The dream of weaving technology into our everyday fabric of life is recently being made possible by advances in ubiquitous computing and sensor technologies. Countless sensors of various sizes have made their way into everyday commercial applications. Many projects aim to explore new ways to utilize these new technologies to aid and interact with the general population. Context-aware systems use available context information to assist users automatically, without explicit user input. By inferring user intent and configuring the system proactively for each user, context-aware systems are an integral part of achieving user-friendly ubiquitous computing environments. <br /><br /> A common issue with building a distributed context-aware system is the need to develop a supporting infrastructure providing features such as storage, distributed messaging, and security, before the real work on processing context information can be done. This thesis proposes a coordination framework that provides an effective common foundation for context-aware systems. The separation between the context-processing logic component and the underlying supporting foundation allows researchers to focus their energy at the context-processing part of the system, instead of spending their time re-inventing the supporting infrastructure. <br /><br /> As part of an ongoing project, Impress, the framework uses the open standard, Jabber, as its communication protocol. The Publish-Subscribe (pubsub) extension to Jabber provides interesting features that match those needed by a context-aware system. The main contribution of this thesis is the design and implementation of a coordination framework, called the Impress Context Store, that provides an effective common foundation for context-aware systems. The separation between the context-processing logic and the underlying supporting foundation allows researchers to focus their energy at the context-processing part of the system, instead of spending their time re-inventing the supporting infrastructure.

Modern distributed applications are long-lived, are expected to provide flexible and adaptive data services, and must meet the functionality and scalability challenges posed by dynamically changing user communities in heterogeneous execution environments. The practical implications of these requirements are that reconfiguration and upgrades are increasingly necessary, but opportunities to perform such tasks offline are greatly reduced. Developers are responding to this situation by dynamically extending or adjusting application functionality and by tuning application performance, a typical method being the incorporation of client- or context-specific code into applications' execution loops. Our work addresses a basic roadblock in deploying such solutions: the protection of key application components and sensitive data in distributed applications. Our approach, termed Dynamic Differential Data Protection (D3P), provides fine-grain methods for providing component-based protection in distributed applications. Context-sensitive, application-specific security methods are deployed at runtime to enforce restrictions in data access and manipulation. D3P is suitable for low- or zero-downtime environments, since deployments are performed while applications run. D3P is appropriate for high performance environments and for highly scalable applications like publish/subscribe, because it creates native codes via dynamic binary code generation. Finally, due to its integration into middleware, D3P can run across a wide variety of operating system and machine platforms. This dissertation introduces D3P, using sample applications from the high performance and pervasive computing domains to illustrate the problems addressed by our D3P solution. It also describes how D3P can be integrated into modern middleware. We present experimental evaluations which demonstrate the fine-grain nature of D3P, that is, its ability to capture individual end users' or components' needs for data protection, and also describe the performance implications of using D3P in data-intensive applications.

XML was recommended by W3C in 1998 as a markup language to be used by device- and system-independent methods of representing information. XML is nowadays used as a data model for storing and querying large volumes of data in database systems. In spite of significant research and systems development, many performance problems are raised by processing very large amounts of XML data. Materialized views have long been used in databases to speed up queries. Materialized views can be seen as precomputed query results that can be re-used to evaluate (part of) another query, and have been a topic of intensive research, in particular in the context of relational data warehousing. This thesis investigates the applicability of materialized views techniques to optimize the performance of Web data management tools, in particular in distributed settings, considering XML data and queries. We make three contributions.We first consider the problem of choosing the best views to materialize within a given space budget in order to improve the performance of a query workload. Our work is the first to address the view selection problem for a rich subset of XQuery. The challenges we face stem from the expressive power and features of both the query and view languages and from the size of the search space of candidate views to materialize. While the general problem has prohibitive complexity, we propose and study a heuristic algorithm and demonstrate its superior performance compared to the state of the art.Second, we consider the management of large XML corpora in peer-to-peer networks, based on distributed hash tables (or DHTs, in short). We consider a platform leveraging distributed materialized XML views, defined by arbitrary XML queries, filled in with data published anywhere in the network, and exploited to efficiently answer queries issued by any network peer. This thesis has contributed important scalability oriented optimizations, as well as a comprehensive set of experiments deployed in a country-wide WAN. These experiments outgrow by orders of magnitude similar competitor systems in terms of data volumes and data dissemination throughput. Thus, they are the most advanced in understanding the performance behavior of DHT-based XML content management in real settings.Finally, we present a novel approach for scalable content-based publish/subscribe (pub/sub, in short) in the presence of constraints on the available computational resources of data publishers. We achieve scalability by off-loading subscriptions from the publisher, and leveraging view-based query rewriting to feed these subscriptions from the data accumulated in others. Our main contribution is a novel algorithm for organizing subscriptions in a multi-level dissemination network in order to serve large numbers of subscriptions, respect capacity constraints, and minimize latency. The efficiency and effectiveness of our algorithm are confirmed through extensive experiments and a large deployment in a WAN.

This thesis presents the design and evaluation of content-based publish/subscribe systems for efficient content dissemination and sharing of dynamic and large-scale networked applications. The rapid development of network technologies and the continuous investment in network infrastructure have realized a ubiquitous platform for sharing information. However, there lacks efficient protocol and software that can utilize such resource to support novel networked applications. In this thesis, we explore the possibility of content-based publish/subscribe as an efficient communication substrate for dynamic and large-scale networked applications. Although content-based publish/subscribe has been used extensively in many small-to-medium scale systems, there is no Internet-scale applications that utilize this technology. The research reported in this thesis investigates the technical challenges and their solutions of applying content-based publish/subscribe in various applications in mobile networks and Internet. We apply content-based publish/subscribe in the interest-driven information sharing for smartphone networks. We design efficient approximate content matching algorithms and data structures. We study how to construct optimal overlay publish/subscribe overlay networks. We propose architecture designs that make Internet content-based publish/subscribe robust. We also design a name resolution system that enables content discovery in the Internet. These techniques are evaluated comprehensively in realistic simulation studies, and some of them are further evaluated on PlanetLab testbed with prototype implementations. / Computer and Information Science

Publish/subscribe (P/S) is a communication paradigm of growing popularity for information dissemination in large-scale distributed systems. The weak coupling between information producers and consumers in P/S systems is attractive for loosely coupled and dynamic network infrastructures such as ad hoc networks. However, achieving end-to-end timeliness and reliability properties when P/S events are causally dependent is an open problem in ad hoc networks. In this thesis, we present, evaluate benefits of, and compare with past work, an architecture design that can effectively support timely and reliable delivery of events and causally related events in ad hoc environments, and especially in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). With observations from both realistic application model and simulation experiments, we reveal causal dependencies among events and their significance in a typical use notional system. We also examine and propose engineering methodologies to further tailor an event-based system to facilitate its self-reorganizing capability and self-reconfiguration. Our design features a two-layer structure, including novel distributed algorithms and mechanisms for P/S tree construction and maintenance. The trace-based experimental simulation studies illustrate our design's effectiveness in both cases with and without causal dependencies. / Master of Science

Le langage XML, proposé par le W3C, est aujourd’hui utilisé comme un modèle de données pour le stockage et l’interrogation de grands volumes de données dans les systèmes de bases de données. En dépit d’importants travaux de recherche et le développement de systèmes efficace, le traitement de grands volumes de données XML pose encore des problèmes des performance dus à la complexité et hétérogénéité des données ainsi qu’à la complexité des langages courants d’interrogation XML. Les vues matérialisées sont employées depuis des décennies dans les bases de données afin de raccourcir les temps de traitement des requêtes. Elles peuvent être considérées les résultats de requêtes pré-calculées, que l’on réutilise afin d’éviter de recalculer (complètement ou partiellement) une nouvelle requête. Les vues matérialisées ont fait l’objet de nombreuses recherches, en particulier dans le contexte des entrepôts des données relationnelles.Cette thèse étudie l’applicabilité de techniques de vues matérialisées pour optimiser les performances des systèmes de gestion de données Web, et en particulier XML, dans des environnements distribués. Dans cette thèse, nos apportons trois contributions.D’abord, nous considérons le problème de la sélection des meilleures vues à matérialiser dans un espace de stockage donné, afin d’améliorer la performance d’une charge de travail des requêtes. Nous sommes les premiers à considérer un sous-langage de XQuery enrichi avec la possibilité de sélectionner des noeuds multiples et à de multiples niveaux de granularités. La difficulté dans ce contexte vient de la puissance expressive et des caractéristiques du langage des requêtes et des vues, et de la taille de l’espace de recherche de vues que l’on pourrait matérialiser.Alors que le problème général a une complexité prohibitive, nous proposons et étudions un algorithme heuristique et démontrer ses performances supérieures par rapport à l’état de l’art.Deuxièmement, nous considérons la gestion de grands corpus XML dans des réseaux pair à pair, basées sur des tables de hachage distribuées. Nous considérons la plateforme ViP2P dans laquelle des vues XML distribuées sont matérialisées à partir des données publiées dans le réseau, puis exploitées pour répondre efficacement aux requêtes émises par un pair du réseau. Nous y avons apporté d’importantes optimisations orientées sur le passage à l’échelle, et nous avons caractérisé la performance du système par une série d’expériences déployées dans un réseau à grande échelle. Ces expériences dépassent de plusieurs ordres de grandeur les systèmes similaires en termes de volumes de données et de débit de dissémination des données. Cette étude est à ce jour la plus complète concernant une plateforme de gestion de contenus XML déployée entièrement et testée à une échelle réelle.Enfin, nous présentons une nouvelle approche de dissémination de données dans un système d’abonnements, en présence de contraintes sur les ressources CPU et réseau disponibles; cette approche est mise en oeuvre dans le cadre de notre plateforme Delta. Le passage à l’échelle est obtenu en déchargeant le fournisseur de données de l’effort de répondre à une partie des abonnements. Pour cela, nous tirons profit de techniques de réécriture de requêtes à l’aide de vues afin de diffuser les données de ces abonnements, à partir d’autres abonnements.Notre contribution principale est un nouvel algorithme qui organise les vues dans un réseau de dissémination d’information multi-niveaux ; ce réseau est calculé à l’aide d’outils techniques de programmation linéaire afin de passer à l’échelle pour de grands nombres de vues, respecter les contraintes de capacité du système, et minimiser les délais de propagation des information. L’efficacité et la performance de notre algorithme est confirmée par notre évaluation expérimentale, qui inclut l’étude d’un déploiement réel dans un réseau WAN. / XML was recommended by W3C in 1998 as a markup language to be used by device- and system-independent methods of representing information. XML is nowadays used as a data model for storing and querying large volumes of data in database systems. In spite of significant research and systems development, many performance problems are raised by processing very large amounts of XML data. Materialized views have long been used in databases to speed up queries. Materialized views can be seen as precomputed query results that can be re-used to evaluate (part of) another query, and have been a topic of intensive research, in particular in the context of relational data warehousing. This thesis investigates the applicability of materialized views techniques to optimize the performance of Web data management tools, in particular in distributed settings, considering XML data and queries. We make three contributions.We first consider the problem of choosing the best views to materialize within a given space budget in order to improve the performance of a query workload. Our work is the first to address the view selection problem for a rich subset of XQuery. The challenges we face stem from the expressive power and features of both the query and view languages and from the size of the search space of candidate views to materialize. While the general problem has prohibitive complexity, we propose and study a heuristic algorithm and demonstrate its superior performance compared to the state of the art.Second, we consider the management of large XML corpora in peer-to-peer networks, based on distributed hash tables (or DHTs, in short). We consider a platform leveraging distributed materialized XML views, defined by arbitrary XML queries, filled in with data published anywhere in the network, and exploited to efficiently answer queries issued by any network peer. This thesis has contributed important scalability oriented optimizations, as well as a comprehensive set of experiments deployed in a country-wide WAN. These experiments outgrow by orders of magnitude similar competitor systems in terms of data volumes and data dissemination throughput. Thus, they are the most advanced in understanding the performance behavior of DHT-based XML content management in real settings.Finally, we present a novel approach for scalable content-based publish/subscribe (pub/sub, in short) in the presence of constraints on the available computational resources of data publishers. We achieve scalability by off-loading subscriptions from the publisher, and leveraging view-based query rewriting to feed these subscriptions from the data accumulated in others. Our main contribution is a novel algorithm for organizing subscriptions in a multi-level dissemination network in order to serve large numbers of subscriptions, respect capacity constraints, and minimize latency. The efficiency and effectiveness of our algorithm are confirmed through extensive experiments and a large deployment in a WAN.

The AEC industry has long been in need of effective modes of information exchange and knowledge sharing, but their practice in the industry is still far from satisfactory. In order to maintain their competence in a highly competitive environment and a globalized market, many organizations in the AEC industry have aimed at a move towards the development of learning organizations. Knowledge management has been seen as an effective way to have every member of an organization engaged in learning at all levels. At the very centre of knowledge management and learning is knowledge sharing through effective communication. Unfortunately, however, there is a big gap in the AEC industry between existing practice and the ideal in this area. In order to effectively coordinate information and knowledge flow in the AEC industry, this present research has developed a framework for an information system – a Construction Information and Knowledge Protocol/Portal (CIKP) which integrates within it a publish/subscribe system, Semantic Web technology, and Social Web concepts. Publish/subscribe is an appropriate many-to-many, people-to-people communication paradigm for handling a highly fragmented industry such as construction. In order to enrich the expressiveness of publications and subscriptions, Semantic Web technology has been incorporated into this system through the development of ontologies as a formal and interoperable form of knowledge representation. This research first involved the development of a domain-level ontology (AR-Onto) to encapsulate knowledge about actors, roles, and their attributes in the AEC industry. AR-Onto was then extended and tailored to create an application-level ontology (CIKP-Onto) which has been used to support the semantics in the CIKP framework. Social Web concepts have been introduced to enrich the description of publications and subscriptions. Our aim has been to break down linear communication through social involvement and encourage a culture of sharing, and in the end, the CIKP framework has been developed to specify desired services in communicating information and knowledge, applicable technical approaches, and more importantly, the functions required to satisfy the needs of a variety of service scenarios.

The AEC industry has long been in need of effective modes of information exchange and knowledge sharing, but their practice in the industry is still far from satisfactory. In order to maintain their competence in a highly competitive environment and a globalized market, many organizations in the AEC industry have aimed at a move towards the development of learning organizations. Knowledge management has been seen as an effective way to have every member of an organization engaged in learning at all levels. At the very centre of knowledge management and learning is knowledge sharing through effective communication. Unfortunately, however, there is a big gap in the AEC industry between existing practice and the ideal in this area. In order to effectively coordinate information and knowledge flow in the AEC industry, this present research has developed a framework for an information system – a Construction Information and Knowledge Protocol/Portal (CIKP) which integrates within it a publish/subscribe system, Semantic Web technology, and Social Web concepts. Publish/subscribe is an appropriate many-to-many, people-to-people communication paradigm for handling a highly fragmented industry such as construction. In order to enrich the expressiveness of publications and subscriptions, Semantic Web technology has been incorporated into this system through the development of ontologies as a formal and interoperable form of knowledge representation. This research first involved the development of a domain-level ontology (AR-Onto) to encapsulate knowledge about actors, roles, and their attributes in the AEC industry. AR-Onto was then extended and tailored to create an application-level ontology (CIKP-Onto) which has been used to support the semantics in the CIKP framework. Social Web concepts have been introduced to enrich the description of publications and subscriptions. Our aim has been to break down linear communication through social involvement and encourage a culture of sharing, and in the end, the CIKP framework has been developed to specify desired services in communicating information and knowledge, applicable technical approaches, and more importantly, the functions required to satisfy the needs of a variety of service scenarios.

No description available.

This thesis presents the design and analysis of Spasiba, a context-aware mobile advisor. We argue that current context-aware mobile applications exhibit significant flaws with respect to (1) limited use of context information, (2) incomplete or irrelevant content generation, and (3) low usability. The proposed model attempts to tackle these limitations by advancing the usage and manipulation of context information, automating the back-end systems in terms of self-management and seamless extensibility, and shifting the logic away from the client side. A distinguishing characteristic of Spasiba is the proactive approach to notifying the user of information of interest. In this proactive approach, the user subscribes to the service and receives content updates as the context changes. This proposed model is realised in a proof-of-concept prototype that uses a Nokia Web Runtime widget as the client application. The widget, which sports an elegant, touch-optimised interface, collects multiple context parameters to deliver high-quality results. The server-side architecture employs the publish/subscribe paradigm for managing the active users and Comet—for proactively notifying the clients of updated information of interest. IRS-III, a Semantic Web Services broker, handles the process of content generation. The prototype employs nine data sources, seven of which are open API web services and two of which are regular web pages, to deliver diverse and complete results. A simple autonomic element, implemented with the help of aspect-oriented programming, ensures partial self-management of the back-end systems. Spasiba is evaluated by means of a case study that involves a tourist couple visiting Victoria. The application assists the tourist couple with finding attractions, relevant stores, and places serving food.