User Access Points Research Articles

Representing Historically Marginalized Communities in Archives: Moving Beyond LCSH to Create More Inclusive Subject Headings

The Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) are widely used around the world in libraries and archives to add access points for users searching their collections. This can be problematic because LCSH has many embedded issues including inconsistency and complexity, the myth of neutrality that surrounds it, systemic biases, and how slow it is to change. These problems lead to poor descriptions of people, especially those who belong to historically marginalized communities. Archives can move beyond LCSH to create local thesauri, crowdsourced vocabularies, and collaborative partnerships with historically marginalized communities to create more inclusive subject headings.

Mobile Security Operation Centre (mSOC)

Attacks on the internet are becoming increasingly threatening. For naïve home users, who are poorly protected, there is always an imminent danger of getting cyber attacked. 
 This paper is aimed to design and build an IoT-based Network Security device that would run as an access point for users to connect to the Internet in a home setting. The paper discusses a standalone perimeter security solution with Incident Response (IR) life cycle management and controls through an IoT device – Raspberry PI. Enterprise-level features such as Next Generation Firewall (NGFW), Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS), Domain Control for Ad/Spam blocking, Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) for Log Co-ran System on Chip (SoC), which can be installed anywhere and carried for mobile operations. Hence, the name, Mobile Security Operation Centre (mSOC).
 This solution intends to protect the user when browsing the internet and blocking or providing visibility to the malicious connections made to or from users. The mSOC can filter domains based on whitelist/blacklist and Regex Pattern. It can also identify the domains that are blocked or allowed. It also provides visibility to traffic, application statistics, and IP reputation. IP reputation and Malicious Domains then can act as input to the iptables for L3/L4 blocking. A Software User Interface is developed to integrate and manage multiple Open-Sourced applications like dnsmasq/ elk/ graylog/ SQlite3/ Iptables/ adminlte as a single product that could serve as a complete security solution for a home or Small Medium Business (SMB). Thus, the proposed solution secures naïve users from security exploitations.

Multiuser Uplink MIMO Communications Assisted by Multiple Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces

This letter focuses on the design of multiuser uplink multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communications assisted by multiple reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs), where we consider both linear minimal mean-squared error (MMSE) and nonlinear MMSE-decision feedback equalization (DFE) receivers. The RISs, consisting of massive low-cost passive elements, can reflect the incident signals with either continuous or discrete phase shifts. Adopting the sum mean-squared error (MSE) minimization criterion, we jointly optimize the RIS phase shifts, the linear or nonlinear receiving matrices, and the source precoding matrices in iterative manner. Simulation results show that, when the signals in direct user-access point (AP) links suffer severe attenuation, the introduction of indirect user-RIS-AP links can significantly improve the system performance.

Participatory description: decolonizing descriptive methodologies in archives

By looking at current examples of participatory archives, this paper hopes to introduce and encourage a discussion of participatory description. How does an originating community describe their records? How can the nuances of another language be allowed for in archival description? Archival description helps to create access points for users, but archivists must ask the question, access for whom? This paper seeks to examine the existing state of archival description and to make recommendations for areas in which decolonizing methodologies might be employed to better address the nuances of multicultural, community, and participatory archives. A literature review is provided in order to examine the current state of archival description. As a second step, decolonizing methodologies are discussed and examined in order to establish a method by which description might become more participatory. Finally, some examples of archives in which participatory endeavors have been undertaken are presented, in order to establish models from which other archives can draw inspiration.

A Stochastic Model for UAV Networks Positioned Above Demand Hotspots in Urban Environments

Wireless access points on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are being considered for mobile service provisioning in commercial networks. These UAV access points will carry radio infrastructure and will be temporarily deployed in areas of dense user traffic to deal with excess user data demand. In this paper, we analyze the coverage when UAVs act as access points for users on the ground in an urban area. We consider the impact of several UAV placement strategies, either independent of, or responsive to, the locations of the users on the ground. Our analysis allows us to demonstrate how the density of the UAVs in the network will determine whether the UAVs should position themselves closer to user hotspots to improve the received signal strength, or further away from one another to mitigate interference. In addition, we demonstrate how network design parameters such as the UAV height above ground or the antenna beamwidth impact the coverage probability. In addition to simulations, we provide mathematical expressions for the coverage probability, for the scenario where UAVs are positioned directly above the centers of user hotspots.

WIFIP: a web-based user interface for automated synchrotron beamlines.

The beamline control software, through the associated graphical user interface (GUI), is the user access point to the experiment, interacting with synchrotron beamline components and providing automated routines. FIP, the French beamline for the Investigation of Proteins, is a highly automatized macromolecular crystallography (MX) beamline at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility. On such a beamline, a significant number of users choose to control their experiment remotely. This is often performed with a limited bandwidth and from a large choice of computers and operating systems. Furthermore, this has to be possible in a rapidly evolving experimental environment, where new developments have to be easily integrated. To face these challenges, a light, platform-independent, control software and associated GUI are required. Here, WIFIP, a web-based user interface developed at FIP, is described. Further than being the present FIP control interface, WIFIP is also a proof of concept for future MX control software.

A Novel Multipath-Transmission Supported Software Defined Wireless Network Architecture

The inflexible management and operation of today’s wireless access networks cannot meet the increasingly growing specific requirements, such as high mobility and throughput, service differentiation, and high-level programmability. In this paper, we put forward a novel multipath-transmission supported software-defined wireless network architecture (MP-SDWN), with the aim of achieving seamless handover, throughput enhancement, and flow-level wireless transmission control as well as programmable interfaces. In particular, this research addresses the following issues: 1) for high mobility and throughput, multi-connection virtual access point is proposed to enable multiple transmission paths simultaneously over a set of access points for users and 2) wireless flow transmission rules and programmable interfaces are implemented into mac80211 subsystem to enable service differentiation and flow-level wireless transmission control. Moreover, the efficiency and flexibility of MP-SDWN are demonstrated in the performance evaluations conducted on a 802.11 based-testbed, and the experimental results show that compared to regular WiFi, our proposed MP-SDWN architecture achieves seamless handover and multifold throughput improvement, and supports flow-level wireless transmission control for different applications.

Linked Data in Libraries: A Case Study of Harvesting and Sharing Bibliographic Metadata with BIBFRAME

By way of a case study this paper illustrates and evaluates the Bibliographic Framework (or BIBFRAME) as means for harvesting and sharing bibliographic metadata over the Web for libraries. BIBFRAME is an emerging framework developed by the Library of Congress for bibliographic description based on Linked Data. Much like Semantic Web, the goal of Linked Data is to make Web “data aware” and transform the existing Web of documents into a Web of data. Linked Data leverages the existing Web infrastructure and allows linking and sharing of structured data for human and machine consumption.
 The BIBFRAME model attempts to contextualize the Linked Data technology for libraries. Library applications and systems contain high-quality structured metadata but this data is generally static in its presentation and seldom integrated with other internal metadata sources or linked to external Web resources. With BIBFRAME existing disparate library metadata sources such as catalogs and digital collections can be harvested and integrated over the Web. In addition, bibliographic data enriched with Linked Data could offer richer navigational control and access points for users. With Linked Data principles, metadata from libraries could also become harvestable by search engines, transforming dormant catalogs and digital collections into active knowledge repositories. Thus experimenting with Linked Data using existing bibliographic metadata holds the potential to empower libraries to harness the reach of commercial search engines to continuously discover, navigate, and obtain new domain specific knowledge resources on the basis of their verified metadata.
 The initial part of the paper introduces BIBFRAME and discusses Linked Data in the context of libraries. The final part of this paper outlines a step-by-step process for implementing BIBFRAME with existing library metadata.

International Cancer Genome Consortium Data Portal--a one-stop shop for cancer genomics data

The International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) is a collaborative effort to characterize genomic abnormalities in 50 different cancer types. To make this data available, the ICGC has created the ICGC Data Portal. Powered by the BioMart software, the Data Portal allows each ICGC member institution to manage and maintain its own databases locally, while seamlessly presenting all the data in a single access point for users. The Data Portal currently contains data from 24 cancer projects, including ICGC, The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), Johns Hopkins University, and the Tumor Sequencing Project. It consists of 3478 genomes and 13 cancer types and subtypes. Available open access data types include simple somatic mutations, copy number alterations, structural rearrangements, gene expression, microRNAs, DNA methylation and exon junctions. Additionally, simple germline variations are available as controlled access data. The Data Portal uses a web-based graphical user interface (GUI) to offer researchers multiple ways to quickly and easily search and analyze the available data. The web interface can assist in constructing complicated queries across multiple data sets. Several application programming interfaces are also available for programmatic access. Here we describe the organization, functionality, and capabilities of the ICGC Data Portal.Database URL: http://dcc.icgc.org

TreeGenes: A Forest Tree Genome Database

The Dendrome Project and associated TreeGenes database serve the forest genetics research community through a curated and integrated web-based relational database. The research community is composed of approximately 2 000 members representing over 730 organizations worldwide. The database itself is composed of a wide range of genetic data from many forest trees with focused efforts on commercially important members of the Pinaceae family. The primary data types curated include species, publications, tree and DNA extraction information, genetic maps, molecular markers, ESTs, genotypic, and phenotypic data. There are currently ten main search modules or user access points within this PostgreSQL database. These access points allow users to navigate logically through the related data types. The goals of the Dendrome Project are to (1) provide a comprehensive resource for forest tree genomics data to facilitate gene discovery in related species, (2) develop interfaces that encourage the submission and integration of all genomic data, and to (3) centralize and distribute existing and novel online tools for the research community that both support and ease analysis. Recent developments have focused on increasing data content, functional annotations, data retrieval, and visualization tools. TreeGenes was developed to provide a centralized web resource with analysis and visualization tools to support data storage and exchange.

Designing a Resilient and High Performance Network

This article describes the detailed configuration and LAN infrastructure design at the University of Bahrain (UOB). The article describes the configuration based on the new setup and migration requirements and indicates how the design satisfies those requirements. The article explains the detailed configuration of the design process of the distribution layer switches and shows how these switches can be configured in the final implementation. The article also discusses the modifications that occurred during the implementation/migration phase. The design of the network at UOB campuses incorporates resiliency into the network core in order to manage problems effectively. This will enable user access points to remain connected to the network even in the event of a failure. This incorporation aims to provide services and benefits to users without impediments.

Transparent image access in a distributed picture archiving and communications system: the Master Database broker.

A distributed design is the most cost-effective system for small-to medium-scale picture archiving and communications systems (PACS) implementations. However, the design presents an interesting challenge to developers and implementers: to make stored image data, distributed throughout the PACS network, appear to be centralized with a single access point for users. A key component for the distributed system is a central or master database, containing all the studies that have been scanned into the PACS. Each study includes a list of one or more locations for that particular dataset so that applications can easily find it. Non-Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) clients, such as our worldwide web (WWW)-based PACS browser, query the master database directly to find the images, then jump to the most appropriate location via a distributed web-based viewing system. The Master Database Broker provides DICOM clients with the same functionality by translating DICOM queries to master database searches and distributing retrieval requests transparently to the appropriate source. The Broker also acts as a storage service class provider, allowing users to store selected image subsets and reformatted images with the original study, without having to know on which server the original data are stored.