Service Interface Research Articles

Fisheries and biodiversity along Mediterranean Sea: Italian and Egyptian coast overview

Mediterranean fish species living along Italian (Gaeta) and Egyptian (Alexandria) coasts were analyzed using DNA barcodes for molecular identification. Mitochondrial Cytochrome c Oxidase subunit 1 (COI) gene was sequenced from 31 different marine species to test whether the morphology-based assignment of individuals into 19 families, 6 orders was supported by DNA-based species delimitation and Neighbour Joining cladogram. All COI rRNA gene barcodes were matched with reference sequences of expected species, according to morphological identification. Neighbour joining tree was drawn based on COI rRNA gene and the majority of specimens clustered in agreement with their taxonomic classification. Our results updated Mediterranean edible fish knowledge providing graphical resources, taxonomical and bioinformatics references, improving the genetic fish database and the basic molecular information to strengthen the science–policy interface for biodiversity and ecosystem services as conservation, blue economy, and long-term human well-being.

A Novel Iterative OFDMA Channel Estimation Technique for DOCSIS 3.1 Uplink Channels

This paper presents an orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) channel estimation technique that jointly considers the effects of coarse timing error and multipath propagation. Many conventional approaches only consider an optimistic scenario where timing synchronization is perfect and each of the channel delays is an integer number of system samples. In realistic scenarios timing offsets and echo delays are not integer multiples of the system’s sampling period. This leads to poor estimation and consequently reduces the system’s overall performance. This paper proposes a novel iterative channel estimation technique, which considers the practical scenario of fractional timing error and nonsample-spaced echo delays. The proposed method does not require channel state information (e.g., second-order statistics of the channel impulse responses or the noise power). Moreover, timing error can be conveniently obtained with the proposed technique. Simulation results show that, when comparing OFDMA channel estimation techniques under realistic data over cable service interface specification 3.1 channel conditions, the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms all conventional methods known to the authors.

Translating research into practice through user-centered design: An application for osteoarthritis healthcare planning

ObjectiveTo identify the needs and requirements of the end users, to inform the development of a user-interface to translate an existing evidence-based decision support tool into a practical and usable interface for health service planning for osteoarthritis (OA) care. Materials and MethodsWe used a user-centered design (UCD) approach that emphasized the role of the end-users and is well-suited to knowledge translation (KT). The first phase used a needs assessment focus group (n=8) and interviews (n=5) with target users (health care planners) within a provincial health care organization. The second phase used a participatory design approach, with two small group sessions (n=6) to explore workflow, thought processes, and needs of intended users. ResultsThe needs assessment identified five design recommendations: ensuring the user-interface supports the target user group, allowing for user-directed data explorations, input parameter flexibility, clear presentation, and provision of relevant definitions. The second phase identified workflow insights from a proposed scenario. Graphs, the need for a visual overview of the data, and interactivity were key considerations to aid in meaningful use of the model and knowledge translation. ConclusionA UCD approach is well suited to identify health care planners’ requirements when using a decision support tool to improve health service planning and management of OA. We believe this is one of the first applications to be used in planning for health service delivery. We identified specific design recommendations that will increase user acceptability and uptake of the user-interface and underlying decision support tool in practice. Our approach demonstrated how UCD can be used to enable knowledge translation.

Drivers of health system strengthening: learning from implementation of maternal and child health programmes in Mozambique, Nepal and Rwanda.

There is a growing understanding that strong health systems are crucial to sustain progress. Health systems, however, are complex and much of their success depends on factors operating at different levels and outside the health system, including broader governance and political commitment to health and social development priorities. Recognizing these complexities, this article offers a pragmatic approach to exploring the drivers of progress in maternal and child health in Mozambique, Nepal and Rwanda. To do this, the article builds on a semi-systematic literature review and case study findings, designed and analysed using a multi-level framework. At the macro level, governance with effective and committed leaders was found to be vital for achieving positive health outcomes. This was underpinned by clear commitment from donors coupled by a significant increase in funding to the health sector. At the meso level, where policies are operationalized, inter-sectoral partnerships as well as decentralization and task-shifting emerged as critical. At micro (service interface) level, community-centred models and accessible and appropriately trained and incentivized local health providers play a central role in all study countries. The key drivers of progress are multiple, interrelated and transversal in terms of their operation; they are also in a constant state of flux as health systems and contexts develop. Without seeking to offer a blueprint, the study demonstrates that a 'whole-system' approach can help elicit the key drivers of change and potential pathways towards desirable outcomes. Furthermore, understanding the challenges and opportunities that are instrumental to progress at each particular level of a health system can help policy-makers and implementers to navigate this complexity and take action to strengthen health systems.

Driving and Fuel Consumption Monitoring with Internet of Things

Problems related to fuel consumption efficiency are likely to occur in a car rental company. A system for the Internet of Things – VISCar to monitor fuel consumption on Android mobile application is proposed to solve the problem. The VISCar has four features, including driving behavior analysis, monitoring, notification, and location and route to the gas station. This system consists of three subsystems: connector, server, and user interface. Car’s engine data is scanned by OBDII and sent via Bluetooth to Raspberry Pi then passed using 3G connection to the server and being stored. The data can be accessed by users through a mobile application via MQTT and processed on server for analysis. The test results show VISCar has been successfully built and implemented to monitor fuel consumption efficiency for the car rental company.

GRAPLEr: A distributed collaborative environment for lake ecosystem modeling that integrates overlay networks, high‐throughput computing, and WEB services

SummaryThe GLEON Research And PRAGMA Lake Expedition—GRAPLE—is a collaborative effort between computer science and lake ecology researchers. It aims to improve our understanding and predictive capacity of the threats to the water quality of our freshwater resources, including climate change. This paper presents GRAPLEr, a distributed computing system used to address the modeling needs of GRAPLE researchers. GRAPLEr integrates and applies overlay virtual network, high‐throughput computing, and WEB service technologies in a novel way. First, its user‐level IP‐over‐P2P overlay network allows compute and storage resources distributed across independently administered institutions (including private and public clouds) to be aggregated into a common virtual network, despite the presence of firewalls and network address translators. Second, resources aggregated by the IP‐over‐P2P virtual network run unmodified high‐throughput‐computing middleware to enable large numbers of model simulations to be executed concurrently across the distributed computing resources. Third, a WEB service interface allows end users to submit job requests to the system using client libraries that integrate with the R statistical computing environment. The paper presents the GRAPLEr architecture, describes its implementation and reports on its performance for batches of general lake model simulations across 3 cloud infrastructures (University of Florida, CloudLab, and Microsoft Azure).

SeMFIS: A flexible engineering platform for semantic annotations of conceptual models

In this paper, we present SeMFIS - a flexible engineering platform for semantic annotations of conceptual models. Conceptual models have in the past been used for many purposes in the context of information systems' engineering. These purposes include for example the elicitation of requirements, the simulation of the behavior of future information systems, the generation of code or the interaction with information systems through models at runtime. Semantic annotations of conceptual models constitute a recently established approach for dynamically extending the semantic representation and semantic analysis scope of conceptual modeling languages. Thereby, elements in conceptual models are linked to concepts in ontologies via anno- tations. Thus, additional knowledge aspects can be represented without modifications of the modeling languages. These aspects can then be analyzed using queries, specifically designed algorithms or external tools and services. At its core, SeMFIS provides a set of meta models for visually representing ontologies and semantic annotations as models. In addition, the tool contains an analysis component, a web service interface, and an import/export component to query and exchange model information. SeM- FIS has been implemented using the freely available ADOxx meta modeling platform. It can thus be easily added to the large variety of other modeling methods based on this platform or used as an additional service for other tools. We present the main features of SeMFIS and briefly discuss use cases where it has been applied. SeMFIS is freely available via the OMiLAB.org website at http://www.omilab.org/web/semfis.

Older Adults and Email Use: The challenges facing interface co-design

Faced with a rapidly ageing society and with constant technological progression, studies focused on fostering communicative action and reducing social isolation have become increasingly relevant. This paper presents a proposal of a graphical interface for an asynchronous communication service aimed at older adults, which was tested in different user contexts – both in Portugal and the United States of America. The main aims of this study are to determine to what extent the participation of older adults in the development of an email service can influence its usability and the design of a simplified interface. The usability results provide consistent clues as to how the technical development of an email service for older adults should proceed. We conclude that we should not design an email interface so as to be completely different from existing ones. Rather, we chose to improve its usability and simplify the entire process of using an email service.

Discovering composable web services using functional semantics and service dependencies based on natural language requests

The processes of service discovery, selection and composition are crucial tasks in web service based application development. Most web service-driven applications are complex and are composed of more than one service, so, it becomes important for application designers to identify the best service to perform the next task in the intended application’s workflow. In this paper, a framework for discovering composable service sets as per user’s complex requirements is proposed. The proposed approach uses natural language processing and semantics based techniques to extract the functional semantics of the service dataset and also to understand user context. In case of simple queries, basic services may be enough to satisfy the user request, however, in case of complex queries, several basic services may have to be identified to serve all the requirements, in the correct sequence. For this, the service dependencies of all the services are used for constructing a service interface graph for finding suitable composable services. Experiments showed that the proposed approach was effective towards finding relevant services for simple & complex queries and achieved an average accuracy rate of 75.09 % in finding correct composable service templates.

MotifNet: a web-server for network motif analysis.

Network motifs are small topological patterns that recur in a network significantly more often than expected by chance. Their identification emerged as a powerful approach for uncovering the design principles underlying complex networks. However, available tools for network motif analysis typically require download and execution of computationally intensive software on a local computer. We present MotifNet, the first open-access web-server for network motif analysis. MotifNet allows researchers to analyze integrated networks, where nodes and edges may be labeled, and to search for motifs of up to eight nodes. The output motifs are presented graphically and the user can interactively filter them by their significance, number of instances, node and edge labels, and node identities, and view their instances. MotifNet also allows the user to distinguish between motifs that are centered on specific nodes and motifs that recur in distinct parts of the network. MotifNet is freely available at http://netbio.bgu.ac.il/motifnet . The website was implemented using ReactJs and supports all major browsers. The server interface was implemented in Python with data stored on a MySQL database. estiyl@bgu.ac.il or michaluz@cs.bgu.ac.il. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

End-to-End Response Time of IEC 61499 Distributed Applications Over Switched Ethernet

The IEC 61499 standard provides means to specify distributed control systems in terms of function blocks. For the deployment, each device may hold one or many logical resources, each consisting of a function block network with service interface blocks at the edges. The execution model is event driven (asynchronous), where triggering events may be associated with data (and seen as messages). In this paper, we propose a low-complexity implementation technique allowing to assess end-to-end response times of event chains spanning over a set of networked devices. Based on a translation of IEC 61499 to RTFM 1 1 Real-time for the masses.

A modernized version of a 1D soil vegetation atmosphere transfer model for improving its future use in land surface interactions studies

SimSphere is a land biosphere model that provides a mathematical representation of vertical ‘views’ of the physical mechanisms controlling Earth's energy and mass transfers in the soil/vegetation/atmosphere continuum. Herein, we present recent advancements introduced to SimSphere code, aiming at making its use more integrated to the automation of processes within High Performance Computing (HPC) that allows using the model at large scale. In particular, a new interface to the model is presented, so-called “SimSphere-SOA” which forms a command line land biosphere tool, a Web Service interface and a parameters verification facade that offers a standardised environment for specification execution and result retrieval of a typical model simulation based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). SimSphere-SOA library can now execute various simulations in parallel. This allows exploitation of the tool in a simple and efficient way in comparison to the currently distributed approach. In SimSphere-SOA, an Application Programming Interface (API) is also provided to execute simulations that can be publicly consumed. Finally this API is exported as a Web Service for remotely executing simulations through web based tools. This way a simulation by the model can be executed efficiently and subsequently the model simulation outputs may be used in any kind of relevant analysis required.The use of these new functionalities offered by SimSphere-SOA is also demonstrated using a “real world” simulation configuration file. The inclusion of those new functions in SimSphere are of considerable importance in the light of the model's expanding use worldwide as an educational and research tool.

An approach for scaling cloud resource management

Given its current development trajectory, the complexity of cloud computing ecosystems are evolving to where traditional resource management strategies will struggle to remain fit for purpose. These strategies have to cope with ever-increasing numbers of heterogeneous resources, a proliferation of new services, and a growing user-base with diverse and specialized requirements. This growth not only significantly increases the number of parameters needed to make good decisions, it increases the time needed to take these decisions. Consequently, traditional resource management systems are increasingly prone to poor decisions making. Devolving resources management decisions to the local environment of that resource can dramatically increase the speed of decisions making; moreover, the cost of gathering global information can thus be eliminated; saving communication costs. Experimental data, provided in this paper, illustrate that extant cloud deployments can be used as effective vehicles for devolved decision making. This finding strengthens the case for the proposed paradigm shift, since it does not require a change to the architecture of existing cloud systems. This shift would result in systems in which resources decide for themselves how best they can be used. This paper takes this idea to its logical conclusion and proposes a system for supporting self-managing resources in cloud environments. It introduces the concept of coalitions, consisting of collaborating resources, formed for the purpose of service delivery. It suggests the utility of restricting the interactions between the end-user and the cloud service provider to a well-defined services interface. It shows how clouds can be considered functionally, as engines for delivering an appropriate set of resources in response to service requests. And finally, since modern applications are increasingly constructed from sophisticated workflows of complex components, it shows how combinatorial auctions can be used to effectively deliver packages of resources to support those workflows.

Designing for Social Infrastructures in Complex Service Systems: A Human-Centered and Social Systems Perspective on Service Design

Service design is one of the keys to improving how we target today’s complex societal problems. The predominant view of service systems is mechanistic and linear. A service infrastructure—which includes solutions like service blueprints, scripts, and protocols—is, in some ways, designed to control the behavior of service professionals at the service interface. This view undermines the intrinsic motivation, expertise, and creativity of service professionals. This article presents a different perspective on service design. Using theories of social systems and complex responsive processes, I define service organizations as ongoing iterated patterns of relationships between people, and identify them as complex social service systems. I go on to show how the human-centeredness of design practices contributes to designing for such service systems. In particular, I show how a deep understanding of the needs and aspirations of service professionals through phenomenological themes contributes to designing for social infrastructures that support continuous improvement and adaptation of the practices executed by service professionals at the service interface.

Interactive Refactoring of Web Service Interfaces Using Computational Search

Successful Web services evolve through a process of continuous change due to several reasons such as improving the quality, fixing bugs and adding new features. However, this evolution process may weaken the design of the Web service's interface by aggregating many non-cohesive and semantically unrelated operations. Thus, the service interface becomes unnecessarily complex for users to find relevant operations to be used by their services-based systems. In this paper, we propose an interactive recommendation approach, based on evolutionary algorithms, that dynamically adapts and suggests a possible remodularization of the Web services interface design to users/developers and takes their feedback into consideration. Our approach uses an interactive multi-criteria decision-making algorithm, based on interactive Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA-II), to find a set of good design interface modularization solutions. These solutions provide a trade-off between improving several interface design quality metrics (e.g., coupling, cohesion, number of port types, and number of antipatterns) and fix Web services design antipatterns, maximizing the satisfaction of the interaction constraints learnt from the user feedback during the execution of the algorithm while minimizing the deviation from the initial design. We evaluated our approach on a set of 22 real world Web services, provided by Amazon and Yahoo. Statistical analysis of our experiments shows that our dynamic interactive Web services interface modularization approach performed significantly better than the state-of-the-art modularization techniques in terms of generating well-designed Web services interface for users.

Assessing Web Services Interfaces with Lightweight Semantic Basis

In the last years, Web Services have become the technological choice to materialize the Service-Oriented Computing paradigm. However, a broad use of Web Services requires efficient approaches to allow service consumption from within applications. Currently, developers are compelled to search for suitable services mainly by manually exploring Web catalogs, which usually show poorly relevant information, than to provide the adequate glue-code for their assembly. This implies a large effort into discovering, selecting and adapting services. To overcome these challenges, this paper presents a novel Web Service Selection Method. We have defined an Interface Compatibility procedure to assess structural-semantic aspects from functional specifications - in the form of WSDL documents - of candidate Web Services. Two different semantic basis have been used to define and implement the approach: WordNet, a widely known lexical dictionary of the English language; and DISCO, a database which indexes co-occurrences of terms in very large text collections. We performed a set of experiments to evaluate the approach regarding the underlying semantic basis and against third-party approaches with a data-set of real-life Web Services. Promising results have been obtained in terms of well-known metrics of the Information Retrieval field.

A structural-semantic web service selection approach to improve retrievability of web services

Service-Oriented Computing promotes building applications by consuming and reusing Web Services. However, the selection of adequate Web Services given a client application is still a major challenge. The effort of assessing and adapting candidate services could be overwhelming due to the “impedance” of Web Service interfaces expected by clients versus the actual interfaces of retrieved Web Services. In this work, we present a novel structural-semantic approach to help developers in the retrieval and selection of services from a service registry. The approach is based on a comprehensive structural scheme for service Interface Compatibility analysis, and WordNet as the semantic support to assess identifiers of operations and parameters. We also empirically analyze, compare and contrast the performance of three service selection methods: a pure structural approach, a pure semantic approach, and the structural-semantic (hybrid) approach proposed in this work. The experimental analysis was performed with two data-sets of real-world Web Services and a service discovery support already published in the literature. Results show that our hybrid service selection approach improved effectiveness in terms of retrievability of Web Services compared to the other approaches.

An Efficient Framework for Providing Secured Transaction of Data in Cloud Environment

Background/Objectives: The aim our work is to achieve transactional security for users across cloud servers. Method/Statistical Analysis: A framework called Conditional Source Encryption based Data Transactional Security (CSEDTS) is developed in cloud environment. The transaction request sent to cloud data storage is evaluated as conditional attributes. The obtained conditional attributes are encrypted with the help of Conditional Source Encryption method. Then, mapping function is applied for conditional attributes by using unique secured identity number and then these conditional attributes gets decrypted. Findings: Experiments are conducted and the performance analysis shows that the transactional security rate on data layer and the true positive rate are improved. Applications/Improvements: This technique increases security of data that can be applied to access a wide range of resources and applications through web service interface. In future, this can be improved by reducing the transaction time.

Templates as a method for implementing data provenance in decision support systems

Decision support systems are used as a method of promoting consistent guideline-based diagnosis supporting clinical reasoning at point of care. However, despite the availability of numerous commercial products, the wider acceptance of these systems has been hampered by concerns about diagnostic performance and a perceived lack of transparency in the process of generating clinical recommendations. This resonates with the Learning Health System paradigm that promotes data-driven medicine relying on routine data capture and transformation, which also stresses the need for trust in an evidence-based system. Data provenance is a way of automatically capturing the trace of a research task and its resulting data, thereby facilitating trust and the principles of reproducible research. While computational domains have started to embrace this technology through provenance-enabled execution middlewares, traditionally non-computational disciplines, such as medical research, that do not rely on a single software platform, are still struggling with its adoption. In order to address these issues, we introduce provenance templates – abstract provenance fragments representing meaningful domain actions. Templates can be used to generate a model-driven service interface for domain software tools to routinely capture the provenance of their data and tasks. This paper specifies the requirements for a Decision Support tool based on the Learning Health System, introduces the theoretical model for provenance templates and demonstrates the resulting architecture. Our methods were tested and validated on the provenance infrastructure for a Diagnostic Decision Support System that was developed as part of the EU FP7 TRANSFoRm project.

An ideal-typical model for comparing interprofessional relations and skill mix in health care.

BackgroundComparisons of health system performance, including the regulations of interprofessional relations and the skill mix between health professions are challenging. National strategies for regulating interprofessional relations vary widely across European health care systems. Unambiguously defined and generally accepted performance indicators have to remain generic, with limited power for recognizing the organizational structures regulating interprofessional relations in different health systems. A coherent framework for in-depth comparisons of different models for organizing interprofessional relations and the skill mix between professional groups is currently not available. This study aims to develop an ideal-typical framework for categorizing skill mix and interprofessional relations in health care, and to assess the potential impact for different ideal types on care coordination and integrated service delivery.MethodsA document analysis of the Health Systems in Transition (HiT) reports published by the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies was conducted. The HiT reports to 31 European health systems were analyzed using a qualitative content analysis and a process of meaning condensation.ResultsThe educational tracks available to nurses have an impact on the professional autonomy for nurses, the hierarchy between professional groups, the emphasis given to negotiating skill mix, interdisciplinary teamwork and the extent of cooperation across the health and social service interface. Based on the results of the document analysis, three ideal types for regulating interprofessional relations and skill mix in health care are delimited. For each ideal type, outcomes on service coordination and holistic service delivery are described.ConclusionsComparisons of interprofessional relations are necessary for proactive health human resource policies. The proposed ideal-typical framework provides the means for in-depth comparisons of interprofessional relations in the health care workforce beyond of what is possible with directly comparable, but generic performance indicators.