High-Performance Computing Approaches for Using the WWW to Access a Large-Scale Environmental Dataset Repository

Three kinds of data structures related to the quadtree and the octree are reviewed, and improvements, particularly far the storage requirements, are introduced. Applications to geology are indicated where possible. First, the bitwise condensed quadtree (BC quadtree) and the gray scale depth first expression are presented, which lead to a better manipulation and compression of gray scale images and density data. The BC quadtree results from a combination of spatial hierarchical subdivision with gray scale hierarchical subdivision and can easily be adapted to the representation of imprecise information. Second, examining the node types of the polytree, compaction is improved by defining some new node types. The polytree is a variant of the octree used in solid modeling to represent polygonal and polyhedral data. A special property of the new node types is that they can easily be processed with the conventional algorithms. Third, the storage of different kinds of very large quadtrees on external storage media leads to the desire for an unified way of access. Until now, the linear quadtree was the only data structure far this task. Its storage requirements are considerably improved by some simple changes.

Since the advent of the World Wide Web (WWW) in the early 1990s, a tremendous amount of information has become available to the general public. The WWW allows a person to navigate “hypermedia”— text, images, or sound files that are linked together electronically. The WWW is an information presentation tool flexible enough to handle a wide range of data presentation methods and popular enough to reach a large audience, making it an effective teaching or research tool. We have taken advantage of these attributes by developing an interactive electronic atlas of climatic products from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP)–National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Reanalysis Project and the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) General Circulation Model (GCM) on the WWW at http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/ncep_reanalysis/ and http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/gfdl/. Although printed atlases have their own utility, an electronic version has many advantages. An electronic atlas is dynamic, so that fields can be added, corrected, and updated as more data become available. Since it is distributed via the Internet, the electronic atlas has a potentially larger audience and is less expensive to distribute than a printed publication. Other research institutions provide interactive climate information on the WWW with varying degrees of complexity. Some, like the Climate Change Atlas (Model Evaluation Consortium for Climate Assessment 1997), are interfaces to access pregenerated images stored on disk. This type of design has all of the advantages listed above, yet it still has some drawbacks. Maintaining an archive of images can become cumbersome as the number of datasets, variables, and statistics increases. In addition, stored images have similar limitations to that of a printed atlas in that the region of interest, contour interval, etc., have already been determined. The electronic atlases developed at the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Sciences (CIRES) allow users to more fully explore datasets by focusing on areas of interest, performing averages over time or space, or modifying the contour interval plotted. A similar effort to provide interactive climate data visualization on the WWW can be found at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL 1997).

Data compression by linear prediction for storage and transmission of EEG signals

Millau: an encoding format for efficient representation and exchange of XML over the Web

Many different techniques have recently been proposed for efficient storage of ECG data with data compression as one of the main objectives. Although high compression ratios have been claimed for some of these techniques, the techniques did not always include the word length considerations with regard to the parameters representing the compressed signal. The authors feel that any technique can be meaningfully evaluated only if the resulting compression is expressed in bits/sample rather than the compression ratio that is often used in this field. This paper provides a critical evaluation of two classes of techniques, the direct data compression technique and the transformation technique. It is shown through exhaustive analysis that the direct data compression technique utilizing adaptive least-squares curve fitting yields a relatively fast and efficient representation of ECG signals at about 1.6 bits/sample, while maintaining visual fidelity and a normalized mean-squared error less than 1%.

The evolution of Salesforce's user interface (UI) development has been marked by significant advancements, with Lightning Web Components (LWC) emerging as a pivotal technology. LWC represents a modern approach to building user interfaces on the Salesforce platform, enabling developers to create highly responsive, efficient, and scalable applications. This paper explores the significance of LWC in modern Salesforce UI development, highlighting its architectural advantages, performance improvements, and alignment with web standards. By leveraging LWC, developers can build applications that not only enhance the user experience but also streamline development processes, reduce technical debt, and ensure long-term maintainability. LWC is built on native web standards, such as Web Components, which allows developers to utilize reusable components across multiple applications. This modularity simplifies development, reduces redundancy, and promotes a cleaner, more maintainable codebase. Additionally, LWC's adherence to modern JavaScript frameworks and its compatibility with standard HTML and CSS make it an attractive choice for developers familiar with these technologies. This compatibility allows for seamless integration with other web development practices and tools, reducing the learning curve and accelerating the adoption of LWC in Salesforce projects. One of the critical advantages of LWC is its performance efficiency. Unlike its predecessor, Aura, LWC leverages native browser capabilities, resulting in faster load times and improved application responsiveness. The lightweight nature of LWC components ensures that applications can handle large volumes of data and complex user interactions without compromising performance. This efficiency is particularly crucial in enterprise environments where Salesforce applications must support thousands of users and handle significant data processing tasks. Moreover, LWC's design aligns with Salesforce's commitment to providing a robust, scalable, and secure platform. The framework includes built-in security features, such as Locker Service, which enforces security best practices by isolating components and preventing unauthorized access to sensitive data. This emphasis on security makes LWC an ideal choice for organizations that prioritize data protection and regulatory compliance. LWC also offers enhanced customization capabilities, enabling developers to tailor Salesforce applications to meet specific business requirements. Through LWC, developers can create custom user interfaces that integrate seamlessly with Salesforce's backend services and third-party APIs. This flexibility allows businesses to deliver unique, branded experiences to their users while maintaining the robustness and reliability of the Salesforce platform. The paper also delves into the ecosystem surrounding LWC, including the availability of pre-built components, tools, and resources that accelerate development. Salesforce provides an extensive library of base components that developers can leverage to quickly assemble complex UIs. Additionally, the Salesforce community and marketplace offer a wealth of third-party components and solutions, further expanding the possibilities for UI customization and enhancement. The adoption of LWC also fosters collaboration among development teams. Its modular architecture allows multiple developers to work on different components simultaneously, reducing bottlenecks and speeding up the development cycle. This collaborative approach is supported by Salesforce's developer tools, such as Salesforce CLI and Visual Studio Code extensions, which streamline the development, testing, and deployment of LWC-based applications. In conclusion, Lightning Web Components represent a significant leap forward in Salesforce UI development, offering a modern, efficient, and secure framework for building high-quality applications. By embracing LWC, organizations can enhance their Salesforce applications' user experience, improve performance, and future-proof their investments in the Salesforce platform. As businesses continue to demand more sophisticated and responsive applications, LWC will play a crucial role in meeting these expectations and driving innovation within the Salesforce ecosystem.

Advanced medical imaging technologies have enabled biologists and other researchers in biomedicine, biochemistry and bio-informatics to gain better insight in complex, large-scale data sets. These datasets, which occupy large amounts of space, can no longer be stored on local hard drives. San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) maintains a large data repository, called High Performance Storage System (HPSS), where large-scale biomedical data sets can be stored. These data sets must be transmitted over an open or closed network (Internet or Intranet) within a reasonable amount of time to make them accessible in an interactive fashion to the researchers all over the world. Our approach deals with extracting, compressing and transmitting these data sets using the Haar wavelets, over a low- to medium-bandwidth network. These compressed data sets are then transformed and reconstructed into a 3-D volume on the client side using texture mapping in Java3D. These data sets are handled using the Scalable Visualization Toolkits provided by the NPACI (National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure). Sub-volumes of the data sets are extracted to provide a detailed view of a particular region of interest (ROI). This application is being ported to C++ platform to obtain higher rendering speed and better performance but lacks platform independency.

Improving public participation in spatial planning with Web 2.0 toolsPublic participation is a form of public cooperation or participation in the spatial-planning process that enables subjects or groups to express views, give initiatives, and actively take part in such proceedings.Because public participation is often limited to giving remarks on finished spatial plans, it is assumed that public participation could be improved with the help of information technology: namely, new web tools.One innovation is Web 2.0, a concept introduced in 2004.This introduced many tools into the world wide web that are useful in social networks and various web services as participatory services with a huge number of users.This article analyses opportu-nities for interaction between public participation and Web 2.0.It presents the demands of public participation and Web 2.0 and their opportunities for enabling participation in spatial planning.The article ascertains that Web 2.0 tools are very useful in including the public in spatial-planning processes but that much preparatory work and a good technical platform are necessary.

Algorithms and programming models for efficient representation of XML for Internet applications

The World Wide Web (WWW) on the Internet has been recognized as an effective environment to create new distributed applications that have the potential to bring instruction beyond the bounds of the classroom. The availability of browsers (e.g. Mosaic, Netscape, Hot Java) has enormously simplified the access to the WWW, and there have been numerous initiatives to take advantage of this new technology for teaching. This work will illustrate recent developments of tools for engineering education and technology transfer which take advantage of WWW browsers, Java applets, and virtual reality. We have developed modules based on WWW browsers incorporating educational and research software, including advanced visualization, which find use for multimedia classroom presentations accessible by Internet users, and which can also improve interaction among academic groups and industry. Therefore, the material is suitable for asynchronous distance learning and technology transfer. Examples of interactive WWW applications include device simulation, semiconductor band structure calculation, numerical techniques, and electromagnetics.

On 18 February, 2020, The Lancet published the report of the WHO-UNICEF-Lancet Commission, calling for a refocus of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) around child and adolescent health. All sectors are responsible for children's wellbeing, with digital platforms and artificial intelligence (AI) playing an increasing role in child and adolescent health.

This paper proposes a framework to support the development and use of tools that support the teaching of software and Web engineering. It describes the evolution of tools to support the teaching of software engineering from simple client-side tools that support drawing DFDs and UML diagrams to Web-based repositories that support process modelling. The paper specifically introduces the concept of and describes their use within the WWW. It also describes tools that automatically create automated walkthroughs for the World Wide Web (WWW) and their evaluation within a masters-level software engineering module. Conclusions are drawn about the general applicability of the framework and proposals are made for further work in this area.

Combining interactivity and improved layout while creating educational software for the Web

Integrating access to web services with desktop applications allows for an expanded set of application features, including performing computationally intensive tasks and convenient searches of databases. We describe how we have enhanced UCSF Chimera (http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimera/), a program for the interactive visualization and analysis of molecular structures and related data, through the addition of several web services (http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/webservices.html). By streamlining access to web services, including the entire job submission, monitoring and retrieval process, Chimera makes it simpler for users to focus on their science projects rather than data manipulation. Chimera uses Opal, a toolkit for wrapping scientific applications as web services, to provide scalable and transparent access to several popular software packages. We illustrate Chimera's use of web services with an example workflow that interleaves use of these services with interactive manipulation of molecular sequences and structures, and we provide an example Python program to demonstrate how easily Opal-based web services can be accessed from within an application. Web server availability: http://webservices.rbvi.ucsf.edu/opal2/dashboard?command=serviceList.

In the pharmaceutical industry, process validation tasks are based on the raw data and its derived analytical results generated from the process. Process validation failure affects both patient safety and the economic success of the manufacturing company. Hence, data integrity is highly critical in this area. Regulatory agencies, such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), reacted to past data integrity breaches by publishing new guidelines on data integrity for the correct handling of data in the pharmaceutical context.In this contribution, we want to show how data integrity can be improved on a technological level, removing the need for trusted third parties and centralized systems for this task. Therefore, we implemented an approach that uses existing tools, currently mostly used by software developers, and combined them with a new smart contract built on top of the Ethereum blockchain. In a case study, we test how data manipulation or backdating of results can be easily detected and how regulatory agencies can audit the complete data flow from the regulatory report back to the original raw data.The results of this contribution outline a possible road map for the development of production-ready tools, such as versioned database systems that natively interoperate with distributed ledgers. This will improve the trustworthiness of pharmaceutical manufacturing data by both protecting the intellectual property of the industrial company and improving the safety of the patients.LAY ABSTRACT: In the pharmaceutical industry, economically driven manufacturing companies are regulated and controlled by regulatory agencies. The pharmaceutical manufacturing companies need to produce large amounts of process and analytical data to show that their products are safe for patients. As the decisions of the regulatory agencies rely on this data, manufacturing companies need to prove how their generated data can be protected from technical breaches or data manipulation.As of today, the available technical solutions to provide data integrity are not working well enough. Regulatory agencies have published multiple documents highlighting the current data integrity issues.In this contribution, we show how blockchain, a technology that multiple cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin rely on, can help to improve the integrity of manufacturing data and data science analysis procedures. Therefore, we combined a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain with tools currently mostly used by software developers. The presented workflow shows how data integrity can be guaranteed on a technological level without the need for trusted third parties.