Web Services Standards Research Articles

Cloud-enabled web services for wireless sensor and actuator networks

Wireless sensors and actuators have limited resources and low bandwidth wireless communication ability while they are low-cost and energy-efficient. These devices can form ad hoc wireless networks and can be connected to the internet through the gateways. The resource constrained wireless devices cannot afford the general internet protocols so that they cannot be directly accessed through the internet. In this paper, we propose a cloud-enabled web services solution to address this issue. The functions of device are encapsulated into web services and submitted to the cloud; the client operates the device by invoking the web services; and the gateway converts messages between the device and the cloud. Using the standard web services architecture instead of customised SOA solutions and deploying services to the cloud instead of wireless nodes or gateways reduce the resource demand of nodes and gateways, simplify the wireless network design, and provide a uniform interface for using and managing devices.

Cloud-enabled web services for wireless sensor and actuator networks

Wireless sensors and actuators have limited resources and low bandwidth wireless communication ability while they are low-cost and energy-efficient. These devices can form ad hoc wireless networks and can be connected to the internet through the gateways. The resource constrained wireless devices cannot afford the general internet protocols so that they cannot be directly accessed through the internet. In this paper, we propose a cloud-enabled web services solution to address this issue. The functions of device are encapsulated into web services and submitted to the cloud; the client operates the device by invoking the web services; and the gateway converts messages between the device and the cloud. Using the standard web services architecture instead of customised SOA solutions and deploying services to the cloud instead of wireless nodes or gateways reduce the resource demand of nodes and gateways, simplify the wireless network design, and provide a uniform interface for using and managing devices.

Interactive 3D geodesign tool for multidisciplinary wind turbine planning

Wind turbine site planning is a multidisciplinary task comprising of several stakeholder groups from different domains and with different priorities. An information system capable of integrating the knowledge on the multiple aspects of a wind turbine plays a crucial role on providing a common picture to the involved groups. In this study, we have developed an interactive and intuitive 3D system (Falcon) for planning wind turbine locations. This system supports iterative design loops (wind turbine configurations), based on the emerging field of geodesign. The integration of GIS, game engine and the analytical models has resulted in an interactive platform with real-time feedback on the multiple wind turbine aspects which performs efficiently for different use cases and different environmental settings. The implementation of tiling techniques and open standard web services support flexible and on-the-fly loading and querying of different (massive) geospatial elements from different resources. This boosts data accessibility and interoperability that are of high importance in a multidisciplinary process. The incorporation of the analytical models in Falcon makes this system independent from external tools for different environmental impacts estimations and results in a unified platform for performing different environmental analysis in every stage of the scenario design. Game engine techniques, such as collision detection, are applied in Falcon for the real-time implementation of different environmental models (e.g. noise and visibility). The interactivity and real-time performance of Falcon in any location in the whole country assist the stakeholders in the seamless exploration of various scenarios and their resulting environmental effects and provides a scope for an interwoven discussion process. The flexible architecture of the system enables the effortless application of Falcon in other countries, conditional to input data availability. The embedded open web standards in Falcon results in a smooth integration of different input data which are increasingly available online and through standardized access mechanisms.

Evolution of the Building Management System in the INFN CNAF Tier-1 data center facility.

The INFN CNAF Tier-1 data center is composed by two different main rooms containing IT resources and four additional locations that hosts the necessary technology infrastructures providing the electrical power and cooling to the facility. The power supply and continuity are ensured by a dedicated room with three 15,000 to 400 V transformers in a separate part of the principal building and two redundant 1.4MW diesel rotary uninterruptible power supplies. The cooling is provided by six free cooling chillers of 320 kW each with a N+2 redundancy configuration. Clearly, considering the complex physical distribution of the technical plants, a detailed Building Management System (BMS) was designed and implemented as part of the original project in order to monitor and collect all the necessary information and for providing alarms in case of malfunctions or major failures. After almost 10 years of service, a revision of the BMS system was somewhat necessary. In addition, the increasing cost of electrical power is nowadays a strong motivation for improving the energy efficiency of the infrastructure. Therefore the exact calculation of the power usage effectiveness (PUE) metric has become one of the most important factors when aiming for the optimization of a modern data center. For these reasons, an evolution of the BMS system was designed using the Schneider StruxureWare infrastructure hardware and software products. This solution proves to be a natural and flexible development of the previous TAC Vista software with advantages in the ease of use and the possibility to customize the data collection and the graphical interfaces display. Moreover, the addition of protocols like open standard Web services gives the possibility to communicate with the BMS from custom user application and permits the exchange of data and information through the Web between different third-party systems. Specific Web services SOAP requests has been implemented in our Tier-1 monitoring system in order to collect historical trends of power demands and calculate the partial PUE (pPUE) of a specific part of the infrastructure. This would help in the identification of “spots” that may need further energy optimization. The StruxureWare system maintains compatibility with standard protocols like Modbus as well as native LonWorks, making possible reusing the existing network between physical locations as well as a considerable number of programmable controller and I/O modules that interact with the facility. The high increase of detailed statistical information about power consumption and the HVAC (heat, ventilation and air conditioning) parameters could prove to be a very valuable strategic choice for improving the overall PUE. This will bring remarkable benefits for the overall management costs, despite the limits of the non-optimal actual location of the facility, and it will help us in the process of making a more energy efficient data center that embraces the concept of green IT.

An efficient architecture to support digital pathology in standard medical imaging repositories

In the past decade, digital pathology and whole-slide imaging (WSI) have been gaining momentum with the proliferation of digital scanners from different manufacturers. The literature reports significant advantages associated with the adoption of digital images in pathology, namely, improvements in diagnostic accuracy and better support for telepathology. Moreover, it also offers new clinical and research applications. However, numerous barriers have been slowing the adoption of WSI, among which the most important are performance issues associated with storage and distribution of huge volumes of data, and lack of interoperability with other hospital information systems, most notably Picture Archive and Communications Systems (PACS) based on the DICOM standard.This article proposes an architecture of a Web Pathology PACS fully compliant with DICOM standard communications and data formats. The solution includes a PACS Archive responsible for storing whole-slide imaging data in DICOM WSI format and offers a communication interface based on the most recent DICOM Web services. The second component is a zero-footprint viewer that runs in any web-browser. It consumes data using the PACS archive standard web services. Moreover, it features a tiling engine especially suited to deal with the WSI image pyramids. These components were designed with special focus on efficiency and usability. The performance of our system was assessed through a comparative analysis of the state-of-the-art solutions. The results demonstrate that it is possible to have a very competitive solution based on standard workflows.

The Dockstore: enabling modular, community-focused sharing of Docker-based genomics tools and workflows

As genomic datasets continue to grow, the feasibility of downloading data to a local organization and running analysis on a traditional compute environment is becoming increasingly problematic. Current large-scale projects, such as the ICGC PanCancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG), the Data Platform for the U.S. Precision Medicine Initiative, and the NIH Big Data to Knowledge Center for Translational Genomics, are using cloud-based infrastructure to both host and perform analysis across large data sets. In PCAWG, over 5,800 whole human genomes were aligned and variant called across 14 cloud and HPC environments; the processed data was then made available on the cloud for further analysis and sharing. If run locally, an operation at this scale would have monopolized a typical academic data centre for many months, and would have presented major challenges for data storage and distribution. However, this scale is increasingly typical for genomics projects and necessitates a rethink of how analytical tools are packaged and moved to the data. For PCAWG, we embraced the use of highly portable Docker images for encapsulating and sharing complex alignment and variant calling workflows across highly variable environments. While successful, this endeavor revealed a limitation in Docker containers, namely the lack of a standardized way to describe and execute the tools encapsulated inside the container. As a result, we created the Dockstore ( https://dockstore.org), a project that brings together Docker images with standardized, machine-readable ways of describing and running the tools contained within. This service greatly improves the sharing and reuse of genomics tools and promotes interoperability with similar projects through emerging web service standards developed by the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH).

The Dockstore: enabling modular, community-focused sharing of Docker-based genomics tools and workflows.

As genomic datasets continue to grow, the feasibility of downloading data to a local organization and running analysis on a traditional compute environment is becoming increasingly problematic. Current large-scale projects, such as the ICGC PanCancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG), the Data Platform for the U.S. Precision Medicine Initiative, and the NIH Big Data to Knowledge Center for Translational Genomics, are using cloud-based infrastructure to both host and perform analysis across large data sets. In PCAWG, over 5,800 whole human genomes were aligned and variant called across 14 cloud and HPC environments; the processed data was then made available on the cloud for further analysis and sharing. If run locally, an operation at this scale would have monopolized a typical academic data centre for many months, and would have presented major challenges for data storage and distribution. However, this scale is increasingly typical for genomics projects and necessitates a rethink of how analytical tools are packaged and moved to the data. For PCAWG, we embraced the use of highly portable Docker images for encapsulating and sharing complex alignment and variant calling workflows across highly variable environments. While successful, this endeavor revealed a limitation in Docker containers, namely the lack of a standardized way to describe and execute the tools encapsulated inside the container. As a result, we created the Dockstore ( https://dockstore.org), a project that brings together Docker images with standardized, machine-readable ways of describing and running the tools contained within. This service greatly improves the sharing and reuse of genomics tools and promotes interoperability with similar projects through emerging web service standards developed by the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH).

Bolegweb Platform – Contribution to the Web Communities

The effective access to and reuse of geospatial information (GI) has come to be of critical value in modern knowledge based society. The standardized web services defined by Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) are frequently used for the implementation of a spatial data infrastructure (SDI), to expose geospatial data, metadata and models on the Web. These GI are normally stored in an encoded geospatial layer, which is hidden from search engines. SDI uses a catalogue service for the web as a gateway to GI through the metadata defined by ISO standards, which are structurally diverse to OGC metadata. Therefore, a crosswalk needs to be implemented to bridge the OGC resources discovered on mainstream web with those documented by metadata in an SDI to enrich its information extent. We have to build mechanisms allowing entrepreneurs and developers access the information SDI is providing to build their apps. The paper reports a global wide and user friendly platform of OGC resources available on the web with the main goal to ensure and enhance the use of GI within a multidisciplinary context and to bridge the geospatial web from the end-user perspective, thus to open its borders to more web communities. The platform has been developed in the research project Borderless Geospatial Web (Bolegweb).

МЕТОДОЛОГИЯ ПОСТРОЕНИЯ ПРОАКТИВНЫХ РЕКОМЕНДУЮЩИХ СИСТЕМ ДЛЯ ИНФОМОБИЛЬНЫХ ПРИЛОЖЕНИЙ

Introduction: Development of personal mobile devices makes it possible for the users to access various information anywhere and at any time. However, traditional methods do not provide efficient decision support when the situation is continuously changing and the intensive interaction of the user with the device is not possible (e.g., when driving or walking). Purpose: We develop theoretical and technological foundations of proactive recommender systems for infomobile applications capable of providing personalized context-aware intelligent decision support for the users, taking into account not only the current situation but also its possible development. Results: The state of the art in the area of proactive recommender systems and related areas (personalization, context-aware decision support, tourist information support) has been analyzed. On the base of this analysis and scenarios of infomobile application usage, the following requirements to such applications have been specified: distributed architecture, availability of technical and semantic interoperability support means, context awareness, personalization, usage of mobile devices to interact with the user, proactiveness, and the usage of the recommender system concept. The major principles of the methodology have been formulated: availability of a common ontology; context specification by means of formalism and terminology of the common ontology; usage of service-oriented architecture and Web-service standards, as well as usage of methods of context management, profiling and proactive generation of recommendations. A service-oriented architecture for the systems of the considered class has been proposed. Practical relevance: The proposed methodology and service-oriented architecture can be used for the creation of infomobile applications.

ENVI‐PV: an interactive Web Client for multi‐criteria life cycle assessment of photovoltaic systems worldwide

AbstractSolar photovoltaics (PV) is the second largest source of new capacity among renewable energies. The worldwide capacity encompassed 135 GW in 2013 and is estimated to increase to 1721 GW in 2030 and 4674 GW in 2050, according to a prospective high‐renewable scenario. To achieve this production level while minimizing environmental impacts, decision makers must have access to environmental performance data that reflect their high spatial variability accurately. We propose ENVI‐PV (http://viewer.webservice‐energy.org/project_iea), a new interactive tool that provides maps and screening level data, based on weighted average supply chains, for the environmental performance of common PV technologies. Environmental impacts of PV systems are evaluated according to a life cycle assessment approach. ENVI‐PV was developed using a state‐of‐the‐art interoperable and open standard Web Service framework from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). It combines the latest life cycle inventories, published in 2015 by the International Energy Agency (IEA) under the Photovoltaic Power Systems Program (PVPS) Task 12, and some inventories previously published from Ecoinvent v2.2 database with solar irradiation estimates computed from the worldwide NASA SSE database. ENVI‐PV is the first tool to propose a worldwide coverage of environmental performance of PV systems using a multi‐criteria assessment. The user can compare the PV environmental performance to the environmental footprint of country electricity mixes. ENVI‐PV is designed as an environmental interactive tool to generate PV technological options and evaluate their performance in different spatial and techno‐economic contexts. Its potential applications are illustrated in this paper with several examples. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

AnnoLnc: a web server for systematically annotating novel human lncRNAs.

BackgroundLong noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) have been shown to play essential roles in almost every important biological process through multiple mechanisms. Although the repertoire of human lncRNAs has rapidly expanded, their biological function and regulation remain largely elusive, calling for a systematic and integrative annotation tool.ResultsHere we present AnnoLnc (http://annolnc.cbi.pku.edu.cn), a one-stop portal for systematically annotating novel human lncRNAs. Based on more than 700 data sources and various tool chains, AnnoLnc enables a systematic annotation covering genomic location, secondary structure, expression patterns, transcriptional regulation, miRNA interaction, protein interaction, genetic association and evolution. An intuitive web interface is available for interactive analysis through both desktops and mobile devices, and programmers can further integrate AnnoLnc into their pipeline through standard JSON-based Web Service APIs.ConclusionsTo the best of our knowledge, AnnoLnc is the only web server to provide on-the-fly and systematic annotation for newly identified human lncRNAs. Compared with similar tools, the annotation generated by AnnoLnc covers a much wider spectrum with intuitive visualization. Case studies demonstrate the power of AnnoLnc in not only rediscovering known functions of human lncRNAs but also inspiring novel hypotheses.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12864-016-3287-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

A Semantic Web Services Classification approach based on IG-C4.5

Semantic Web services have emerged as the solution to the need for automating several aspects related to service-oriented architectures, such as service discovery and composition, and they are realized by combining Semantic Web technologies and Web service standards. The increasing number of available Web services has raised the need for their automated and accurate classification. Services Classification would be useful to enact powerful capabilities such as automatic selection, invocation, composition, location or discovery of web services. In this paper, We proposes a approach of Semantic Web Services classification taking into account the feature of textual description and the semantic annotations of OWL-S advertisements. An experimental test of the proposed techniques is reported, showing positive results, the efficiency and accuracy of the automatic service portfolio has been improved.

SASeS: A Framework for the Development of Service-based Self-adaptive Applications

Self-adaptive Systems (SaS) enable the structural or behavioral adaptation at runtime in response to context changes or user's new needs without interruption in their execution. In service-based SaS, the adaptation activity can be considered as a complex activity, since such systems need to modify or replace a service (e.g., due to an unforeseen situation or failure) at runtime without perception of their stakeholders (i.e., client of these services). Based on this scenario, a framework called SASeS (Self-Adaptive Service-based System) was design. In short, this framework was developed based on web services standards and design patterns that support common tasks in the development of such systems. Moreover, SASeS provides a mechanism for the management of the control loop (or feedback loop), which enables constantly self-evaluating (i.e., monitor, analyze, plan, and execute) the adaptation activity. In order to show the applicability of our framework, two case studies are reported in this paper.

Accessing diverse data comprehensively – CODM, the COSYNA data portal

Abstract. The coastal observation system COSYNA aims to describe the physical and biogeochemical state of a regional coastal system. The COSYNA data management is the link between observations, model results and data usage. The challenge for the COSYNA data management CODM is the integration of diverse data sources in terms of parameters, dimensionality and observation methods to gain a comprehensive view of the observations. This is achieved by describing the data using metadata in a generic way and by making all gathered data available for different analyses and visualisations in an interrelated way, independent of data dimensionality. Different parameter names for the same observed property are mapped to the corresponding CF standard name Eaton et al. (2010) leading to standardised and comparable metadata. These metadata together with standardised web services are the base for the data portal. The URLs of these web services are also stored within the metadata as direct data access URLs, e.g. a map such as a GetMap request.

Open Water Data in Space and Time

AbstractAn Open Water Data Initiative has been established by the federal government to enhance water information sharing across the United States (U.S.) using standardized web services for geospatial and temporal data. In a parallel effort, the National Weather Service has established a new National Water Center on the Tuscaloosa campus of the University of Alabama, at which a new National Water Model starts operations in June 2016, to continually simulate and forecast streamflow discharge throughout the continental U.S. These two developments support the interoperability of streamflow and hydrologic information in time and space from modeled and observed sources through the use of open standards to share water information.

BORDERLESS GEOSPATIAL WEB (BOLEGWEB)

The effective access and use of geospatial information (GI) resources acquires a critical value of importance in modern knowledge based society. Standard web services defined by Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) are frequently used within the implementations of spatial data infrastructures (SDIs) to facilitate discovery and use of geospatial data. This data is stored in databases located in a layer, called the invisible web, thus are ignored by search engines. SDI uses a catalogue (discovery) service for the web as a gateway to the GI world through the metadata defined by ISO standards, which are structurally diverse to OGC metadata. Therefore, a crosswalk needs to be implemented to bridge the OGC resources discovered on mainstream web with those documented by metadata in an SDI to enrich its information extent. A public global wide and user friendly portal of OGC resources available on the web ensures and enhances the use of GI within a multidisciplinary context and bridges the geospatial web from the end-user perspective, thus opens its borders to everybody. <br><br> Project “Crosswalking the layers of geospatial information resources to enable a borderless geospatial web” with the acronym BOLEGWEB is ongoing as a postdoctoral research project at the Faculty of Geodesy, University of Zagreb in Croatia (http://bolegweb.geof.unizg.hr/). The research leading to the results of the project has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7 2007-2013) under Marie Curie FP7-PEOPLE-2011-COFUND. The project started in the November 2014 and is planned to be finished by the end of 2016. This paper provides an overview of the project, research questions and methodology, so far achieved results and future steps.

BORDERLESS GEOSPATIAL WEB (BOLEGWEB)

Abstract. The effective access and use of geospatial information (GI) resources acquires a critical value of importance in modern knowledge based society. Standard web services defined by Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) are frequently used within the implementations of spatial data infrastructures (SDIs) to facilitate discovery and use of geospatial data. This data is stored in databases located in a layer, called the invisible web, thus are ignored by search engines. SDI uses a catalogue (discovery) service for the web as a gateway to the GI world through the metadata defined by ISO standards, which are structurally diverse to OGC metadata. Therefore, a crosswalk needs to be implemented to bridge the OGC resources discovered on mainstream web with those documented by metadata in an SDI to enrich its information extent. A public global wide and user friendly portal of OGC resources available on the web ensures and enhances the use of GI within a multidisciplinary context and bridges the geospatial web from the end-user perspective, thus opens its borders to everybody. Project “Crosswalking the layers of geospatial information resources to enable a borderless geospatial web” with the acronym BOLEGWEB is ongoing as a postdoctoral research project at the Faculty of Geodesy, University of Zagreb in Croatia (http://bolegweb.geof.unizg.hr/). The research leading to the results of the project has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7 2007-2013) under Marie Curie FP7-PEOPLE-2011-COFUND. The project started in the November 2014 and is planned to be finished by the end of 2016. This paper provides an overview of the project, research questions and methodology, so far achieved results and future steps.

Technical note: Harmonising metocean model data via standard web services within small research groups

Abstract. Work over the last decade has resulted in standardised web services and tools that can significantly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of working with meteorological and ocean model data. While many operational modelling centres have enabled query and access to data via common web services, most small research groups have not. The penetration of this approach into the research community, where IT resources are limited, can be dramatically improved by (1) making it simple for providers to enable web service access to existing output files; (2) using free technologies that are easy to deploy and configure; and (3) providing standardised, service-based tools that work in existing research environments. We present a simple, local brokering approach that lets modellers continue to use their existing files and tools, while serving virtual data sets that can be used with standardised tools. The goal of this paper is to convince modellers that a standardised framework is not only useful but can be implemented with modest effort using free software components. We use NetCDF Markup language for data aggregation and standardisation, the THREDDS Data Server for data delivery, pycsw for data search, NCTOOLBOX (MATLAB®) and Iris (Python) for data access, and Open Geospatial Consortium Web Map Service for data preview. We illustrate the effectiveness of this approach with two use cases involving small research modelling groups at NATO and USGS.

Distributed agents for online spatial searches

As the availability and utilisation of online data blossoms, automated online searches—whether to answer a simple question, seek specific sensor readings, or investigate research in a particular domain—have raised a number of issues. Simple search tools do not access the deep web of services and online forms, and cannot handle knowledge domain-specific search problems, but specialist search tools can have a narrow domain and applicability. Some online tools circumvent these problems by putting more filter controls into the hands of users, but this leads to more complex interfaces which can raise usability barriers. A distributed approach, where specialised search agents act autonomously to find contextualised information, can provide a useful compromise between a simple, general search interface and specialist searches. This paper outlines work in progress on design and use of specialist search agents, with a case study to find public transportation bus stops within a spatial region. The approach is demonstrated with a proof of concept web interface, developed to interpret a text query to find and show bus stop locations within a named boundary by coordinating multiple online search agents. Search agents were designed to follow a common model to allow for future development of agent types, including specialist agents used in the case study to search standard open web services and extract spatial features.

Development of an IHE MRRT-compliant open-source web-based reporting platform.

To develop a platform that uses structured reporting templates according to the IHE Management of Radiology Report Templates (MRRT) profile, and to implement this platform into clinical routine. The reporting platform uses standard web technologies (HTML / JavaScript and PHP / MySQL) only. Several freely available external libraries were used to simplify the programming. The platform runs on a standard web server, connects with the radiology information system (RIS) and PACS, and is easily accessible via a standard web browser. A prototype platform that allows structured reporting to be easily incorporated into the clinical routine was developed and successfully tested. To date, 797 reports were generated using IHE MRRT-compliant templates (many of them downloaded from the RSNA's radreport.org website). Reports are stored in a MySQL database and are easily accessible for further analyses. Development of an IHE MRRT-compliant platform for structured reporting is feasible using only standard web technologies. All source code will be made available upon request under a free license, and the participation of other institutions in further development is welcome. • A platform for structured reporting using IHE MRRT-compliant templates is presented. • Incorporating structured reporting into clinical routine is feasible. • Full source code will be provided upon request under a free license.