Search

This paper introduces a novel automatic instrument changer that allows for fast and precise tool changing in robot-assisted microsurgery. The importance of such a system is usually ignored and therefore most of the existing robotic surgical systems still require manual operation to change surgical instruments. To achieve automatic instrument changing, we apply a clamp mechanism which consists of an instrument adapter and an instrument holder. The instrument adapter creates a unified interface between the surgical instrument and the holder. The instrument holder clamps the instrument through the adapter. The instrument can be transferred to another holder when these two holders are connected. A prototype of the proposed automatic instrument changer was implemented and mounted on a surgical robot. The experimental results validate the capability of the prototypical design in automatic, precise, and fast instrument changing.

The JETSCAPE collaboration announced the first public release of its framework and Monte Carlo event generator at this conference, providing a unified interface and a comprehensive suite of model implementations for all stages of ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions. This release focuses on validation of the framework and the $pp$ reference. A full manual is under development. In the mean-time, these proceedings will provide a guide for installation and simulation runs in lieu of the more traditional summary of the presentation., Comment: Proceedings of Quark Matter 2018, submitted to Nuclear Physics A. 4 pages, 2 figures

Background Life science research is moving quickly towards large-scale experimental designs that are comprised of multiple tissues, time points, and samples. Omic time-series experiments offer answers to three big questions: what collective patterns do most analytes follow, which analytes follow an identical pattern or synchronize across multiple cohorts, and how do biological functions evolve over time. Existing tools fall short of robustly answering and visualizing all three questions in a unified interface. Results Functional Heatmap offers time-series data visualization through a Master Panel page, and Combined page to answer each of the three time-series questions. It dissects the complex multi-omics time-series readouts into patterned clusters with associated biological functions. It allows users to identify a cascade of functional changes over a time variable. Inversely, Functional Heatmap can compare a pattern with specific biology respond to multiple experimental conditions. All analyses are interactive, searchable, and exportable in a form of heatmap, line-chart, or text, and the results are easy to share, maintain, and reproduce on the web platform. Conclusions Functional Heatmap is an automated and interactive tool that enables pattern recognition in time-series multi-omics assays. It significantly reduces the manual labour of pattern discovery and comparison by transferring statistical models into visual clues. The new pattern recognition feature will help researchers identify hidden trends driven by functional changes using multi-tissues/conditions on a time-series fashion from omic assays. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s12859-019-2657-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

In this article, we compare three different input technologies (gamepad, vision-based motion controls, room-scale) for an interactive virtual reality (VR) environment. The overall system is able to visualize (open) data from multiple online sources in a unified interface, enabling the user to browse and explore displayed information in an immersive VR setting. We conducted a user interaction study (n=24; n=8 per input technology, between-group design) to investigate experienced workload and perceived flow of interaction. Log files and observations allowed further insights and comparison of each condition. We have identified trends that indicate user preference of a visual (virtual) representation, but no clear trends regarding the application of physical controllers (over vision-based controls), in a scenario that encouraged exploration with no time limitations. Open Data Exploration in Virtual Reality (ODxVR)

Summary The existence of doublets is a key confounder in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data analysis. Computational techniques have been developed for detecting doublets from scRNA-seq data. We developed an R package DoubletCollection to integrate the installation and execution of eight doublet detection methods. DoubletCollection provides a unified interface to perform and visualize downstream analysis after doublet detection. Here, we present a protocol of using DoubletCollection to benchmark doublet-detection methods. This protocol can accommodate new doublet-detection methods in the fast-growing scRNA-seq field. For details on the use and execution of this protocol, please refer to Xi and Li (2020)., Graphical abstract, Highlights • Integrate the installation and execution of eight doublet-detection methods • An interface to perform and visualize downstream analysis after doublet detection • A collection of real and synthetic scRNA-seq datasets with doublet annotations • A user-friendly R package to perform doublet detection on scRNA-seq count matrices, The existence of doublets is a key confounder in single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data analysis. Computational techniques have been developed for detecting doublets from scRNA-seq data. We developed an R package DoubletCollection to integrate the installation and execution of eight doublet detection methods. DoubletCollection provides a unified interface to perform and visualize downstream analysis after doublet detection. Here, we present a protocol of using DoubletCollection to benchmark doublet-detection methods. This protocol can accommodate new doublet-detection methods in the fast-growing scRNA-seq field.

Quantum Annealing is an algorithm for solving instances of quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) that is implemented in hardware utilizing quantum effects to quickly find approximate solutions. However, QUBO can obviously also be solved by any classical optimization technique, for which various implementations exist. The UQ platform provides a unified interface to various means of solving QUBO that allows for a seamless switch between classical and quantum methods while implementing features such as load and user management.

Simulating a realistic navigation of virtual pedestrians through virtual environments is a recurring subject of investigations. The various mathematical approaches used to compute the pedestrians’ paths result, i.a., in different computation-times and varying path characteristics. Customizable parameters, e.g., maximal walking speed or minimal interpersonal distance, add another level of complexity. Thus, choosing the best-fitting approach for a given environment and use-case is non-trivial, especially for novice users.To facilitate the informed choice of a specific algorithm with a certain parameter set, crowd simulation frameworks such as Menge [3] provide an extendable collection of approaches with a unified interface for usage. However, they often miss an elaborated visualization with high informative value accompanied by visual analysis methods to explore the complete simulation data in more detail – which is yet required for an informed choice. Benchmarking suites such as SteerBench [14] are a helpful approach as they objectively analyze crowd simulations, however they are too tailored to specific behavior details. To this end, we propose a preliminary design of an advanced graphical user interface providing a 2D and 3D visualization of the crowd simulation data as well as features for time navigation and an overall data exploration.

From LDA to neural models, different topic modeling approaches have been proposed in the literature. However, their suitability and performance is not easy to compare, particularly when the algorithms are being used in the wild on heterogeneous datasets. In this paper, we introduce ToModAPI (TOpic MOdeling API), a wrapper library to easily train, evaluate and infer using different topic modeling algorithms through a unified interface. The library is extensible and can be used in Python environments or through a Web API.

Nowadays, huge amount of data are available which are used to get information. For extracting this information, according to user’s requirements, there are many platforms available for searching incomprehensible or inconceivable data, for example, Quora, Google. But none of them provides optimized, accurate, precise, relevant answers. Even the problem of platform switching is observed. By developing our application and integrating it with Slack, this problem can be overcome and is beneficial for the Slack users. Slack software is cloud-based collaboration software and is designed to enable users to communicate easily and eliminate the app fatigue associated with using multiple communication applications. Slack software is a collaboration hub for work, no matter what work you do. It’s a place where conversations happen, decisions are made, and information is always at your fingertips. It is a collaboration chat tool used both in and out of organizations to help teams communicate and coordinate in a more effective manner. Vizerto is a software application designed to get high-quality answers to our questions. In this, integration of these two platforms is done using APIs. The Slack conversation API provides your app with a unified interface to work with all the channel-like things encountered in Slack, public channels, private channels, direct messages, group direct messages, and our newest channel type, shared channels. Similarly, Vizerto API provides your app with a unified interface to get the search results in no time. Our chatbot will be having all these functions that can be used and made knowledge available at your fingertips.

The paper describes mdatools – R package, which implements mainly basic but also some advanced chemometric methods providing a unified interface and user experience. The package was created to give a low entry level for beginners, so they can start using the implemented methods without writing much of code. While progressing, though, users can also have direct access to all computed results thus extending the package functionality by writing own code on top.

Software Presentation accepted at ISSAC '20 (Kalamata, Greece, July 20-22, 2020); International audience; We present in this extended abstract a new software designed to work with generating functions that count walks in the quarter plane. With this software we offer a cohesive package that brings together all the required procedures for manipulating these generating functions, as well as a unified interface to deal with them. We also display results that this package offers on a public webpage.

Здійснено огляд інтерфейсів та протоколів периферійних пристроїв для вендингових автоматів, виконано їх порівняння. На основі особливостей, які наведені в порівняльній характеристиці, запропоновано реалізацію уніфікованого програмного інтерфейсу для набору цих протоколів. Описані етапи взаємодії між платою управління та виконавчими пристроями. Наведено структурну схему реалізації інтерфейсу.

Three pillars for an effective integrated diagnostics practice are described in this article: steering of diagnostic pathways, concerted diagnostic decisions, and a unified interface to referring clinicians.

Virtual Monte Carlo (VMC) provides a unified interface to different detector simulation transport engines such as GEANT3 and Geant4. Since recently, all VMC packages: the VMC core library, also included in ROOT, Geant3 and Geant4 VMC are distributed via the VMC Project GitHub organization. In addition to these VMC related packages, the VMC project also includes the Virtual Geometry Model (VGM), which is optionally used in Geant4 VMC for conversion between Geant4 and ROOT TGeo geometry models. In this contribution, we will present the new organization of the VMC project at GitHub and new developments in the VMC interface and the VMC packages. We will cover the introduction of the sensitive detector interface in the VMC core and both Geant3 and Geant4 VMC and the new Geant4-related developments. Geant4 VMC 3.0 with the integration of multithreading processing was presented at CHEP in 2015. In this presentation we will report on new features included in version 4.0 and beyond: the improved support for magnetic fields, the integration of fast simulation, Garfield++ physics, Geant4 transition radiation and monopole physics. Five new VMC examples demonstrating these new features, also used for tests, will be also discussed. Finally we will mention the work towards the code quality and improvements in testing, documentation and automated code formatting. The introduction of the multiple engine framework in the VMC packages and new developments in VGM will be covered in two separate contributions to this conference.

The Scikit-HEP project is a community-driven and community-oriented effort with the aim of providing Particle Physics at large with a Python scientific toolset containing core and common tools. The project builds on five pillars that embrace the major topics involved in a physicist's analysis work: datasets, data aggregations, modelling, simulation and visualisation. The vision is to build a user and developer community engaging collaboration across experiments, to emulate scikit-learn's unified interface with Astropy's embrace of third-party packages, and to improve discoverability of relevant tools., 6 pages, 2 figures, Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP 2018), 9-13 July 2018

This document presents a base YANG Data model for connection oriented OAM protocols. It provides a technology-independent abstraction of key OAM constructs for such protocols. The model presented here can be extended to include technology specific details. This guarantees uniformity in the management of OAM protocols and provides support for nested OAM workflows (i.e., performing OAM functions at different levels through a unified interface)

This document presents a retrieval method YANG Data model for connectionless OAM protocols. It provides technology-independent RPC operations for OAM protocols that use connectionless communication. The retrieval methods model herein presented can be extended to include technology specific details. There are two key benefits of this approach: First, it leads to uniformity between OAM protocols. And second, it support both nested OAM workflows (i.e., performing OAM functions at different or same levels through a unified interface) as well as interactive OAM workflows (i.e., performing OAM functions at same levels through a unified interface).

In the future, integrated functions and energy internet will become the direction of smart energy development. This puts forward requirements for power flow calculation and simulation of combined heat and power supply and unified modeling. Due to the complexity of the tespy heat network equipment model, the lack of node modeling corresponding to the power flow calculation model brings difficulties to the simulation modeling of the unified power and power flow calculation. Therefore, it is necessary to unify the interface of thermal network and power flow calculation model. Based on the tespy and pandapower libraries, this paper unifies the interface functions of heat network and power grid power flow calculation modeling, constructs a unified interface library Open-IES-Sim platform and builds a coupled power flow calculation process method and corresponding visualization results display program. The corresponding open source example is given. It is convenient for the future use of scientific research workers who need thermal and electrical coupling modeling and the demonstration research in education and teaching.

The Virtual Monte Carlo (VMC) package together with its concrete implementations provides a unified interface to different detector simulation transport engines such as GEANT3 or GEANT4. However, so far the simulation of one event was restricted to the usage of one chosen engine. We introduce here the possibility to mix multiple engines within the simulation of one event. Depending on user conditions the simulation is then effectively split among the chosen engines. Among others, these conditions can depend on phase space, geometry, particle type or an arbitrary combination. This development hence offers the possibility to choose multiple engines for an event simulation profiting from each of their advantages or specific capabilities under different conditions. Furthermore, it allows for the implementation of fast simulation kernels on VMC level which can then easily be dispatched to during simulation. This also makes stand-alone fast simulation possible since such a fast simulation kernel in essence acts as a fully functional engine. This development opens many new opportunities for the usage of the VMC package and its functionality. It allows for extended studies of detector simulation engines, their interplay and, especially concerning customized user implementations of fast simulations, it provides vital new flexibility.

Due to the large and frequent static data interaction between the Electric Information Acquisition System and the external business systems, researching on using limited server sources to do an efficient task scheduling is becoming one of the key technologies of the unified interface platform. The information interaction structure of the unified interface platform is introduced. Task scheduling has been decomposed into two stages, task decomposition and task combination, based on the features (various types and dispersed) of large static data. The principle of the minimum variance of the subtasks data quantity is used to do the target task resolving in the decomposition stage. The thought of the Greedy Algorithm is used in the taskcombination. Breaking the target task with large static data into serval composed tasks with roughly same data quantity is effectively realized. Meanwhile, to avoid the situation of the GA falling into the local optimal solution, an improved combination method has been put forward. Moreover, the new method creates more average composed tasks and making the task scheduling more effective. Ultimately, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by the experimental data.

This paper explores the concept of files as directories (FAD) as a unified interface to structured data within a file by representing such a file as (virtual) directory and the structured data as subdirectories and subfiles. Transparent conversion of files and their structured data into directory trees is to be handled by virtual filesystem providers. This allows for arbitrary applications and programming languages to read and write data within supported file types without the need to understand the file format - e.g., in order to modify pixel values within an image file, paragraphs in a text document, or settings in a configuration file. Advantages of this approach compared to API-mediated file access might include better learnability, modularity, explorability, synchronous access, better integration of proprietary applications, and a few other nice features. While technical issues of the FAD concept have been discussed by developers in the past, no major operating system allows FAD at the moment. In this paper I present concept, advantages, limitations, and use cases of FAD.

Ceph, an open-source distributed storage platform, provides a unified interface for object-, block-, and file-level storage [33, 80, 34, 81]. This chapter presents the block-level workload characteristics of a WD WASP/EPIC microserver-based Ceph cluster. The analysis techniques presented can help you to understand the performance and drive characteristics of Ceph in production environments. In addition, I also identify whether SMR, hybrid disk, and SSD drives are suitable for the Ceph workload.

Complex software applications expose hundreds of commands to users through intricate menu hierarchies. One of the most popular productivity software suites, Microsoft Office, has recently developed functionality that allows users to issue free-form text queries to a search system to quickly find commands they want to execute, retrieve help documentation or access web results in a unified interface. In this paper, we analyze millions of search sessions originating from within Microsoft Office applications, collected over one month of activity, in an effort to characterize search behavior in productivity software. Our research brings together previous efforts in analyzing command usage in large-scale applications and efforts in understanding search behavior in environments other than the web. Our findings show that users engage primarily in command search, and that re-accessing commands through search is a frequent behavior. Our work represents the first large-scale analysis of search over command spaces and is an important first step in understanding how search systems integrated with productivity software can be successfully developed.

Um der geforderten Flexibilität in der Fertigungstechnik gerecht zu werden, kommen in Werkzeugmaschinen vermehrt intelligente Werkzeuge zur Anwendung. Hierfür sind mittlerweile diverse hersteller- und anwendungsspezifische Schnittstellen entstanden. Um den Einsatz dieser „smarten Tools“ zu vereinfachen, wird eine einheitliche Schnittstelle entwickelt. In order to fulfill the requested flexibility in manufacturing, an increasing number of intelligent tools is used in machine tools. To do so, diverse manufacturer and application dependent interfaces have been developed. To ease using these intelligent tools a unified interface is being developed.

The developments and improvements in human computer interaction (HCI) and information and communication technologies (ICTs) have marked the emergence of a number of new assistive technologies for the People with Disabilities (PWDs). Although, there have been many new ideas and technologies for assisting the PWDs, to improve their quality of life, still their applications are hampered depending on the impairment type, and environment. In fact, few of these existing assistive technologies have considered the workplace environment, especially in smart cities. In this research work, a comprehensive smart unified solution has been proposed for the PWDs at the workplace, which plays a major role in the smart cities. The developed solution which is multi-modal in nature addresses multiple input and output methods to alleviate different kinds of impaired persons using a single solution. This system will help the PWDs to actively communicate with others through the flexible interface and obtain help information from the smart cities’ environment such as the health context aware services. The interface is called as flexible because it can be adapted to meet the different requirements. This solution can support a wide domain of the PWDs existing with different combinations of the disabilities. Hence, with this system, the users can exhibit the ability to manage their system interface using multi-model ways of interactions through the use of speech recognition engine, text-to-speech, mic, and mouse/keyboard, etc.

The existing emergency rescue plan and case management systems face the following problems: The relevant systems are maintained by different rescue brigades, but staff in those bridges have limited professional skills to conduct maintenance; the systems are independent to each other, and the data interface is not exactly consistent with the National Safety Supervision Bureau, so that the bureau and provincial rescue centers cannot master the national rescue information timely and accurately. In addition, the rescue brigades cannot share the rescue preplan and cases to reduce the maintenance cost. In this paper, leveraged by the concept of Software as a Service (SaaS), we propose a mine emergency rescue preplan and case management system to realize national-, provincial-, and brigade-level rescue planning and case management, unified interface, entirely shared resources, and reduced maintenance costs. The system test results verify that this proposed platform can easily support all the concurrent national emergency rescue management units/users. The proposed system leveraged by SaaS is 3 times faster than the traditional Java EE-based system: 90% of transactions in the newly proposed system are finished in 650 ms and 50% of those transactions are finished in 32 ms.

The Frequency Allocations in Remote Sensing (FARS) Technical Committee (TC) was formed in 2000 as a means for the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS) community to discuss spectrum management issues that affect the remote sensing field and to provide a unified interface to the regulatory world. Presently, FARS members include 84 engineers and scientists representing government, academic and industrial entities across 10 countries.

This paper introduces the design and implementation of an interactive tool, the EASTViewer, for the visualization of plasma equilibrium reconstruction results for EAST (the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak). Aimed at the operating system independently, Python, when combined with the PyGTK toolkit, is used as the programming language. Using modular design, the EASTViewer provides a unified interface with great flexibility. It is easy to access numerous data sources either from local data files or an MDSplus tree, and with the pre-defined configuration files, it can be extended to other tokamaks. The EASTViewer has been used as the major tool to visualize equilibrium data since the second EAST campaign in 2008, and it has been verified that the EASTViewer features a user-friendly interface, and has easy access to numerous data sources and cross-platforms.

The existing emergency rescue systems face the following problems: rescue systems belong to different rescue brigades and are independent of each other, there is no guarantee that the data interface is consistent with the National Safety Supervision Bureau, the bureau and provincial rescue centers can't get the important rescue information timely and accurately; In addition, the rescue brigades cannot share the large-scale equipment, human resources, training materials, and rescue prearranged planning cases to reduce the cost. We put forward the mine emergency rescue platform based on SOA, which supports national, provincial level and brigade level rescue management, with unified interface, entirely sharing of resources such as large equipment, online examination, simulation training, rescue prearranged planning case and so on to reduce the maintenance costs. The test results of platform show that the platform can easily support all the national emergency rescue management units/users to concurrent access, the throughput is 97.6 transactions/sec, the number of concurrent users is 2100, and 99% of transactions are finished in 81ms.

Integration of CAD and CAPP system is always a difficult problem in the research, the reason is that the information expression is not consistent. As the output of the CAD system, STEP standard can provide a unified interface to the CAPP system information extraction. In this paper, based on STEP neutral file part feature information extraction and recognition technology, the output from the CAD geometry STEP neutral file includes geometric characteristics information and manufacturing information, the STEP information was transformed into a format recognized by CAPP system. Based on the above research, the process design system was developed based on the information extraction and storage of parts of STEP system, and the system feasibility was proved.

Connections between web services vastly changed the landscape of web applications by allowing users to seamlessly forward data from one application to the next. Mobile platforms like Android improved on this concept and defined a more unified interface to transfer information from one application to another, without relying on a fixed source or target application, but rather defining the way of transfer. The ARVIDA project targets a similar purpose in a very different field: Connecting industrial applications, systems and data by defining a self-describing interface rather than writing glue code to connect specific applications. This paper focuses on the adaption of x3dom to ARVIDA interfaces and its use as a testing platform for other ARVIDA components.

This paper outlines the results of applying a generic approach to execute automated tasks of multiple CAD applications from web. The motivation for the study was the need to develop an easy-to-use and unified interface for engineering automation programs involving multiple CAD applications. A holistic and generic solution is achieved, so that all such tasks are brought under the ambit of web. The web-enabled workflow of CAD-based engineering activities and automatic generation of manufacturing drawings has been established using the approach.

In this demo we demonstrate the functionalities of a novel experimentation framework, called WiSHFUL, that facilitates the prototyping and experimental validation of innovative solutions for heterogeneous wireless networks, including cross-technology coordination mechanisms. The framework supports a clean separation between the definition of the logic for optimizing the behaviors of wireless devices and the underlying device capabilities, by means of a unifying platform-independent control interface and programming model. The use of the framework is demonstrated through two representative use cases, where medium access is coordinated between IEEE-802.11 and IEEE-802.15.4 networks.

On the basis of shortage existing in traditional WebGIS, this paper puts forward a novel WebGIS framework based on REST (Representational State Transfer) and RIA (Rich Internet Application). The framework combines REST with Web Services. As all business data and server-side functionality components have been published into web services with a unified interface through the REST way, the problems of poor user experience, system isomeric compatibility, system integration and mutual operation etc. are solved. The conclusion means a great deal to construct and run the WebGIS with high quality and efficiency.

Assistive technologies that implement the right solution for People with Disabilities (PWD) through innovative technological friendly interface can empower them to work normal at the workplace. Tracking PWDs movements and linking it to behavior algorithm is useful to inform their caregiver as well as alerting them for missing activities. Different tracking system can be used to determine PWDs' location but this requires a proper algorithm to determine their behavior in order to assist them at the workplace. This paper presents a unified interface for PWD with multiple impairment conditions by supporting essential features for getting help information from the environment, helping them to communicate with others smartly, and providing flexible interface that is adaptable to meet their requirements. It also supports event and personal monitoring as well as location tracking to intervene if necessary and guide PWD to behave normally. This smart interface solution is being developed within the of SMARTDISABLE's research project activities implemented to support PWDs at the workplace. This solution supports wide-spectra of PWD groups (11 groups with various combinations of disabilities) with ability to manage the system interface using multi-model ways of interactions and commanding through use of speech recognition engine, text-to-speech, Mic, and mouse/keyboard.

In this study, we present our experimental design of an interactive interface that allows users to answer linguistically sophisticated queries utilizing functional-semantic information. Building on previous visualizations of linguistic patterning and discourse structure, the proposed visualization interface presents a unified interface for interrogating the functional-semantic structure of arbitrary texts at different levels of details. To evaluate the effectiveness of the interface, we performed a comparative analysis between visualizations of manual gold-standard annotation and those automatically generated by connecting the interface to existing automatic systems, which revealed remarkable visual correspondence between the two when dealing with small to medium texts. A small-scale case study was then conducted which demonstrated the potential of the resulting tool for effective discovery of interesting patterning in large political texts.

Background Real-time quantitative PCR (qPCR) is a broadly used technique in the biomedical research. Currently, few different analysis models are used to determine the quality of data and to quantify the mRNA level across the experimental conditions. Methods We developed an R package to implement methods for quality assessment, analysis and testing qPCR data for statistical significance. Double Delta CT and standard curve models were implemented to quantify the relative expression of target genes from CT in standard qPCR control-group experiments. In addition, calculation of amplification efficiency and curves from serial dilution qPCR experiments are used to assess the quality of the data. Finally, two-group testing and linear models were used to test for significance of the difference in expression control groups and conditions of interest. Results Using two datasets from qPCR experiments, we applied different quality assessment, analysis and statistical testing in the pcr package and compared the results to the original published articles. The final relative expression values from the different models, as well as the intermediary outputs, were checked against the expected results in the original papers and were found to be accurate and reliable. Conclusion The pcr package provides an intuitive and unified interface for its main functions to allow biologist to perform all necessary steps of qPCR analysis and produce graphs in a uniform way.

Virtual observatories have been introduced by the astrophysics community as an environment connecting distributed data sources with a unified interface. The heliophysics community soon recognized that they faced a similar problem of many distributed data sets with varying amount of information about them and several discipline specific virtual observatories have been established. Two of them, the virtual heliospheric observatory (VHO) and the virtual magnetospheric observatory (VMO), share a common architecture design with development efforts oriented towards a structured data search. This paper describes the VHO/VMO middleware and its components from metadata preparation and processing to the user interface.

Advancements in human computer interaction (HCI), and information and communication technology (ICT) resulted in developing of various assistive technologies especially for People with Disabilities (PWD). There are many assistive technologies and applications available these days. However, most of the available solutions focus on a particular type of impairment, and very few of these solutions focused on work place environment. Therefore, in this research a comprehensive smart unified solution for people with disabilities at work place is developed. The developed solution provides multiple input and output methods, so that various kinds of impaired persons can be assisted with a single solution. The system offers essential features for getting help information from the environment. It helps impaired people to communicate with others smartly, with the help of flexible interface that is adaptable to meet their requirements. This solution supports wide-spectra of PWD groups with various combinations of disabilities. Users will have the ability to manage their system interface using multi-model ways of interactions and commanding through use of speech recognition engine, text-to-speech, Mic, and mouse/keyboard.