Workflows and e-Science: An overview of workflow system features and capabilities

Hand movement data acquisition is used in many engineering applications ranging from the analysis of gestures to the biomedical sciences. Glove-based systems represent one of the most important efforts aimed at acquiring hand movement data. While they have been around for over three decades, they keep attracting the interest of researchers from increasingly diverse fields. This paper surveys such glove systems and their applications. It also analyzes the characteristics of the devices, provides a road map of the evolution of the technology, and discusses limitations of current technology and trends at the frontiers of research. A foremost goal of this paper is to provide readers who are new to the area with a basis for understanding glove systems technology and how it can be applied, while offering specialists an updated picture of the breadth of applications in several engineering and biomedical sciences areas.

A Survey of Glove-Based Systems and Their Applications

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Data integration: the teenage years

Reference reconciliation is the problem of identifying when different references (i.e., sets of attribute values) in a dataset correspond to the same real-world entity. Most previous literature assumed references to a single class that had a fair number of attributes (e.g., research publications). We consider complex information spaces: our references belong to multiple related classes and each reference may have very few attribute values. A prime example of such a space is Personal Information Management, where the goal is to provide a coherent view of all the information on one's desktop.Our reconciliation algorithm has three principal features. First, we exploit the associations between references to design new methods for reference comparison. Second, we propagate information between reconciliation decisions to accumulate positive and negative evidences. Third, we gradually enrich references by merging attribute values. Our experiments show that (1) we considerably improve precision and recall over standard methods on a diverse set of personal information datasets, and (2) there are advantages to using our algorithm even on a standard citation dataset benchmark.

Reference reconciliation in complex information spaces

Different planning techniques have been applied to the problem of automated composition of web services. However, in realistic cases, this planning problem is far from trivial: the planner needs to deal with the nondeterministic behavior of web services, the partial observability of their internal status, and with complex goals expressing temporal conditions and preference requirements. We propose a planning technique for the automated composition of web services described in OWLS process models, which can deal effectively with nondeterminism, partial observability, and complex goals. The technique allows for the synthesis of plans that encode compositions of web services with the usual programming constructs, like conditionals and iterations. The generated plans can thus be translated into executable processes, e.g., BPEL4WS programs. We implement our solution in a planner and do some preliminary experimental evaluations that show the potentialities of our approach, and the gain in performance of automating the composition at the semantic level w.r.t. the automated composition at the level of executable processes.

Automated composition of semantic web services into executable processes

The power of web services can only be realized when web services are utilized as building blocks to dynamically compose new web services. The Building Finder application is an example application that integrates information from several web services by modeling the web services as information sources in a mediator-based architecture. The paper also describes a mediator framework to dynamically compose new web services, similar to the Building Finder, by generating an integration plan to integrate information from the existing web services.

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Dynamically Composing Web Services from On-line Sources

Web services enable the user to integrate and manipulate data from distributed data sources without worrying about the underlying syntactical details. We describe extensions to the view integration approach to support dynamic integration of data from web services and support dynamic composition of web services from existing web services. In particular, we describe techniques to extend the “inverse rules” query reformulation algorithm to generate a universal integration plan to answer user queries. To demonstrate the effectiveness of these techniques we describe a mediator-based system that dynamically integrates various web services in response to a user query and provides a integrated web service that can handle a range of user queries.

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A View Integration Approach to Dynamic Composition of Web Services

Recent growth of the geospatial information on the web has made it possible to easily access various maps and orthoimagery. By integrating these maps and imagery, we can create intelligent images that combine the visual appeal and accuracy of imagery with the detailed attribution information often contained in diverse maps. However, accurately integrating maps and imagery from different data sources remains a challenging task. This is because spatial data obtained from various data sources may have different projections and different accuracy levels. Most of the existing algorithms only deal with vector to vector spatial data integration or require human intervention to accomplish imagery to map conflation. In this paper, we describe an information integration approach that utilizes common vector datasets as "glue" to automatically conflate imagery with street maps. We present efficient techniques to automatically extract road intersections from imagery and maps as control points. We also describe a specialized point pattern matching algorithm to align the two point sets and conflation techniques to align the imagery with maps. We show that these automatic conflation techniques can automatically and accurately align maps with images of the same area. In particular, using the approach described in this paper, our system automatically aligns a set of TIGER maps for an area in El Segundo, CA to the corresponding orthoimagery with an average error of 8.35 meters per pixel. This is a significant improvement considering that simply combining the TIGER maps with the corresponding imagery based on geographic coordinates provided by the sources results in error of 27 meters per pixel.

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Automatically and accurately conflating orthoimagery and street maps

Building Finder uses semantic Web technologies to integrate different data types from various online data sources. The application's use of the RDF and RDF data query language makes it usable by computer agents as well as human users. An agent would send a query, expressed in terms of its preferred ontology (schema), to a system that would then find and integrate the relevant data from multiple sources and return it using the agent's ontology. We discuss about retrieving and semantically integrating heterogeneous data from the Web.

Retrieving and semantically integrating heterogeneous data from the Web

The emergence of a large number of bioinformatics datasets on the Internet has resulted in the need for flexible and efficient approaches to integrate information from multiple bioinformatics data sources and services. In this paper, we present our approach to automatically generate composition plans for web services, optimize the composition plans, and execute these plans efficiently. While data integration techniques have been applied to the bioinformatics domain, the focus has been on answering specific user queries. In contrast, we focus on automatically generating parameterized integration plans that can be hosted as web services that respond to a range of inputs. In addition, we present two novel techniques that improve the execution time of the generated plans by reducing the number of requests to the existing data sources and by executing the generated plan more efficiently. The first optimization technique, called tuple-level filtering, analyzes the source/service descriptions in order to automatically insert filtering conditions in the composition plans that result in fewer requests to the component web services. To ensure that the filtering conditions can be evaluated, this technique may include sensing operations in the integration plan. The savings due to filtering significantly exceed the cost of the sensing operations. The second optimization technique consists in mapping the integration plans into programs that can be executed by a dataflow-style, streaming execution engine. We use real-world bioinformatics web services to show experimentally that (1) our automatic composition techniques can efficiently generate parameterized plans that integrate data from large numbers of existing services and (2) our optimization techniques can significantly reduce the response time of the generated integration plans.

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Snehal Thakkar

Papers

Dynamically Composing Web Services from On-line Sources

A View Integration Approach to Dynamic Composition of Web Services

Automatically and accurately conflating orthoimagery and street maps

Retrieving and semantically integrating heterogeneous data from the Web

Composing, optimizing, and executing plans for bioinformatics web services