How has Japan become a major economic power, a world leader in the automotive and electronics industries? What is the secret of their success? The consensus has been that, though the Japanese are not particularly innovative, they are exceptionally skilful at imitation, at improving products that already exist. But now two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, turn this conventional wisdom on its head: Japanese firms are successful, they contend, precisely because they are innovative, because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. Examining case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, 3M, GE, and the U.S. Marines, this book reveals how Japanese companies translate tacit to explicit knowledge and use it to produce new processes, products, and services.

The knowledge-creating company : how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation

Data replication is a key technology in distributed systems that enables higher availability and performance. This article surveys optimistic replication algorithms. They allow replica contents to diverge in the short term to support concurrent work practices and tolerate failures in low-quality communication links. The importance of such techniques is increasing as collaboration through wide-area and mobile networks becomes popular.Optimistic replication deploys algorithms not seen in traditional “pessimistic” systems. Instead of synchronous replica coordination, an optimistic algorithm propagates changes in the background, discovers conflicts after they happen, and reaches agreement on the final contents incrementally.We explore the solution space for optimistic replication algorithms. This article identifies key challenges facing optimistic replication systems---ordering operations, detecting and resolving conflicts, propagating changes efficiently, and bounding replica divergence---and provides a comprehensive survey of techniques developed for addressing these challenges.

/pdf/optimistic-replication-olzqfvhf6n.pdf

Optimistic replication

What is total quality control? : the Japanese way

http://globule.org/publi/WWADH_comnet2009.pdf

Wikipedia workload analysis for decentralized hosting

Current configuration management systems promote workspaces that isolate developers from each other. This isolation is both good and bad. It is good, because developers make their changes without any interference from changes made concurrently by other developers. It is bad, because not knowing which artifacts are changing in parallel regularly leads to problems when changes are promoted from workspaces into a central configuration management repository. Overcoming the bad isolation, while retaining the good isolation, is a matter of raising awareness among developers, an issue traditionally ignored by the discipline of configuration management. To fill this void, we have developed Palantir, a novel workspace awareness tool that complements existing configuration management systems by providing developers with insight into other workspaces. In particular, the tool informs a developer of which other developers change which other artifacts, calculates a simple measure of severity of those changes, and graphically displays the information in a configurable and generally non-obtrusive manner. To illustrate the use of Palantir, we demonstrate how it integrates with two representative configuration management systems.

https://www.ics.uci.edu/~andre/papers/C25.pdf

Palantir: raising awareness among configuration management workspaces

Reconciliating divergent data is an important issue in concurrent engineering, mobile computing and software configuration management. Currently, a lot of synchronizers or merge tools perform reconciliations. However, they do not define what is the correctness of their synchronisation. In this paper, we propose to use a transformational approach as the basic model for reasonning about synchronisation. We propose an algorithm and specific transformation functions that realize a file system synchronisation. Unlike classic synchronizers, our synchronizer ensures properties of convergence, causality and intention preservation and is extensible to new data types.

/pdf/using-the-transformational-approach-to-build-a-safe-and-1vfb3nivxu.pdf

Using the transformational approach to build a safe and generic data synchronizer

Awareness widgets facilitate coordination for both synchronous and asynchronous groupware systems. Unfortunately, they cannot be used for multi-synchronous groupware systems, where people work simultaneously but disconnected on the same project. With a group of architects, we have designed a new awareness widget for multi-synchronous groupware system called "State Treemap". This widget shows the divergence states of shared objects using Shneiderman's treemap visualization (1992). We have developed and integrated this widget in a platform for hosting virtual teams of architects. We describe the motivations, the design and the realization of this original widget.

State Treemap: an awareness widget for multi-synchronous groupware

In the context of cooperative work a team alternates divergence phases where each member works in insulation on copies of objects and convergence phases during which the group reconciles and validates data. To support this style of working, we propose the concept of SAMS environment. A SAMS environment allows team members to work in synchronous, asynchronous or multi-synchronous mode while ensuring the coherence of shared data.

/pdf/sams-synchronous-asynchronous-multi-synchronous-environments-1eoq8kbkvp.pdf

SAMS: synchronous, asynchronous, multi-synchronous environments

Answering queries over a federation of SPARQL endpoints requires combining data from more than one data source. Optimizing queries in such scenarios is particularly challenging not only because of (i) the large variety of possible query execution plans that correctly answer the query but also because (ii) there is only limited access to statistics about schema and instance data of remote sources. To overcome these challenges, most federated query engines rely on heuristics to reduce the space of possible query execution plans or on dynamic programming strategies to produce optimal plans. Nevertheless, these plans may still exhibit a high number of intermediate results or high execution times because of heuristics and inaccurate cost estimations. In this paper, we present Odyssey, an approach that uses statistics that allow for a more accurate cost estimation for federated queries and therefore enables Odyssey to produce better query execution plans. Our experimental results show that Odyssey produces query execution plans that are better in terms of data transfer and execution time than state-of-the-art optimizers. Our experiments using the FedBench benchmark show execution time gains of at least 25 times on average.

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01839973/document

The Odyssey Approach for Optimizing Federated SPARQL Queries

Tools like SourceForge or BSCW have popularized virtual teams through the web. They allow people to work together distributed across space, time and organization. A member of a virtual team can work disconnected on his private copies of shared objects with cycles of divergence-convergence. Divergence occurs when people are working insulated in their private workspaces and convergence takes place during integration phases. Although, these cycles are very natural, usually users are not aware of the amount of the divergence, where is it located? With who? Is it increasing? In this paper, we propose an algorithm to measure divergence and different visualizations of the divergence.

Hala Skaf-Molli

Papers

Using the transformational approach to build a safe and generic data synchronizer

State Treemap: an awareness widget for multi-synchronous groupware

SAMS: synchronous, asynchronous, multi-synchronous environments

The Odyssey Approach for Optimizing Federated SPARQL Queries

Divergence Awareness for Virtual Team through the Web