Information Dissemination System Research Articles

Special issue on information dissemination and new services in P2P systems

Information dissemination is an important P2P application that has received considerable research attention in recent years. P2P information dissemination systems range from simple file sharing applications to more complex systems that allows users to securely and efficiently publish, organize, index, search, update and retrieve data in a distributed storage medium. For complex P2P information dissemination systems, there is a need for features which include security, anonymity, fairness, scalability, resource management, and organization capabilities. For effective information dissemination, following features of P2P systems and infrastructure need to be updated: distributed object location and routing mechanisms, novel approaches to content replication, caching and migration, encryption, authentication, access control, and resource trading and management schemes. As P2P-based technologies play a more and more important role in the Internet, a number of new applications and services have been developed in the past few years, including file sharing, music downloading, live streaming, video on demand, and P2P based game platform. For these P2P systems, the key issues to be considered are scalability, robustness, reliability, and security. Moreover, today's networks are becoming increasingly more heterogeneous in terms of both network technologies and traffic, impacted by various factors including the wide deployment of wireless networks, diversification of multimedia formats, various requirements of different users, which brought many new challenges to P2P systems. The Call for Papers attracted nine submissions worldwide. After a rigorous review process, five papers have been selected for publication. An outline of the selected papers is presented as follows. The first article, by Jun-Hong Cui, et. al., attacks the problem of scalability, routing efficiency and complex query support for a P2P file sharing system. The authors propose a semantic overlay network of logical nodes, in which queries are routed on the basis of semantics. By exploiting the concepts of hierarchy and semantics, PSON has been demonstrated to support complex queries in a scalable and efficient way. The second article, by Zhipeng Ouyang, et. al., addresses a critical problem of factoring users’ subjective preferences in large-scale video streaming applications. The authors derive a model and formulate the problem as a resource demand vs supply problem. A framework is presented to address the challenge via efficient bandwidth allocation and group cooperation. The M. Song (*) Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, USA e-mail: msong@odu.edu

Soil erosion, muddy floods and the need for institutional memory

The flooding of property by runoff from agricultural fields is an increasing problem in Europe. In two areas, southern England and central Belgium, the frequency of cases is high and relatively good databases exist. We examine the role of institutional memory in the success and failure to deal with muddy flooding. There appear to be four reasons for memory failure: inadequate transfer of information to the relevant people; lack of a legislative framework, particularly in the UK; a shortage of trained personnel; and institutional difficulties in dealing with an interdisciplinary problem. A successful institutional framework requires national or regional‐level legislation and funding; support for expert groups at the local level; availability of information on successful projects; a system of information dissemination to stakeholders; and active implementation of legislation by regulatory bodies. We suggest that a successful project involving cooperation between municipalities in the Melsterbeek catchment, Flanders, offers a model for action in other areas. Existing projects, such as the Catchment Sensitive Farming scheme in the UK, could learn from this success in Flanders.

Evaluation framework for adaptive context-aware routing in large scale mobile peer-to-peer systems

The proliferation of novel wireless network technologies creates new opportunities for complex peer-to-peer information dissemination systems. A key challenge that remains in this area is how to select the best algorithms and protocols to communicate effectively on a large scale. In this paper, we focus in particular on large scale mobile networks where effectiveness depends on the requirements of the application at hand and on the context of the peers in the network. We propose a framework for context-aware adaptive information sharing that allows the evaluation of and comparison with alternative information routing protocols using network metrics to measure a variety of quality attributes of the information dissemination protocols. These metrics can then be used to verify which protocol is best suited for a particular application. We illustrate our evaluation framework with different information dissemination protocols in an inter-vehicle communication scenario.

Special Issue on “Building Local Capacity for Long-term Disaster Resilience” Toward Disaster Resilient Communities

Special Issue on “Building Local Capacity for Long-term Disaster Resilience” Toward Disaster Resilient Communities

Coexisting typical migraine in familial hemiplegic migraine

In contrast to patients with migraine with aura (MA) and migraine without aura (MO), most patients with familial hemiplegic migraine (FHM) do not report migraine-like attacks after pharmacologic provocation with glyceryl trinitrate (GTN), a donor of nitric oxide. In the present study, we examined patients with FHM without known gene mutations and hypothesized that 1) GTN would cause more migraine-like attacks in patients with FHM compared to controls, and 2) GTN would cause more migraine attacks in patients with FHM with coexisting MA or MO compared to the pure FHM phenotype. The study design was a balanced provocation study. Twenty-three patients with FHM and 11 healthy controls received a continuous IV infusion of 0.5 mug/kg/min GTN over 20 minutes. We found no difference in the incidence of migraine-like attacks comparing all patients with FHM (30%) to controls (9%) (p = 0.15). Patients with FHM with coexisting MA or MO reported more migraine attacks after GTN (55%) than patients with the pure FHM phenotype (8.3%) (p = 0.02). Compared to healthy controls, more patients with FHM with coexisting MA or MO reported migraine-like attacks than controls (p = 0.03), whereas the FHM group with the pure FHM phenotype did not (p > 0.05). Compared to patients with migraine with aura (MA) and migraine without aura (MO), patients with familial hemiplegic migraine (FHM) without known gene mutations display a reduced sensitivity to nitric oxide. A subset of patients with FHM with coexisting nonhemiplegic migraine is more sensitive than controls. These data extend our previous findings that pathophysiologic pathways in FHM may differ from those of MO and MA.

An Institutional Review of Earnings Quality in Japan

Despite its sophisticated markets and information dissemination systems, corporate disclosures in Japan have consistently shown to suffer from poor earnings quality. Drawing from international research and research conducted on Japanese companies, this literature review examines some of the institutional features of Japan which may contribute to the country’s comparatively low earnings quality. Although the review reveals large gaps in the literature, we find that the most likely characteristics driving the poor earnings quality are the disclosures practices of keiretsu affiliates and the underutilization of private or public corporate disclosure enforcement mechanisms. We also examine major reforms stemming from the Enron and Kanebo frauds that have been implemented in Japan in the last decade and discuss their implications for earnings quality.

Fengyun satellites: achievements and future

Chinese meteorological satellite, Fengyun (FY) Satellite, has a polar-orbiting series and a geostationary series. Up to now, 5 polar-orbiting (FY-1A/B/C/D and FY-3A) and 5 geostationary (FY-2A/B/C/D/E) satellites were launched. FY data has been being intensively applied not only to meteorological monitoring and prediction but also to many other fields regarding ecology, environment, disaster, space weather and so and. The FY data sharing system, FengyunCast, is now one of the three components of global meteorological satellite information dissemination system, GEONETCast. The first satellite of the new generation polar-orbiting series, FY-3A, was launched on 27 May, 2008, demonstrating the FY polar-orbiting satellite and its application completed a great leap to realize three-dimensional observations and quantitative application. The first of the next generation geostationary series (FY-4) is planned to launch in 2014.

A dynamic and fast event matching algorithm for a content-based publish/subscribe information dissemination system in Sensor-Grid

In this paper, we discuss one of the most important issues in Sensor-Grid, i.e., to develop a fast and flexible content-based publish/subscribe information dissemination (CBPSID) system for automatic fusion, interpretation, sharing and delivery of huge sensor data to consumers as the entire Sensor-Grid environment is very dynamic. Existing works to develop the CBPSID system in Sensor-Grid mostly focus on reducing the effort to define and maintain subscriptions and to handle the difficulty of dynamic changes of publishers and consumers data. However, the performance of a CBPSID system in Sensor-Grid is bounded by the expensive matching/evaluation cost of events. Existing event-matching algorithms are not very efficient, especially for interval range predicates or overlapping predicates in subscriptions which are practical in Sensor-Grid as well as other application areas. So in this paper we discuss the above challenge and propose a dynamic and fast event-matching algorithm called CGIM for the CBPSID system in Sensor-Grid. The algorithm supports range predicates or overlapping predicates very well and provides single and composite event matching. It uses two approaches, called SGIM and DGIM, to group the subscriptions by the predicates and dynamically identifies appropriate number of groups considering different statistical distributions of subscriptions at run time. Also, we present an experimental evaluation of the proposed algorithm in a Sensor-Grid based u-Healthcare scenario using synthetic workloads and compare its performance with existing algorithms. The experimental results show that our algorithm significantly reduces the evaluation cost (on average using SGIM by 79% and DGIM by 88%) comparing with others and guarantees the scalability with respect to the number of subscriptions as well as the number of predicates and events. In addition, further experiments were conducted by applying the CGIM algorithm in other application areas, e.g. in the publish/subscribe system for online job sites, to show its diverse utilization and scalability.

The status of <i>Koedoe</i> one year after changing to an online publication mode

2008 represented the start of a new online era for Koedoe, which provided us with a number of challenges and opportunities. The challenges lay in developing an entirely new publication and information dissemination system containing a number of new processes. The opportunities however, allowed us to build on Koedoes’ 50 year publication history. The main opportunity for Koedoe lies in using the open access publication route, where all our articles are freely available via the World Wide Web. Further, all back issues of the journal will be available as PDF downloads by March 2009, additional special interest sections were added (for example, essays and book reviews) and the marketing strategy was expanded to reach a wider audience.

О факторах построения и путях совершенствования правового классификатора

The article defines and compares four groups of factors influencing the construction and development of the united legal classifier in the Republic of Belarus and the classifier of legal acts in the Russian Federation: legal systems and all its structures, legislative system and all its structures, the system of public administration; electronic system of legal information collecting, processing, storage, systematisation and dissemination. The author offers to methods to improve the inner structure of the legal classifiers of the Republic of Belarus and the Russian Federation: (a) possible changes in the organisation of regulatory material alongside with the conservation of today's approaches to comprising legal classifiers by means of current legal sources; (b) improvement of legal classifiers by new content, new forms of law's being and new sources of law in force.

Journal of Flood Risk Management

Journal of Flood Risk Management

Health communication: a call for papers

Health communication: a call for papers

Determination of Routing Velocity with GPS Floating Car Data and WebGIS-Based Instantaneous Traffic Information Dissemination

The acquisition of accurate and timely traffic information is a vital precondition to rational traffic decision making. Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are bound to be the outcome when modern traffic systems develop to a high degree. In ITS, instantaneous traffic information can be collected by the Floating Car Data (FCD) method. Based on the establishment of the Shenzhen Urban Transportation Simulation System (SUTSS) in China, the authors explored how to use 4000 taxis as the data collection sensors in Shenzhen, a southern city in China which borders Hong Kong. The authors introduce the procedures and algorithms for the computation and map-matching of road segment velocities to a digital road network. To superimpose the near real-time traffic information onto a digital map, coordinate transformation is required and the transformation precision is analyzed using field testing data. Due to the nature of FCD, continuous GPS data such as routing velocities and coordinates can be collected by any GPS equipped vehicle. Therefore, relevant algorithms are developed and utilized for the map-matching according to probability and statistical theories. To evaluate the reliability of proposed map-matching method, the confidence levels are calculated statistically, from which it can be determined whether the positioning data is valid or not with predefined threshold values. Furthermore, road segment velocity matching methods based on the Metropolis criteria is extended and relevant validation is carried out through the comparison of estimated and measured results. The major objective of this method is to obtain more accurate road segment travel time through the combination of those estimated by FCD and historical ones. This can significantly improve the reliability of instantaneous traffic information before its web publication. The final part of this paper introduces the architecture and the realization of a web Geographical Information System (GIS) and FCD-based instantaneous traffic information dissemination system for the whole of Shenzhen City.

Sampling Strategies for Epidemic-Style Information Dissemination

We consider epidemic-style information dissemination strategies that leverage the nonuniformity of host distribution over subnets (e.g., IP subnets) to optimize the information spread. Such epidemic-style strategies are based on random sampling of target hosts according to a sampling rule. In this paper, we consider the metric of total number of samplings (equivalently probes) to reach a given target fraction of the host population. We first identify the minimum number of samplings needed to reach a target fraction of hosts, assuming global information about the host distribution over subnets is available. We show that this optimum can be achieved either by a dynamic strategy, for which the sampling probabilities over subnets are allowed to vary over time, or, surprisingly, even by a static strategy, for which the sampling probabilities over subnets are fixed. These results provide insights about the best achievable performance and how different system parameters affect the number of sampling needed. We then consider simple online sampling strategies that do not require any prior knowledge of the distribution of hosts over subnets, but where each host biases sampling based on its observed sampling outcomes while keeping only O(1) state at any point in time. Using real data-sets from several large-scale Internet measurements, we evaluate significance of the system parameters that determine the sampling requirements and compare the performance of our proposed distribution-oblivious sampling strategies to the theoretical bound. Our results provide insights for the design of efficient information dissemination systems, as well as for the design of countermeasures against worms that use subnet-preferential scanning.

Energy-Efficient Processing of Complex Queries over a Wireless Broadcast Data Stream

Energy-efficiency is one of the main concerns in the wireless information dissemination system. This paper presents a wireless broadcast stream organization scheme which enables complex queries (e.g., aggregation queries) to be processed in an energy-efficient way. For efficient processing of complex queries, we propose an approach of broadcasting their pre-computed results with the data stream, wherein the way of replication of index and pre-computation results are investigated. Through analysis and experiments, we show that the new approach can achieve significant performance enhancement for complex queries with respect to the access time and tuning time.

Evidence in the Palm of Your Hand: Development of an Outcomes‐Focused Knowledge Translation Intervention

The aim of the project was to develop an electronic information gathering and dissemination system to support both nursing-sensitive outcomes data collection and evidence-based decision-making at the point-of-patient care. With the current explosion of health-related knowledge, it is a challenge for nurses to regularly access information that is most current. The Internet provides timely access to health information, however, nurses do not readily use the Internet to access practice information because of being task-driven and coping with heavy workloads. Mobile computing technology addresses this reality by providing the opportunity for nurses to access relevant information at the time of nurse-patient contact. A cross-sectional, mixed-method design was used to describe nurses' requirements for point-of-care information collection and utilization. The sample consisted of 51 nurses from hospital and home care settings. Data collection involved work sampling and focus group interviews. In the hospital sector, 40% of written information was recorded onto "personal papers" at point-of-care and later transcribed into the clinical record. Nurses often sought information away from the point-of-care; for example, centrally located health records, or policy and procedure manuals. In home care, documentation took place in clients' homes. The most frequent source of information was "nurse colleagues." Nurses' top priorities for information were vital signs data, information on intravenous (IV) drug compatibility, drug references, and manuals of policies and procedures. A prototype software system was designed that enables nurses to use handheld computers to simultaneously document patients' responses to treatment, obtain real-time feedback about patient outcomes, and access electronic resources to support clinical decision-making. The prototype software system has the potential to increase nurses' access to patient outcomes information and evidence for point-of-care decision-making.

Economic Evaluation of Systems that Expedite Inventory Information

Information delays exist when the most recent inventory information available to the Inventory Manager (IM) is dated. Such situations arise when it takes a while to process the demand data, count the inventory, and pass the results to the IM. We show that the optimal total inventory‐related cost decreases when the length of the information delay decreases. The amount of the decrease is an important datum for an IM interested in considering whether or not to invest in reducing the delay. The investment is required to finance design and acquisition of an information (collection and dissemination) system that can reduce the information delay. Such systems include phone calls, business meetings, and the use of information collection mechanisms such as radiofrequency identification tags.

TRAC

Traffic congestion is a major cause of concern in many cities. A real-time information dissemination system announcing current traffic conditions to travelers is increasingly becoming a necessity in this context. The recent DSRC research initiative[1] envisions a deployment of DSRC access points (APs) along the road side to enable Vehicle to Roadside Communication (VRC) for this purpose. However, even if such an infrastructure is deployed on the roadside, it is not trivial to design a system that distributes on-demand traffic information. Existing solutions employ a centrialized design where the traffic information is stored at a central database and the vehicles then query the database for information of their interest. Such solutions are simply not scalable due to the huge volume of queries the central database would have to handle. Moreover, such a communication architecture does not take into account the fact that traffic related queries are location sensitive and that the sources for a particular query also tend to be localized .

Cultural Relevance for Rural Community Development in China: A Case Study in Bai, Jingpo and Huyaodai Communities of Yunnan Province

A three-year study over the Bai, Jingpo and Huayaodai communities in Yunnan Province reveals that the community development is significantly influenced in various ways by such cultural factors as the concepts of development; concepts and traditions of inter-community relationships, consumption, marriage and gender; patterns of decision-making and production, resource and income allocation; as well as the role of information dissemination systems, religion and ritual. Based on the analysis over the interactive relevance between each factor and community development, some strategies and methods for dealing with such a cultural relevance in development projects are recommended.

Microbe Are we ready for the next plague?

As indicated by the authors, Microbe is intended for a lay audience, ostensibly a sophisticated lay audience. The subtitle Are we ready for the next plague? hints at Zelicoff and Bellomo’s intent: to inform readers of the organizational, scientific, and bureaucratic shortcomings of existing schemes to prevent the spread of newly recognized infectious diseases. Microbe begins with a series of chapters describing the discovery of a number of individual infectious diseases. The authors then analyze and articulate problems in the reporting of and response to outbreaks of, for example, West Nile virus in New York City in 1999, SARS in Asia and North America, avian influenza, Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, Legionnaires’ disease, and BSE as well as the intentional spread of Bacillus anthracis. They go on to discuss the potential for improvement of the response protocols currently in place. Clearly, the authors are knowledgeable in these areas; however, because they oversimplify complex material in a manner usual in popular science books and introduce a number of factual errors, much of the value of their discussion is lost. The section on smallpox and its etiologic agent, Variola virus, explains in brief that this virus, despite the 1979 WHO certification of the eradication of smallpox, is presumably still a paramount threat to humans. The authors discuss a wide variety of issues, including the availability of vaccines, development of the next generation of vaccines, the appalling lack of recognition of huge epidemics, laboratory carelessness, biowarfare and bioterrorism, agent evolution, and the need for international collaboration. There is only so much a 273-page book can cover, and the authors have done a good job of selecting exemplars for their thesis. Microbe’s principal thesis is that our disease reporting and information dissemination systems are inadequate for rapid and effective responses to natural or engineered exposures to infectious agents. In this, the authors quite likely are correct. For all the efforts that have gone into a so-called homeland security apparatus, little progress has been made on this much-needed and gigantic task, unless one counts spending huge sums and building a bureaucracy as progress. Zelicoff and Bellomo have included in their book a section describing the Rapid Syndrome Validation Program (RSVP), developed by Zelicoff while he was senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories within the Department of Energy. Although RSVP is no longer in use, implementation of a successor program, the Syndrome-Based Disease Surveillance System (SBDSS) from ARES Corporation, where Zelicoff is now senior scientific consultant, is suggested. It was a quandary for me to decide whether this is a sales pitch or a legitimate recommendation. Knowing Zelicoff’s reputation, I settled on the latter; still, I have remaining doubts. Nonetheless, the authors’ arguments and my own common sense indicate that something is needed, and if SBDSS is useful and nothing else is available, then let’s use it. Some annoying aspects of Microbe are the number of errors in the text and what appears to be a slight negative bias against the CDC. The CDC, as an institution, has its flaws, but they are not the fault of the good people who work there. The embattled employees of the CDC are as good, knowledgeable, and caring a group of public servants as I know of, and lack of credit where credit is due is not helpful to them. Awkward sentence construction and errors of fact would have been ameliorated by the efforts of a knowledgeable copy editor and would have made reading this book less of a chore. The more serious factual errors include the authors’ mistaken belief that the CDC branch in Atlanta, not the CDC laboratories in Fort Collins, was initially asked to examine the West Nile virus samples obtained from the New York City outbreak in 1999. Junin virus is an arenavirus, not a flavivirus as the authors claim. They incorrectly state that it is unknown whether the first person known to have West Nile virus infection (Africa, 1937) survived and that Aedes mosquitoes are not native to North America. Warts and all, this book provides background information and excellent suggestions as to what is wrong with present reporting and response systems for outbreaks of infectious disease and what changes are needed. Let us hope that before too long a more definitive and articulate book about distant early warning systems for infectious diseases better prepares us for the next plague.