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Significant changes are currently taking place in scientific research. In particular, there is a greater collaboration among large groups of researchers, which leads to an increase use of information processing techniques, and a need to share results and observations among the participants in the process. Using technologies such as peer-to-peer networks and semantic web, we create an access point to distributed scientific applications, where scientists can work with heterogeneous information and create scientific communities according to their specialties and interests. This paper presents the e-ScienceNet, which is an architecture that supports the creation of scientific communities in the context of semantic e-Science, facilitating the creation and sharing of scientific data and services. This paper also presents the e- ScienceNet prototype. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web-based browsers, languages, technologies and applications have evolved dramatically over the last two decades, making Internet the primary information delivery platform of today. Markup languages such as DHTML/XML, vector languages such as VML/SVG, scripting languages such as Javascript/VBScript, embedded technologies such as Java/Flash, and server-side dynamism with Ruby/Java/C#/C++ have expanded the functionality of Internet Browsers beyond just presentation into a data-driven medium. With the extensive capabilities of the browser, it has become possible for platforms of infinite extensibility and omni-functional power to be made and operated over the internet platform. Document formats that have conventionally packaged all information into a file or collection of files can now be visualized in a globally distributed format. This paper considers the weaknesses of conventional software architectures with respect to document structure and power, and expands on the possibilities of distributing document formats using browser based technologies, supported by an intelligent immersive platform delivered over conventional browsers. By being compatible with standards, such omni-functionalities can be intermingled with semantic web structures to create powerful models for the next generation of Internet (often called Web 3.0). The paper builds on the features and powerful potential solutions that are extended by such combinations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet today can be seen as a global market for electronic services. Each provider can offer its services, and customers can choose between several providers offering similar services. A competition between providers arises, in which services have to be offered for a reasonable price, but also have to be deployed in an efficient way, i.e. a service quality determined by performance and availability characteristics must be guaranteed to satisfy the customers. Satisfying the service quality is a critical factor in success of a provider, but not well supported by current infrastructure: the quality of an offered service is determined by application, system, and network characteristics all at once. This paper discusses a management platform supporting the lifecycle of an electronic service from three different views: customer, provider, and infrastructure. A service trader is used as a central component, supporting a customer in choosing a suitable service while considering the global state of the distributed system's resources using load balancing. Management proxies encapsulate services or service groups and observe performance and availability characteristics of the resources involved in a service usage process to fulfill quality demands of a mediated service. The paper mainly focuses on the proxy concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SESAME proposes the Cloud-Enabled Small Cell (CESC) concept, a new multi-operator enabled Small Cell that integrates a virtualized execution platform for deploying Virtual Network Functions (NVFs), supporting powerful self-x management and executing novel applications and services inside the access network infrastructure. A dedicated architecture has been proposed for that purpose. In this paper, we take into account recent research challenges in order to discuss the latest innovations, as well as the updates of the corresponding architecture. Such updates include the SC-Common VNF as fun-in/fun-out module, the progress in SESAME Small Cell functional splits, and the placement of "Self-x" features and wireless backhauling. Furthermore, to promote future improvements, we analyze the functional description of the related architectural components. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing layers of abstraction between user code and the hardware on which it runs can lead to reduced performance unless careful attention is paid to how data is transferred between the layers of the software stack. For distributed HPC applications, those layers include the network interface where data must be passed from the user's code and explicitly copied from one node to another. Message passing incurs relatively high latencies (compared to local copies) from the transmission of data across the network, as well as from the injection and retrieval of messages into and out of the network drivers that may be exacerbated by unwanted copies of data being made at different levels of the stack. As memory bandwidth is becoming one of the limiting factors in scalability of codes within a node, and latencies of messaging between nodes, it is important to reduce both memory transfers and latencies wherever possible. In this paper we show how the distributed asynchronous task-based runtime, HPX, has been developed to allow zero-copy transfers of data between arguments in user defined remote function invocations and demonstrate the performance of our network layer in a state-of-the-art astrophysics code. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we describe the Reverse Mediated Information System, a new communication architecture that is particularly designed for the needs of archaeo-related disciplines, to bring geo-spatial and temporal data together again. Archaeological data of excavations is spread in data sources of offices, collections, and institutes. This data is important for archaeological questions, but cannot be accessed directly by all participants. In addition, the location of avai lable data sources is often unclear. Our architecture lets individual databases connect to a central application that acts as a communication interface between the users and the data sources, without the need of a central administrator to manage the connections manually. It enables the users to retrieve data from anonymous data sources, independent of their file scheme and the underlying system. Therefore, we enable querying databases that were previously inaccessible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collaboration of the network and optical character recognition (OCR) has a great potential to extend the applications of OCR and to open up new vistas in some future services using OCR. We presented the basic ideas of synergetic OCR system in 2004, and developed a platform called WeOCR to realize the web-based OCR services. The number of accesses has soared since the experimental servers were put into service in 2005. This paper provides an overview of the current WeOCR system, shows some updated statistics, and describes the knowledge obtained through a feasibility study on the web-based OCR system using WeOCR. The unique survey conveys some useful hints for future development of network-oriented OCRs, not limited to WeOCR, and potential OCR applications in the Grid/Cloud Computing era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today there is a growing diversity in devices that support software applications in sectors such as mobile, automotive and home entertainment systems. Developing and testing an application for each existing and future device is inefficient and not scalable. We state that the web with its standardized technologies and powerful components will be the converged platform for ubiquitous application delivery. In this paper we propose a novel approach to ubiquitous application delivery using usability rules that combine the delivery context and web application semantics. We give an overview of the parameters that need to be taken into account when delivering applications ubiquitously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet and Cloud computing will provide several kinds of services including parallel computing. Parallel computing can be achieved through a computer cluster (Internet itself) and special multiple computer/ processor systems. Users of Internet may be more familiar to obtain such parallel computing services in consequences. This paper focuses on parallel computing, evaluation of its performance and two kinds pf parallel programming examples based on master-worker paradigm. Such programming can be realized and executed on CPUs with multiple processor cores. We have compared two types of parallel programming. One is programming for a), which is executed on a personal computer of the specific CPU with 4 processor cores. Another is for Cell B.E. with SPE library on Sony-produced PLAYSTATION3. Through real experiment and simple evaluation, the following evidences have been confirmed. Both of two cases are good practices for parallel calculation and expected performance. And the former is suitable for symbolic and/or algebraic computation, while the latter is efficient for numerical calculation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trading in an e-marketplace has become an essential aspect of the daily lives of many people. Coalitions, which allow traders to form teams, can sometimes accomplish things more efficiently than individuals. As group trading has become increasingly popular in the e-market, concepts and algorithms for coalition formation have drawn much attention from researchers in Multi-Agent Systems. However, most of the coalition schemes fail to check the stability of coalitions, or reduce the computational complexity of forming stable coalitions. The core has become a popular solution concept in economic applications for researchers in Computer Science, because it provides a way to find stable sets. However certain problems of the core hinder researchers from applying it to a real world market. For instance, the core is difficult to use in a large coalition because of its high computational complexity. Developing effective business models for emarket can be a real challenge, because incentive compatibility, distributed computing, and less computational complexity have to be considered at the same time. Numerous specialists are still endeavouring to do it. This paper proposes a new extended core model, which involves bundle selling of composite services, offering amount discount in group buying in the e-marketplace. Several service providers are involved in the transactions of bundle selling, while, on the other hand, many buyers form coalitions for the amount discount in the model. Unlike the traditional core, cores are combined together into a big core in the extended core model. An illustration of how the works is presented in the scenario of a travel agent. The outcome of the scenario is evaluated with Pareto efficiency, and that shows the high potential of the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New generation mobile technologies are able to provide connection qualities comparable to fixed networks. With theoretical throughputs of up to 11.5 Mbps for the uplink, latest UMTS Releases (HSUPA) offer new business opportunities for both the network operators and their clients. In this paper, a broadcast quality real time video streaming system over HSUPA is studied and tested, providing statistics for packet loss rates and quality measurement. The study focuses on streaming video from a laptop computer connected to a USB 3G+ modem to a television production centre, where the stream can be retrieved for broadcasting purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Distributed systems are paradigms to provide vastly more effective solutions to important scientific, engineering, business and government problems. Today, there are many computing paradigms to support development of distributed systems. Currently, Service oriented computing (SOC) is the prominent academic and industrial paradigm among them. The SOC paradigm uses services to support the development of rapid, low-cost, interoperable, evolvable, and massively distributed applications. This paper introduces a small and flexible framework, called Cyrus, to develop distributed systems based on services span on a distributed environment. We don not claim that the Cyrus can be an alternative to current SOA framework such as BEA logic and BizTalk. However, it is a small framework enables developers to build distributed applications easily without knowing more about technologies relevant to service oriented development. The Cyrus is a platform that governs communications between applications, dispatches messages, and manages long time running of applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the field of CSCW and groupware systems context-adaptivity plays an important role for computer supported knowledge-intense cooperative processes. In this contribution four different perspectives are combined into one integrated conceptual approach for context adaptive interaction: cooperative service-oriented tailoring for contextual adaptation, a probabilistic concept to provide an adaptive semantic desktop, the integration of real life knowledge- and collaboration-artefacts and traceable requirements engineering for communities-of-practice in this application domain. These four approaches are combined in one common context-model which is the basis for further research. This paper presents a structured and integrated overview of this undertaking followed by some experiences and lessons learned from the cooperative modelling activities in this heterogeneous field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Distributed systems are paradigms to provide vastly more effective solutions to important scientific, engineering, business and government problems. Today, there are many computing paradigms to support development of distributed systems. Currently, Service oriented computing (SOC) is the prominent academic and industrial paradigm among them. The SOC paradigm uses services to support the development of rapid, low-cost, interoperable, evolvable, and massively distributed applications. This paper introduces a small and flexible framework, called Cyrus, to develop distributed systems based on services span on a distributed environment. We don not claim that the Cyrus can be an alternative to current SOA framework such as BEA logic and BizTalk. However, it is a small framework enables developers to build distributed applications easily without knowing more about technologies relevant to service oriented development. The Cyrus is a platform that governs communications between applications, dispatches messages, and manages long time running of applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Web 2.0 trend has transformed use of the web as a successful participation platform thanks to a rich user interface developed in different languages and technologies able to hide the complexity of the integrating heterogeneous systems and data. Among the underlying concepts of such an environment, there are a web-oriented architecture as a subsystem of a service-oriented architecture and content composition according to the web services. The adopted technologies are separated between those that make the web interface intuitive and rich and those that help to connect multiple data and information sources. The paper describes a work-in progress in implementing design patterns and architectural styles in web development by referring to an example scenario of information distribution among a research institute. By taking advantage of syndication feed technologies, two approaches using or not using server-side script processing are discussed for a news visualization goal, and a new genre of applications such as mashups is introduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In wide-enterprise information system, an object can change its behaviours and play different roles/views in their lifecycle. In distributed system, the same object offers different views/roles (functional) to different users/clients, which enjoy different privileges to core data and functionalities. Distributed platforms address one problem or the other. Our approach, called distributed view programming, tries to address both problems. At any given point of time, an object offers a different set of behaviours depending of the active views in that time. Therefore, a client/application user may select a subset of existing functionalities of that object. The core object forwards a function call to a view that has to return it to core object. In distributed platforms, there are no needs to support delegation in EJB Corba or .Net between an object and its aspects or views because this separation doesn't exist. In this paper, we discuss a distribution issues with view programming (VOP) and then delegation idea in distributed views-based systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A peer-to-peer (P2P) system consists of a number of decentralized distributed network nodes that are capable of sharing resources without centralized supervision. Many applications such as IP-phone, contents delivery network (CDN), distributed computing adopt P2P technology into their base communication systems. One of the most important functions in P2P system is locating resources, and it is generally hard to achieve due to the intrinsic nature of P2P, i.e. dynamic re-configuration of the network. In this paper, we propose an efficient resource locating method in pure P2P system based on multi-agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collaborative mobile applications have become an increasingly important business software segment over the last years. The wide range of possible application areas led to broad acceptance of mobile devices and resulted in the development of a great variety of programming frameworks. However, these frameworks do only cover very special functionality, lacking a common base for system integration for mobile clients. Right now, mobile applications typically use Web technologies for communication which does not support key concepts like transactional system behaviour, event notification, or a means to avoid duplicate message delivery. In this paper, we will propose the use of XVSM (eXtensible Virtual Shared Memory) for mobile applications, a reference architecture for space-based computing that provides such functionality. We show how XVSM can be used together with mobile devices and how it will considerably improve data quality of mobile applications of financial service companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we introduce personalization in a distributed surveillance system. We present the problem of retrieving personalized contents to satisfy different user demands in a context where mobile users support is required. The proposed solution is based on user models, content filtering, temporal relevancy and on a publish-subscribe architecture. The concept was tested by means of a distributed prototype implemented in Java. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing popularity of XML and P2P networks has generated much interest in distributed processing of XML data. In this paper we propose a novel solution for schema and content indexing in a P2P architecture. Our solution is based on a hierarchy of super-peers managing progressively compressed summaries of XML schemas. The main features of the extended tries used for schema and XML data indexing are scalability, as the index adapts to the different memory capacities of peers, and efficiency as it is very simple to provide routing decisions based on path-set matching. We summarize the results of experiments that prove the validity of the proposed distributed trie-indexes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The MODA-ML project aims to enhance the interoperability between enterprises in the Textile/Clothing sector defining a common interchange language based on a set of XML business components and on a framework to exchange business documents related to production processes. The message switching system is built on a peer-to-peer architecture and is based for the transport specification on the ebXML standards. In order to enforce this architecture a set of tools has been developed to face the security and the maintenance of the system, and to encourage the diffusion of MODA-ML framework. Some considerations on the first phase of the experimentation conducted by a group of leading Italian T/C enterprises are presented at the end of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern distributed systems often allow independent development of their components. Successful evolution of such systems depends on the flexibility of component interfaces. This paper puts forward a framework for defining and implementing interfaces that can independently evolve while preserving backward and forward compatibility. This framework is based on the SOAP data model and remote procedure call representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern distributed systems often allow independent development of their components. Successful evolution of such systems depends on the flexibility of component interfaces. This paper puts forward a framework for defining and implementing interfaces that can independently evolve while preserving backward and forward compatibility. This framework is based on the SOAP data model and remote procedure call representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Realization of effective match-making between teleworkers and companies offering Tele-Work positions is considered crucial for the successful development of Tele -Work. This should be realized by ICT (software) applications which operate across distributed computing environments. A frequent cause of software project failure in this regard is the mismatch between the (business) requirements and the actual functionality of the delivered application. We contribute to the solution of this problem by suggesting in this paper an approach for the design of software, basing consistently this design on prior business process modeling. The alignment between these two tasks is realized in a component-based way (by reflecting identified business components in the design of software). This is a definite advantage because of the possibility to identify generic business components and reuse them in the development of different applications. The suggested approach is expected to be useful for Tele -Work (and in particular, for the development of effective Tele-Work brokerage systems) as well as for the design of software in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The popularity gained by XML in the last years has made this mark-up language a de facto standard for data interchange in the web. These data are supported in schemas or DTDs. Although there are many advantages using XML as format for data interchange, DTDs in which it relays do not foresee enough mechanisms to assure a secure interchange of the data. It is required to incorporate certain security mechanisms [Geuer-Pollmann, Ch., 2002] and, from this point of view, the W3C -organization in charge of web resources standardization-, is working in a standard recommendation, XML-Signature Syntax and Processing (XSSP), together with the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), such that enables the introduction of authentication and digital signature information. Once approved as recommendation, the next step will be to include it completely -or just certain parts - in future or new versions of the existing DTDs, but today there are many DTDs that do not consider these security components within their definit ion. This is the case of the NewsML DTD, standard for press news electronic interchange. What is proposed in this paper is to carry on a joint study of the XML-Signature Syntax and Processing and NewsML, and point to a possible application of the first into the second, analyzing in what elements and how authentication and digital signature information could be included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agents are an emerging technology that is gaining momentum in the field of distributed systems. It provides powerful and effective mechanisms to develop applications in distributed systems. However, without proper security protection, especially against malicious host attack, the widespread use of the agent technology can be severely impeded. In this paper, we propose a new model that is able to protect the integrity of the mobile agents from attack by a malicious host. The proposed model consists of a recorded state that is able to record all attacks that result in a different state, a distributed migration path that uses a master-slave agent, and known and established security mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]