize joins with the Time dimension, which in practice is used in the majority of analytical queries. In this chapter we overview the basic index structures, namely: a bitmap index, a join index, and a bitmap join index. Based on these indexes, we show how to build another index, called Time-HOBI, for optimizing queries that address the Time dimension and compute aggregates along dimension hierarchies. We further discuss the extension of the index with additional data structure for storing aggregate values along the hierarchical structure of the index. The aggregates are used for speeding up aggregate queries along dimension hierarchies. Furthermore, we show how the index is used for answering queries in an example data warehouse. Finally, we discuss its performance-related characteristics, based on experiments.

A Community Grid web portal, C-Grid, has been developed in this study for storing, managing and sharing large amounts of distributed community health related data in a data grid, thus facilitating further analysis of these datasets by health researchers in a collaborative environment. Remote management of this data grid is performed using the middleware iRODS, the Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System. A PHP-based wrapper, ez-iRODS, has been created as a component of C-Grid to interact with this middleware through PRODS, a client application programming interface (API). C-Grid serves as a gateway for the XSEDE resources, and also helps the users via ez-iRODS to create and manage ‘virtual data collection’ that can be stored in heterogeneous data resources across the distributed network. This web-based system has been developed with an objective of long-term data preservation, unified data access and sharing domain specific data amongst the scientific research collaborators of myCHOIS project.

Production Grids are becoming widely utilized by the e-Science community to run computation and data intensive experiments more efficiently. Unfortunately, different production Grid infrastructures are based on different middleware technologies, both for computation and for data access. Although there is significant effort from the Grid community to standardize the underlying middleware, solutions that allow existing non-standard tools to interoperate are one of the major concerns of Grid users today. This paper describes the generic requirements towards the interoperation of Grid data resources within computational workflows, and suggests integration techniques that allow workflow engines to access various heterogeneous data resources during workflow execution. Reference implementations of these techniques are presented and recommendations on their applicability and suitability are made.

e-Science and Licklider It is no coincidence that it was at CERN, the particle-physics accelerator laboratory in Geneva, that Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. Given the distributed nature of the multi-institute collaborations required for modern particle-physics experiments, the particle-physics community desperately needed a tool for exchanging information. After a slow start, their community enthusiastically adopted the Web for information exchange within their experimental collaborations – the first Web site in the USA was at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Since its beginnings in the early 1990s, the Web has taken by storm not only the entire scientific world but also the worlds of business and recreation. Now, just a decade later, scientists need to develop capabilities for collaboration that go far beyond those of the Web. Besides being able to access information from different sites they want to be able to use remote computing resources, to integrate, federate, and analyze information from many disparate and distributed data resources, and to access and control remote experimental equipment. The ability to access, move, manipulate, and mine data is the central requirement of these new collaborative-science applications – be they data held in a file or database repositories, data generated by accelerators or telescopes, or data gathered from mobile sensor networks. At the end of the 1990s, John Taylor became Director General of Research Councils at the Office of Science and Technology (OST) in the UK – roughly equivalent to Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the USA. Before his appointment to the OST, Taylor had been Director of HP Laboratories in Europe and HP as a company have long had a vision of computing and IT resources as a “utility.” Rather than purchase expensive IT infrastructure outright, users in the future would be able to pay for IT services as they require them, in the same way as we use the conventional utilities such as electricity, gas, and water. In putting together a bid to government for an increase in science funding, Taylor realized that many areas of science could benefit from a common IT infrastructure to support multidisciplinary and distributed collaborations. He therefore articulated a vision for this type of collaborative science and introduced the term “e-Science”: e-Science is about global collaboration in key areas of science, and the next generation of infrastructure that will enable it.

A large number of diverse, complex, and distributed data resources are currently available in the Bioinformatics domain. The pace of discovery and the diversity of information means that centralised reference databases like UniProt and Ensembl cannot integrate all potentially relevant information sources. From a user perspective however, centralised access to all relevant information concerning a specific query is essential. The Distributed Annotation System (DAS) defines a communication protocol to exchange annotations on genomic and protein sequences; this standardisation enables clients to retrieve data from a myriad of sources, thus offering centralised access to end-users.We introduce MyDas, a web server that facilitates the publishing of biological annotations according to the DAS specification. It deals with the common functionality requirements of making data available, while also providing an extension mechanism in order to implement the specifics of data store interaction. MyDas allows the user to define where the required information is located along with its structure, and is then responsible for the communication protocol details.

Deep-time temperature field simulation of hot dry rock: A deep learning method in both time and space dimensions

In ubiquitous environments, many applications need to process data with time and space dimensions. Because of this, there is growing attention not only on gathering spatiotemporal data in ubiquitous environments, but also on processing such data in databases. In order to obtain the full benefits from spatiotemporal data, we need a data model that naturally expresses the properties of spatiotemporal data. In this paper, we introduce three spatiotemporal data models extended from temporal data models. The main goal of this paper is to determine which data model is less complex in the spatiotemporal context. To this end, we compare their query languages in the complexity aspect because the complexity of a query language is tightly coupled with its underlying data model. Throughout our investigations, we show that it is important to intertwine space and time dimensions and keep one-to-one correspondence between an object in the real world and a tuple in a database in order to naturally express queries in ubiquitous applications.

Collaborative environment will provide the architecture and infrastructure that allows seamlessly integrated comprehensive support services for collaboration involving sharing data, information, knowledge, tools for manipulation, representation and visualizations. Agent Grid Intelligence Platform (AGrIP) will aid people, teams and group to collaborate with searching processes, mining processes, decision processes and action processes. AGrIP is a highly open software environment whose structure is capable of dynamical changes. It’s a loosely coupled computer network of ever expanding size and complexity. It can be viewed as a large, distributed information resource, with nodes on the network designed and implemented by different organizations and individuals with widely varying agendas. The four-layer model for AGrIP is presented, that is data resources, maulti-agent, middleware and applications. In this presentation I will emphasize to discuss agent model, AGrIP architecture and collaborative strategies. For collaborative strategies we have proposed flexible working flow, role assignment, ontology-based collaboration, policy driven and planning.

Researchers, policy makers and others commonly use electronic data routinely collected during the delivery of, or payment for, medical care to study the “real world” effectiveness, comparative effectiveness, safety, and costs of medical interventions. However, even very large individual healthcare data resources are often not big enough to adequately conduct post-marketing evidence studies. To improve the ability to use multiple distributed data resources, like the HMORN’s Virtual Data Warehouse, the Developing Evidence to Inform Decisions about Effectiveness (DEcIDE) centers at the HMORN Center for Education and Research on Therapeutics (CERT) and the University of Pennsylvania are developing a design for a scalable distributed research network. Funded by AHRQ’s Effective Health Care Program, the project intends to develop the framework for a distributed research network that will help close the knowledge gap regarding the “real world” effectiveness, comparative effectiveness, and safety of medical technologies. The network will have these important attributes: distributed architecture, strong local control of data uses, and federated querying. Constructing the network is a challenge, even among sites with fully operational local virtual data warehouse (VDW) installations, because of differences in computing environments and information systems, the need for responsible stewardship of clinical records, concerns related to data privacy, software development obstacles, the use of proprietary data, and the need to develop effective governance mechanisms. To investigate some of these issues, the project includes implementation of a proof of concept prototype involving these HMORN sites: Kaiser Permanente Northern California, Kaiser Permanente Colorado, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Group Health Cooperative, and Geisinger Health System. The goals of the proof of concept work are to distribute a query to separately stored data resources, execute the query remotely, and present aggregated results to an authorized system user. The proof of concept will be designed with a single network portal that manages the network software, including security, authorization, authentication, messaging, and query aggregation. We will present our findings from the proof of concept, including information on specific architecture and design used, the success of the proof of concept, and lessons learned from implementation.

Multi-dimensional data occurs in many domains while a wide variety of text based and visual interfaces for querying such data exists. But many of these interfaces are not applicable to OLAP, as they do not support the use of dimension hierarchies for selection and aggregation. We introduce an interface technique which supports visual querying of OLAP data. It is based on a data graph rather than a data cube representation of the data. Our interface presents each dimension hierarchy in a zoomable panel which supports selection and aggregation at multiple levels. Users explore data and query by making selections in several dimension views. Three view coordinations are identified; progressive, global and result only. We demonstrate our interface technique with an example web log dataset of site visits organised into time, downloads, visitor address and referrer address dimensions. This article provides an extended treatment of an earlier short paper [6].

A global and parallel file system for grids

In the past few years, Knowledge discovery communities have contributed a rich set of methods and tools that had been used for the analysis of large data sets. On the other hand, Grids are increasingly being used for collaborative work. Grid users would similarly benefit from having access to databases, mainly, those involved in collaborative data analysis of large datasets and those requiring sharing of data. OGSA-DAI provides an extension to the OGSA framework by allowing access to and integration of data held in heterogeneous data resources. In this paper we survey some issues, which focus on the extension of the Grid technology to Knowledge Discovery Services that are designed and being implemented on top of OGSA-DAI Grid Services. The proposed architecture defines a set of additional layers to implement the services of distributed knowledge discovery process.

This chapter discusses the concept of dimension hierarchy in star schemas. A dimension hierarchy is a connection of two or more dimensions in a hierarchical manner, using a many-1 relationship. This chapter also compares and contrasts five different models: separate dimension model, combined dimension model, hierarchy model, linked dimension model and hierarchy design considerations.

In this paper, we propose a role-based access control (RBAC) system for data resources in the Storage Resource Broker (SRB). The SRB is a Data Grid management system, which can integrate heterogeneous data resources of virtual organizations (VOs). The SRB stores the access control information of individual users in the Metadata Catalog (MCAT) database. However, because of the specific MCAT schema structure, this information can only be used by the SRB applications. If VOs also have many non-SRB applications, each with its own storage format for user access control information, it creates a scalability problem with regard to administration. To solve this problem, we developed a RBAC system with Shibboleth, which is an attribute authorization service currently being used in many Grid environments. Thus, the administration overhead is reduced because the role privileges of individual users are now managed by Shibboleth, not by MCAT or applications. In addition, access control policies need to be specified and managed across multiple VOs. For the specification of access control policies, we used the Core and Hierarchical RBAC profile of the eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML); and for distributed administration of those policies, we used the Object, Metadata and Artifacts Registry (OMAR). OMAR is based on the e-business eXtensible Markup Language (ebXML) registry specifications developed to achieve interoperable registries and repositories. Our RBAC system provides scalable and fine-grain access control and allows privacy protection. Performance analysis shows that our system adds only a small overhead to the existing security infrastructure of the SRB.

In the last five years, Moroccan e-health system has focused on improving the quality of patient care services by making use of advanced Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) solutions. In actual fact, achieving runtime and efficient information sharing, through large-scale distributed environments such as e-health system, is not a trivial task. It seems to present many issues due to the heterogeneity and complex nature of data resources. This concerns, in particular, Moroccan Hospital Pharmacy Information System (HPIS) which needs to interact with several disparate medical information systems. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) offers solution that is both flexible and practical to effectively address the problem of interoperability of e-health systems. In this paper, we discuss the limits and challenges of the current Moroccan information system intended for hospital pharmacy. We therefore propose a global Web services-based e-health architecture for integrating different heterogeneous blocks and various data resources of this system. We also present a solution to secure Web services communication using WS-SecurityPolicy.