Front-end Services Research Articles

Symbiotic Evolution of Digital Twin Systems and Dataspaces

This paper proposes to combine the concept of digital twins with the concept of dataspaces to fulfill the original expectation that a digital twin is a comprehensive virtual representation of physical assets. Based upon a terminological and conceptual discussion of digital twins and dataspaces, this paper claims that a systemic approach towards digital twin Systems is required. The key conceptual approach consists of a Reference Model for Digital Twin Systems (DTS-RM) and a hypothesis regarding a symbiotic evolution. The DTS-RM distinguishes between a digital twin back-end platform comprising the access and management of comprehensive digital twin instances and digital twin-related services, and digital twin front-end services that are tailored to the demands of applications and users. The main purpose of the back-end platform is to decouple the digital twin’s generation and management from the usage of the digital twin for applications.

Digital Edition of the Inscriptions of Georgia

The paper presents the corpus of the Inscriptions of Georgia, a result of a PhD research project at the Ilia State University, Tbilisi, Georgia. The database, built using the EpiDoc Front-End Services (EFES) platform, combines the EpiDoc editions of hundreds of inscriptions unearthed in Georgia, and published in print during the 18th-20th centuries. The paper outlines the main issues addressed during the creation of the database and the encoding of the inscriptions. It illustrates the core features of the corpus, with an emphasis on the advantages of the digital edition of the epigraphic monuments with the TEI-EpiDoc standard and the EFES platform.

ImseStudio: blockchain-enabled secure digital twin platform for service manufacturing

The manufacturing industry is experiencing a service-oriented transformation in the digitalisation era. However, many small and middle enterprises (SMEs) still rely on traditional manufacturing patterns in which they can hardly servitise manufacturing resources due to the limited budget and poor digitalisation capability. To servitise manufacturing resources, this paper proposes unified five-layer blockchain-enabled secure digital twin platform architecture, followed by its core enabling components and technologies. Firstly, a service-oriented digital twinning model is developed to transform physical resources into digital services. Secondly, a rule-based off-chain matching mechanism is designed to bridge customers’ orders with manufacturing services. Thirdly, service-oriented architecture (SOA) is adopted as the major methodology to design and develop the whole blockchain platform. Four blockchain frontend services are developed using React.js, whilst the blockchain backend is developed using private Ethereum blockchain and InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). Finally, an experimental case is conducted based on the 3D printing scenario to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed platform, named imseStudio. The results show that it not only provides an effective solution to digitalise manufacturing resources but also promotes the transformation towards service manufacturing. Highlights Blockchain-enabled secure digital twin platform is developed to servitise manufacturing resources Service-oriented digital twinning model is developed to transform physical resources into digital services Rule-based off-chain matching mechanism is built to bridge customers’ orders with 3D printer Four blockchain explorers are developed to facilitate 3D printing services

Cretan Institutional Inscriptions: A New EpiDoc Database

The paper presents the database Cretan Institutional Inscriptions, which was created as part of a PhD research project carried out at the University of Venice Ca’ Foscari. The database, built using the EpiDoc Front-End Services (EFES) platform, collects the EpiDoc editions of six hundred inscriptions that shed light on the institutions of the political entities of Crete from the seventh to the first century BCE. The aim of the paper is to outline the main issues addressed during the creation of the database and the encoding of the inscriptions and to illustrate the core features of the database, with an emphasis on the advantages deriving from the combined use of the TEI-EpiDoc standard and of the EFES platform.

Social Media Engineering for Issues Feature Extraction using Categorization Knowledge Modelling and Rule-based Sentiment Analysis

A company maintains and improves its quality services by paying attention to reviews and complaints from users. The complaints from users are commonly written using human natural language expression so that their messages are computationally difficult to extract and proceed. To overcome this difficulty, in this study, we presented a new system for issues feature extraction from users’ reviews and complaints from social media data. This system consists of four main functions: (1) Data Crawling and Preprocessing, (2) Categorization Knowledge Modelling, (3) Rule-based Sentiment Analysis, and (4) Application Environment. Data Crawling and Preprocessing provides data acquisition from users’ tweets on social media, crawls the data and applies the data preprocessing. Categorization Knowledge Modelling provides text mining of textual data, vector space transformation to create knowledge metadata, context recognition of keyword queries to the knowledge metadata, and similarity measurement for categorization. In the Rule-based Sentiment Analysis, we developed our own rules of computatioal linguistics to measure polarity of sentiment. Application Environment consists of 3 layers: database management, back-end services and front-end services. For applicability of our proposed system, we conducted two kinds of experimental study: (1) categorization performance, and (2) sentiment analysis performance. For categorization performance, we used 8743 tweet data and performed 82% of accuracy. For categorization performance, we made experiments on 217 tweet data and performed 92% of accuracy.

Publication, Testing and Visualization with EFES: A tool for all stages of the EpiDoc XML editing process

"EpiDoc is a set of recommendations, schema and other tools for the encoding of ancient texts, especially inscriptions and papyri, in TEI XML, that is now used by upwards of a hundred projects around the world, and large numbers of scholars seek training in EpiDoc encoding every year. The EpiDoc Front-End Services tool (EFES) was designed to fill the important need for a publication solution for researchers and editors who have produced EpiDoc encoded texts but do not have access to digital humanities support or a well-funded IT service to produce a publication for them. This paper will discuss the use of EFES not only for final publication, but as a tool in the editing and publication workflow, by editors of inscriptions, papyri and similar texts including those on coins and seals. The edition visualisations, indexes and search interface produced by EFES are able to serve as part of the validation, correction and research apparatus for the author of an epigraphic corpus, iteratively improving the editions long before final publication. As we will argue, this research process is a key component of epigraphic and papyrological editing practice, and studying these needs will help us to further enhance the effectiveness of EFES as a tool. To this end we also plan to add three major functionalities to the EFES toolbox: (1) date visualisation and filter—building on the existing “date slider,” and inspired by partner projects such as Pelagios and Godot; (2) geographic visualization features, again building on Pelagios code, allowing the display of locations within a corpus or from a specific set of search results in a map; (3) export of information and metadata from the corpus as Linked Open Data, following the recommendations of projects such as the Linked Places format, SNAP, Chronontology and Epigraphy.info, to enable the semantic sharing of data within and beyond the field of classical and historical editions. Finally, we will discuss the kinds of collaboration that will be required to bring about desired enhancements to the EFES toolset, especially in this age of research-focussed, short-term funding. Embedding essential infrastructure work of this kind in research applications for specific research and publication projects will almost certainly need to be part of the solution. Keywords: Text Encoding, Ancient Texts, Epigraphy, Papyrology, Digital Publication, Linked Open Data, Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations"

The Digital Enhancement of a Discipline Byzantine Sigillography and Digital Humanities

Byzantine sigillography is intrinsically interdisciplinary. Unlike other sister auxiliary disciplines, such as epigraphy or numismatics, sigillography has not yet benefited from the experience gained within the Digital Humanities. SigiDoc, the newborn encoding standard for Byzantine seals, is the first attempt to bridge this gap. This paper is aimed at investigating the interactive fusion of aspects of interdisciplinarity between Byzantine Sigillography and the Digital Humanities whilst illustrating the ‘digital genealogy’ of SigiDoc in the broader context of TEI, as well as its relationship of reciprocity with open source initiatives and tools, such as EpiDoc and EFES (EpiDoc Front-End Services).

Design and Implement of Microservice System for Edge Computing

Abstract In the Internet of Things (IoT) scenario, the hardware resources in the edge computing paradigm are limited, so the applications in the cloud computing paradigm are not suitable for edge computing. New system architecture and key technologies are needed for application implement and deployment in edge computing. Based on the hardware performance constraints and scene functional requirements under edge computing, this paper designs and develops a microservice system for edge computing. So it introduces the design of microservice system architecture for edge computing. And it analyzes the key technologies of the system. It selects the PostgreSQL database to achieve data storage, the Flask framework to build back-end services, and the Vue.js framework to build front-end services. Meanwhile, docker containers are used for system deployment and testing. The test results prove that the system has perfect functions and stable operation, which is very suitable for edge devices with limited resources. According to the start-up time and resource consumption of the project, the distributed deployment of applications has better performance than the unified deployment.

Challenges and Perspectives in Creating a Digital Epigraphy Collection Using TEI XML and Front-end Services

The article presents the main tools and methods applied in the creation of the Telamon database of the ancient Greek inscriptions from Bulgaria encoded in TEI XML. The work so far on the project is reported, the modifications to the existing services are enumerated and some future perspectives are discussed.

Shareholder value implications of service failures in triads: The case of customer information security breaches

The rise in front-end service outsourcing in recent years, despite its advantages, has also exposed buyer firms to unique challenges. One of the most salient risks for buyer firms in service triads is service failure due to the service provider. Indeed such service failures may be more costly for firms due to the greater relational and operational costs that may arise from the presence of the third-party provider. Yet, neither the services literature nor extant operations literature on service triads has paid much attention to the financial consequences to the buyer firm – i.e., service risks – of such service failures in triads. To fill this gap, we investigate the financial penalty of service failures due to the service provider using the event study methodology and a sample of 146 customer information security breaches as our empirical context. Analysis of the abnormal returns reveals that service failures due to the front-end service provider lead to greater shareholder losses than such failures due to the buyer firm. This provides important new insight into the financial risks arising from outsourcing front-end services. Further, we investigate the ability of the buyer firm's employee and financial resources to temper these shareholder losses. We find that buyer firm employee productivity can moderate the greater financial penalty associated with such triadic service failures but that buyer firm leverage tends to not have such a mitigating effect. This provides new guidance for theory and practice regarding how buyer firms can position themselves to buffer the financial risks arising from service failures due to front-end service providers.

SOA based Data Architecture for HTML5 Web Applications

Web Services based architectures have already been established as the preferred way to integrate SOA specific components, from the front-end to the back-end business services. One of the key elements of such architecture are data-based or entity services. In this context, SDO standard and SDO related technologies have been confirmed as a possible approach to aggregate such enterprise-wide federation of data services, mainly backed by database servers, but not limited to them. In the followings, we will discuss an architectural purpose based on SDO approach to seamlessly integrate presentation and data services within an enterprise SOA context. This way we will outline the benefits of a common end-to-end data integration strategy. Also, we will try to argue that using HTML5 based clients as front end services in conjunction with SDO data services could be an effective strategy to adopt the mobile computing in the enterprise context.Keywords: SDO-Service Data Objects, Data Access Services, HTML5, Web Services, Cloud Computing, SQL, Data Integration, Mobile Computing1 Introduction: Data Architectures and Enterprise Mobile ComputingAlthough Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) have became a well established and widely acknowledged computing paradigm, its proliferation into the enterprise environment still struggles to resolve some crucial issues as heterogeneous data source integration. In fact, an entire class of SOA services is responsible with the data level and most often these are known as entity services. Their most obvious function is to abstract and then to integrate different data source providers (mostly database servers) across the enterprise, often very distinctive in their internal nature [1:293-323],As such, the Enterprise Data Source Integration [2] process ultimately assumes some kind of global and centralized data model, but in a decoupled, transparent and technologically independent manner. This process could be regarded as a Federative Data Integration strategy that assumes two aspects:* schema integration/denomination: the data services will use a common metadata layer to describe composite data structures, integrity rules and quality rules, that will hide the schema complexities and manage the changes of the data structures in evolution;* actual data integration: the data services will use a common data type system to operate on the data coming from a wide range of heterogeneous data sources. This data type system will provide a common data format layer that will hide the specific data formats and manage their changes in evolution.The Service Data Objects (SDO) based approach to integrate data services could be easily extend-able to standardize servicedata-based communication across the entire SOA stack, as in Figure 1. The traditional web presentation services, heavily based on server-side computing, seem to be a natural fit, but the adoption of the HTML5-based autonomous applications, easy to deploy in mobile computing context, might prove to be a very promising approach.In short, SDO is just another standardized specification aimed to handle data across multiple heterogeneous data source types. Among the most interesting characteristics of the SDO programming model [3], [4] we could mention:* offers a common platform to standardize access across heterogeneous data source types;* offers support for both static and dynamic data types; also SDO data model is grounded on data-graphs which do not consist only into a single data set, but into a cluster of data-sets containing interreferenced data-objects;* offers support to query, update, and to introspect data: SDO data structures are strong typed by separated metadata objects that come along with data-graphs; moreover, the SDO data model defines a special kind of transactional structures, named data object sequences, to describe CRUD changes on interchangeable data objects;* offers clean separation model of application code from data access code;* uses a feature-rich, very adaptive XML based data type format. …

Towards service-based approach: building huge software architectural design

Software architecture, as a discipline, draws vocabulary like rules, paradigm, pattern that help to build software systems. In this paper we first provide an introduction to the emerging field of software architecture. Many software architecture approaches were introduced; they draw different paths and methodologies to build software systems. This paper forms a survey for some of these approaches with a focus on the decomposition approach in terms of requirements and data-attributes. In this paper we will discuss a new formal service-based software decomposition approach. This approach consists of a micro-phased process. We begin by considering the front-end services, the common and modern architectural styles upon which many systems are currently based; we focus on their business profiles, non-atomic business data-items and business rules. Our proposed approach represents the first and crucial design stage in the software engineering process. It consists of building the overall software architectures that could be represented as an oriented and purposed graph. At the end, we demonstrate that the process is plausible and easy to apply. We also state that micro-phases may be reiterated and executed without strict ordering. Meta-modelling and computerising such approach represents our future works.

The Back-End of a Two-Layer Model for a Federated National Datastore for Academic Research VOs that Integrates EGEE Data Management

This paper proposes an architecture for the back-end of a federated national datastore for use by academic research communities, developed by the e-INIS (Irish National e-InfraStructure) project, and describes in detail one member of the federation, the regional datastore at Trinity College Dublin. It builds upon existing infrastructure and services, including Grid-Ireland, the National Grid Initiative and EGEE, Europe’s leading Grid infrastructure. It assumes users are in distinct research communities and that their data access patterns can be described via two properties, denoted as mutability and frequency-of-access. The architecture is for a back-end—individual academic communities are best qualified to define their own front-end services and user interfaces. The proposal is designed to facilitate front-end development by placing minimal restrictions on how the front-end is implemented and on the internal community security policies. The proposal also seeks to ensure that the communities are insulated from the back-end and from each other in order to ensure quality of service and to decouple their front-end implementation from site-specific back-end implementations.

Survey of Remote Laboratories Using Service Oriented Architectures

Remote access to real laboratories can enhance traditional educational paths with practical experiences. However, most of the existing remote laboratories cannot communicate with each other and they are not yet completely integrated with common educational platforms such as Learning Management Systems. These problems could be tackled by offering to end users remote experiments as distributed services using web service technology. The paper examines the architectures of remote laboratories developed by three institutions: DIBE ISILab (Internet Shared Instrumentation Laboratory), HPI DCL (Distributed Control Laboratory) and MIT iLab. Their front-end services are compared and discussed. The paper details how end-user applications interact with these remote labs and reports on the results of a preliminary test of interoperability between remote labs, providing a hint on how different remote experiments can be shared between different institutions.

Library systems in the electronic era

The ‘traditional’ academic library system model – i.e. a central system constructed around a common catalogue record that also dictated the end-users' view – is breaking down. Systems that were constructed to handle the processing and lending of printed items are no longer capable, on their own, of dealing with the variety of different information resources handled by modern academic libraries. A great deal has been written about how end-users expect more ‘Web 2.0’ features than library catalogues currently provide. New front-end services have been designed by libraries and library system providers to cater for this need. However, not much has been written about the needs of internal library staff who struggle with processing, handling, and supporting the huge volume of electronic resources subscribed to by libraries. Electronic resource management systems have been developed to cater for these needs, and new standards for data interchange with such systems have been developed. Just as standards were important in encouraging electronic data interchange (orders, invoices, claims, etc.) between libraries, publishers, and agents in the last century, so new standards are evolving for such transactions in the electronic era.

Enabling Knowledge Sharing within e-Government Back-Office through Ontological Engineering

Nowadays, organizational innovation constitutes the government challenges for providing better and more efficient services to citizens, enterprises or other public offices. E–government seems to be an excellent opportunity to work on this way. The applications that support front-end services delivered to users have to access information systems of multiple government areas. This is a significant problem for e-government back-office since multiple platforms and technologies coexist. Moreover, in the back-office there is a great volume of data that is implicit in the software applications that support administration activities. In this context, the main requirement is to make available the data managed in the back-office for the e-government users in a fast and precise way, without misunderstanding. To this aim, it is necessary to provide an infrastructure that make explicit the knowledge stored in different government areas and deliver this knowledge to the users. This paper presents an approach on how ontological engineering techniques can be applied to solving the problems of content discovery, aggregation, and sharing in the e-government back-office. This approach is constituted by a specific process to develop an ontology in the public sector and an ontology-based architecture. In order to present the process characteristics, a case study applied to a local government domain is analyzed. This domain is the budget and financial information of Santa Fe Province (Argentine).

The IntelCities e-Learning Platform, Knowledge Management System and Digital Library for Semantically-Rich e-Governance Services

The paper examines the architecture and services of the e-learning platform and describes how the knowledge management system designed for IntelCities is supported by the IP’s digital library. It suggests the e-Learning platform, knowledge management system and digital library developed under the IP provides the intelligence cities need to integrate them as a platform of semantically-rich e-Governance services. That is to say, an integrated platform of semantically rich e-Governance services with the intelligence which cities need to meet the expectations citizens have about the quality of such electronically enhanced products. The paper begins by outlining the integrated model of electronically enhanced governance (eGov) services adopted to represent the front-end, middleware and back-office functions of the IntelCities’ e-Learning, knowledge management (KM) and digital library. Having done this, the paper shall report on the search for an intelligent solution to the IP’s learning needs, knowledge transfer and capacity building requirements. It shall then go on to discuss the information technology (IT) underlying the solution adopted by the IP to integrate the electronically enhanced eGov services hosted on the eCity platform with the legacy systems operated by the public administrations involved in the project. From here the discussion shall then go on to examine how the e-Learning platform, KM system and digital library developed by the IP as back-office functions have been integrated into the IntelCities middleware and delivered as frontend services to citizens.

The Miami-Dade Juvenile Assessment Center National Demonstration Project

(2005). The Miami-Dade Juvenile Assessment Center National Demonstration Project. Journal of Offender Rehabilitation: Vol. 41, No. 1, pp. 1-37.

The CIM-OSA integrating infrastructure

In CIM-OSA the specific functions of each particular CIM system are captured in a CIM-OSA implementation description model whilst the general functions, common to all CIM systems, constitute the CIM-OSA integrating infrastructure.The objective of the CIM-OSA integrating infrastructure is to realise these general functions in a way that allows for the integration of the specific functions inherent in each particular CIM system. It also allows the use of the technological components and standards available for both general and specific functions.The CIM-OSA integrating infrastructure comprises four blocks of services: the business services aimed at the control of the execution of models describing specific business processes; the front-end services aimed at the management of the interfaces with the resources (humans, machines and application algorithms) which will execute the functionalities described in the models; the information services managing the information of the enterprise; and the communication services managing the liaison with communication subsystems and transparency mechanisms.

CIM-OSA Part 3: CIM-OSA integrating infrastrucure-the operational basis for integrated manufacturing systems

Abstract CIM-OSA defines an architectural framework (the CIM-OSA cube) which covers all constructs required to model particular enterprises. The data-processing resources of the enterprise are modelled in different levels of abstraction in the resource view of the CIM-OSA cube. The abstract mode] of the CIM-OSA integrated data-processing environment contains as its central part the CIM-OSA integrating infrastructure (IIS) which provides services to integrate all specific application processes of the enterprise into one co-operating system. The integrating infrastructure therefore consists of the following system-wide services: the informationistrating all information required by the various application processes; the business process services scheduling the provision of resources and dispatching the execution of enterprise activities; the front end services representing the various types of manufacturing resources to the business process services in a homogeneous fashion; and the communication services being responsible for system-wide homogeneous and reliable data communication.