Organizations are continuously expanding their use of computer ser-vices. As the number of applications in an organization grows, so does the load on the user management. Registering and unregistering users both from within the organization and also from partner organizations, as well as managing their privileges and providing support all accumu-lates significant costs for the user management. FIdM is a solution that can centralize user management, allow partner organizations to feder-ate, ease users’ password management, provide SSO functionality and externalize the authentication logic from application development. An FIdM system with two organizations, AD FS and two applications have been deployed. The applications are constructed in .NET, with WIF, and in Java using a custom implementation of WS-Federation. In order to evaluate the system, a functional test and a security analysis have been performed. The result of the functional test shows that the system has been implemented successfully. With the use of AD FS, users from both organizations are able to authenticate within their own organization and are then able to access the applications in the organizations without any repeated authentication. The result of the security analysis shows that the overall security in the system is good. The use of AD FS does not allow anyone to bypass authentication. However, the standard integra-tion of WIF in the .NET application makes it more susceptible to a DoS attack. It has been indicated that FIdM can have positive effects on an organization’s user management, a user’s password management and login procedures, authentication logic in application development, while still maintaining a good level of security.

This study examines the Uralian iron and steel industry distribution, its changes through time and the reasons for these changes. At present, this is one of the important iron and steel producing regions in the world. At one time it was the most important. In order to obtain the information on which to base this study, it was necessary to resort mainly to published materials, largely Soviet. The American Iron and Steel Institute also supplied some non-published material. In order to collect the published materials it was necessary to make use of the libraries of the University of British Columbia the University of Washington and the Geographical Branch of the Department of Mines and Technical Surveys in Ottawa. Other Ottawa libraries, the personal collections of Dr. Hooson and Dr. Jackson, various bookstores, notably Kamkin's bookstore in Washington, D. C, the bookstore at the United Nations in New York and Davis bookstore in Montreal, were also very useful. The primary problem when conducting a study of this nature is the collecting of sufficient relevant materials for a balanced appraisal of the phenomena being examined. A knowledge of Russian is mandatory and an acquaintance with French is also useful. The information gathered was organized into tables and plotted on maps. These bodies of data were then described and analyzed. Analysis of the Uralian iron and steel industry indicated that this industry was initially essentially located on the iron ore supply. But none of the major plants are at present located on iron ore resources that are large enough to amortize the plant. Also the major plants are on the whole, based on low quality ores. The major economic advantage of the Uralian iron and steel industry production is its association with the Eastern coal supplies. But this advantage is common to all Eastern plants. Expansion at Magnitogorsk will result in more expensive production than the construction of new plants would, even though Magnitogorsk is the most efficient Uralian plant. The Urals is well located for the introduction of natural gas into its metallurgy. This is proceeding. Nevertheless, the use of natural gas is only a partial solution to the fuel problem because it can not completely replace coke. Therefore, the Urals will have to continue bringing in coking coal over great distances. The de-emphasis of iron and steel announced in 1962 will help the Urals to perpetuate its present status as a producer (it supplies about one-third of the Soviet production). On the other hand, no significant increase in its relative importance can be expected. The bulk of the Uralian iron and steel production is located in the Eastern Urals, more particularly in the South Eastern Urals. In 1956, the three largest plants: Magnitogorsk and Chelyabinsk in the South Eastern Urals, and Nizhne Tagil'sk in the Central Urals produced 77 per cent of the Uralian pig iron and 67 per cent of the steel smelted. This has not significantly changed subsequently. Considerable expansion, based on Kachkanar ores, is planned for Nizhne Tagil'sk. But, all things considered, most of the expansion will be located at the major South Uralian plants. / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate

Heraclitus said, "Man is estranged from that with which he is most familiar." Which is to say, himself. Man, as imperialist, is particularly estranged from his true self. This, then, is the "problem" confronted in the following pages - the processes, bred of his alienation from himself, by which man distorts his perception of his human and physical environments so as to bring them into accordance with his own mystified self-image. Mid-nineteenth century England, like Heraclitus' Greece, turned out an impressive array of imperialists, among them the "Residents", to whom the administration of Her Majesty's Further Indian Empire was entrusted. Victorian England was also for the most part lacking in that quality, as Keats understood it, of Negative Capability - "that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." It was a quality which, by their own confession, the Residents found amply present in the Malays. Given a remarkable opportunity to "learn" this quality in the Malayan setting however, the British, as purveyors of law and order and the scientific method, by setting about making over the Malays in the image of the Victorian gentleman, almost without exception conspired to destroy precisely what might have been their salvation from the dilemmas of imperialism. I have attempted to understand how and why the British adapted their image of Malaya and the Malays to their own reality - a reality determined (for all that they might have been condemned in some circles for "going native") by their own experience as Victorian imperialists, and conceived in essential ignorance of the country and its people. Moreover, I have hypothesized that since people are to a certain extent what others make them, the Malays came to accept and to act out, in varying degrees, the British image of them. Finally, I would conclude with Charles Olsen that history itself can be shown to be of two kinds. One is negatively capable - a function of any one of us, and as such can be taken quietly and usefully. The other is power. Men can and do wilfully set in motion egotistical, sublime events. They have effect which looks like use. These are power, and history as primordial and prospective is seen to demand the recognition that the other history - which I would call ‘anti-history’ – is not good enough. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate

A Christian reformational perspective is introduced and adopted. A critique of modernist, industrialising agriculture is constructed, drawing partly on the work of contemporary agrarian writers. The notion of a regenerative agriculture is advocated. The two ways in which stewardship has been used as an environmental ethic is reviewed: as resource development and conservation, and earthkeeping. The earthkeeping definition is used to formulate the normative concept of agricultural stewardship. The Christian Farmers Federation of Ontario (CFFO) was established by Dutch neo-Calvinist immigrants in the early 1950s, the Christian Farmers Federation of Alberta (CFFA) by the same community in the early 1970s. The history of these two small general farmers' organisations is detailed against the backdrop of separate Christian organisations in the Netherlands and North America. Direct links are traced back to the Christelijke Boeren- en Tuindersbond (CBTB), the Christian Farmers and Gardeners Union, established in the Netherlands in 1918. CFFO and CFFA (which changed its name to Earthkeeping in 1992) are presented as institutions reflecting a "transformational" approach to Christian social action, existing within the mainstream of modern society and agriculture, seeking to transform them. The role of stewardship and the significance of the family farm in the policies of the two Federations are analysed, along with their efforts to protect agricultural land from urban and industrial encroachment. Both Federations have become leading farmers' organisations in environmental issues. An analysis of semi-structured in-depth interviews with CFFA members and non-members in two areas of central Alberta in 1986 shows the significance of stewardship in the beliefs and farming practices of CFFA members. An ecological stewardship index is constructed to explore the use of land management practices. In general, the CFFA members interviewed were using practices that were more environmentally responsible than their neighbours, although there were differences between the two locales studied. It is concluded that the mode of institutional organisation of the two Federations has enabled their members to have more influence, to articulate their views more clearly, and to promote agricultural stewardship more widely. / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate

The Web of Data has grown enormously over the last years. Currently, it comprises a large compendium of linked and distributed datasets from multiple domains. Due to the decentralised architecture of the Web of Data, several of these datasets contain complementary data. Running complex queries on this compendium thus often requires accessing data from different data sources within one query. The abundance of datasets and the need for running complex query has thus motivated a considerable body of work on SPARQL query federation systems, the dedicated means to access data distributed over the Web of Data. This thesis addresses two key areas of federated SPARQL query processing: (1) efficient source selection, and (2) comprehensive SPARQL benchmarks to test and ranked federated SPARQL engines as well as triple stores. Efficient Source Selection: Efficient source selection is one of the most important optimization steps in federated SPARQL query processing. An overestimation of query relevant data sources increases the network traffic, result in irrelevant intermediate results, and can significantly affect the overall query processing time. Previous works have focused on generating optimized query execution plans for fast result retrieval. However, devising source selection approaches beyond triple pattern-wise source selection has not received much attention. Similarly, only little attention has been paid to the effect of duplicated data on federated querying. This thesis presents HiBISCuS and TBSS, novel hypergraph-based source selection approaches, and DAW, a duplicate-aware source selection approach to federated querying over the Web of Data. Each of these approaches can be combined directly with existing SPARQL query federation engines to achieve the same recall while querying fewer data sources. We combined the three (HiBISCuS, DAW, and TBSS) source selections approaches with query rewriting to form a complete SPARQL query federation engine named Quetsal. Furthermore, we present TopFed, a Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) tailored federated query processing engine that exploits the data distribution to perform intelligent source selection while querying over large TCGA SPARQL endpoints. Finally, we address the issue of rights managements and privacy while accessing sensitive resources. To this end, we present SAFE: a global source selection approach that enables decentralised, policy-aware access to sensitive clinical information represented as distributed RDF Data Cubes. Comprehensive SPARQL Benchmarks: Benchmarking is indispensable when aiming to assess technologies with respect to their suitability for given tasks. While several benchmarks and benchmark generation frameworks have been developed to evaluate federated SPARQL engines and triple stores, they mostly provide a one-fits-all solution to the benchmarking problem. This approach to benchmarking is however unsuitable to evaluate the performance of a triple store for a given application with particular requirements. The fitness of current SPARQL query federation approaches for real applications is difficult to evaluate with current benchmarks as current benchmarks are either synthetic or too small in size and complexity. Furthermore, state-of-the-art federated SPARQL benchmarks mostly focused on a single performance criterion, i.e., the overall query runtime. Thus, they cannot provide a fine-grained evaluation of the systems. We address these drawbacks by presenting FEASIBLE, an automatic approach for the generation of benchmarks out of the query history of applications, i.e., query logs and LargeRDFBench, a billion-triple benchmark for SPARQL query federation which encompasses real data as well as real queries pertaining to real bio-medical use cases. Our evaluation results show that HiBISCuS, TBSS, TopFed, DAW, and SAFE all can significantly reduce the total number of sources selected and thus improve the overall query performance. In particular, TBSS is the first source selection approach to remain under 5% overall relevant sources overestimation. Quetsal has reduced the number of sources selected (without losing recall), the source selection time as well as the overall query runtime as compared to state-of-the-art federation engines. The LargeRDFBench evaluation results suggests that the performance of current SPARQL query federation systems on simple queries does not reflect the systems\\\'' performance on more complex queries. Moreover, current federation systems seem unable to deal with many of the challenges that await them in the age of Big Data. Finally, the FEASIBLE\\\''s evaluation results shows that it generates better sample queries than the state-of-the-art. In addition, the better query selection and the larger set of query types used lead to triple store rankings which partly differ from the rankings generated by previous works.

The development of AI application on the edge devices require integrated data, algorithms, and tools. Big companies like Google and Apple have integrated data, algorithms, and tools for building end to end systems with optimized and dedicated hardware for deep learning applications. The Bonseyes [2] EU H2020 collaborative project is an open and expandable AI platform. Bonsey's provides access to advanced tools and services that can be obtained from the data market place and eco-system of collaborative leading academic and industrial partners for adding AI to embedded products. Bonseyes AI Marketplace proposed an end to end AI pipeline to overcome these requirements for the development and deployment of AI solutions on edge devices. In Bonseyes, a Secure virtual premise (SVP) is a secure and protected area for the collaborative and systematic development of AI using Machine Learning AI Pipelines. The centralized SVP has limitations like scalability, reliability, and load balancing. This thesis work focuses on the enhancement of SVP and its mechanisms to adopt a distributed and federated architecture for better performance and fast development of AI applications. It investigates various federation mechanisms and implements a distributed and federated SVP. A Marketplace rendezvous host is designed and implemented from where multiple distributed compute resources can be started, controlled, and stopped by a user. Users and distributed locations related data are stored in an SQLite relational database. Communication between entities of distributed and federated SVP is enabled using HTTPs protocol and PKI Infrastructure is used for authentication and authorization of users. We evaluate the performance of our implementation by calculating the start-up time of multiple resources until a user can perform AI Engineering. The results show that time is directly proportional to the number of nodes started.

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<p>In Russia federalism and the design of federal institutions have been greatly debated topics ever since the beginning of the 1990s. When the newly elected Russian president Vladimir Putin introduced a number of federal reforms in May 2000 it represented the culmination of a debate on federalism that had been triggered by the political and economic crisis of 1998. In many ways these reforms entailed a different perspective on federalism, or in the terminology of this thesis a new “federal paradigm”, from the one that had dominated most of the Yeltsin era. At the same time the relations between federal and regional authorities, often referred to as intergovernmental relations, appeared to become less confrontational and fragmented than before. This work examines this latest stage in the Russian state-building process.</p><p>In particular two elements are scrutinized. The first is the shift of federal paradigms that the federal reforms reflected. Combining organisation theory and historical institutionalism it is argued that the origins of federal paradigm shifts often can be traced to the federal system itself. In Russia the failure of the federal system manifested through the political and economic crisis of 1998 changed many governmental actors’ views on federalism. However, it was not until Putin became president that the new federal paradigm could consolidate.</p><p>The second element concerns the connections between the new federal paradigm and the mode of intergovernmental relations. This work presents the argument that the way in which federalism is interpreted and conceptualised by governmental actors is important for the variation of intergovernmental relations across and within federal systems. Deriving from federal theory and some comparisons with other federal systems it is concluded that the federal paradigm that Putin represented in his first presidential term was on the whole more conducive for coordinate intergovernmental relations, at least in the short term.</p>