Meta-information Management Research Articles

A Novel Meta-Information Management System for SaaS

Cloud hosts numerous services with various underlying business logic and data stores. In this multifaceted and distributed environment locating or updating SaaS services is a crucial task. Researchers proposed various mechanism for this purpose, which involves accessing or altering the meta-information of the services, its underlying business logics. Thus, management of meta-information is crucial for SaaS services. It demands efficient categorization and cataloguing mechanism by preserving semantic-relationships among interrelated services, business processes and data sources. This article proposes a flexible and scalable meta-information management system for SaaS, capable of maintaining dependencies among various SaaS resources. It is useful towards identification of interrelated business processes, services and data sources and facilitates incremental update of meta-information. The proposed system is implemented using Hadoop and a series of experiments have been carried out, which shows that it can efficiently scale and effectively categorize and catalogue different SaaS resources.

Metainformation scenarios in Digital Humanities: Characterization and conceptual modelling strategies

Requirements for the analysis, interpretation and reuse of information are becoming more and more ambitious as we generate larger and more complex datasets. This is leading to the development and widespread use of information about information, often called metainformation (or metadata) in most disciplines. The Digital Humanities are not an exception. We often assume that metainformation helps us in documenting information for future reference by recording who has created it, when and how, among other aspects. We also assume that recording metainformation will facilitate the tasks of interpreting information at later stages. However, some works have identified some issues with existing metadata approaches, related to 1) the proliferation of too many “standards” and difficulties to choose between them; 2) the generalized assumption that metadata and data (or metainformation and information) are essentially different, and the subsequent development of separate sets of languages and tools for each (introducing redundant models); and 3) the combination of conceptual and implementation concerns within most approaches, violating basic engineering principles of modularity and separation of concerns. Some of these problems are especially relevant in Digital Humanities.In addition, we argue here that the lack of characterization of the scenarios in which metainformation plays a relevant role in humanistic projects often results in metainformation being recorded and managed without a specific purpose in mind. In turn, this hinders the process of decision making on issues such as what metainformation must be recorded in a specific project, and how it must be conceptualized, stored and managed.This paper presents a review of the most used metadata approaches in Digital Humanities and, taking a conceptual modelling perspective, analyses their major issues as outlined above. It also describes what the most common scenarios for the use of metainformation in Digital Humanities are, presenting a characterization that can assist in the setting of goals for metainformation recording and management in each case. Based on these two aspects, a new approach is proposed for the conceptualization, recording and management of metainformation in the Digital Humanities, using the ConML conceptual modelling language, and adopting the overall view that metainformation is not essentially different to information. The proposal is validated in Digital Humanities scenarios through case studies employing real-world datasets.

Structuring reflective middleware using meta-information management: the Meta-ORB approach and prototypes

Reflection is now an established technique for achieving dynamic adaptability of middleware platforms. It provides a clean and comprehensive way to access the internals ofa platform implementation, allowing its customisation in order to achieve the best performance and adequacy under given operation environments and user requirements. In addition, the use ofa runtime component model for the design ofthe internal platform structure facilitates the identification of the elements to be adapted, as all platform aspects are built in terms ofcomponents. The major limitation ofthis approach, however, is related to the multitude ofaspects that make up a middleware platform, together with the requirement ofkeeping platform consis-tencyafter adaptations take place. This paper presents the results of ongoing research contributing to reduce this limitation. The approach is based on the use ofa common meta-model, together with meta-information techniques to provide a uniform way to specify and manipulate platform configurations. Both platform configuration and runtime adaptation are always specified using a small number of building blocks defined in the meta-model. The paper also describes the overall architecture ofthe Meta-ORB platform, which demonstrates this approach, and presents its two implementations: a proof-of-concept prototype written in Python, and a Java-based implementation aimed at supporting mobile devices. The results are also evaluated from a quantitative perspective, according to the requirements ofmultimedia applications, one ofthe major areas of application of reflective middleware.

A Unified Model for Security and Integrity in Relational Databases*

The issues of database security and integrity are tightly related. Security mechanisms and integrity mechanisms are both concerned with protection of information, and both involve management of meta-information and procedures for screening transactions. Yet in database systems these tasks are entirely separate. In this paper we describe a unified model that accommodates both security and integrity, with all protective restrictions stated in terms of database views. These protective restrictions are treated as knowledge, from which transaction screening procedures infer the restrictions that apply to individual transactions. A transaction may be allowed or denied in its entirety, or specific non-violating subtransactions may be identified. This process is an application of the view inference problem, to which we offer two alternative solutions. We then show how users can exploit information made available by the integrity mechanism to bypass the security mechanism, and discuss how such security breaches can be avoided. Finally, we show how the model can accommodate a broader concept of integrity that was introduced recently.