The Migration of Multi-tier E-commerce Applications to an Enterprise Java Environment

As technology evolves, many organizations face the problem of migrating legacy applications from one technology base to another. We report on a case study involving the migration of legacy code into the IBM® WebSphere® Commerce Suite product. Specifically, we focus on the problem of migrating applications that use traditional database access techniques to applications using the Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) programming model. Our results include a practical methodology that facilitates such migration, as well as a tool that supports this methodology. The tool has been released on IBM's alphaWorks site.     

Optimal pixel aspect ratio for enhanced 3D TV visualization

In multiview 3D TV, a pair of corresponding pixels in adjacent 2D views contributes to the reconstruction of voxels (3D pixels) in the 3D scene. We analyze this reconstruction process and determine the optimal pixel aspect ratio based on which the estimated object position can be improved given specific imaging or viewing configurations and constraints. By applying mathematical modeling, we deduce the optimal solutions for two general stereo configurations: parallel and with vergence. We theoretically show that for a given total resolution a finer horizontal resolution, compared to the usual uniform pixel distribution, in general, provides a better 3D visual experience for both configurations. The optimal value may vary depending on different configuration parameter values. We validate our theoretical results by conducting subjective studies using a set of simulated non-square discretized red–blue stereo pairs and show that human observers indeed have a better 3D viewing experience with an optimized vs. a non-optimized representation of 3D-models.     

Modification of chlorinated poly(vinyl chloride) by blending with epoxidized polybutadiene

The compatibility of epoxidized poly(cis-1,4-butadiene) (EPB) with chlorinated polyvinylchloride (CPVC) was investigated. Blends studied covered the complete composition range using EPB at two degrees of epoxidation: 20 and 43 mol % oxirane units. Tensile properties of EPB (63)/CPVC were also studied at the 50/50 composition. Dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA) showed that both sets of blends were miscible at the segmental level except for the rich CPVC compositions. All blends showed good tensile properties. even those where DMA indicated phase separation. This may be attributed to strong segmental interactions of the donnor-acceptor type between the oxirane and acidic-hydrogen-containing groups of these complementary dissimilar blend partners.     

Efficient and secure BIG data delivery in Cloud Computing

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Big Data (BD) is a new technology which rapidly growing in the telecommunications sectors, especially in the contemporary field of wireless telecommunications....     

Scalable entity-based summarization of web search results using MapReduce

Although Web Search Engines index and provide access to huge amounts of documents, user queries typically return only a linear list of hits. While this is often satisfactory for focalized search, it does not provide an exploration or deeper analysis of the results. One way to achieve advanced exploration facilities exploiting the availability of structured (and semantic) data in Web search, is to enrich it with entity mining over the full contents of the search results. Such services provide the users with an initial overview of the information space, allowing them to gradually restrict it until locating the desired hits, even if they are low ranked. This is especially important in areas of professional search such as medical search, patent search, etc. In this paper we consider a general scenario of providing such services as meta-services (that is, layered over systems that support keywords search) without a-priori indexing of the underlying document collection(s). To make such services feasible for large amounts of data we use the MapReduce distributed computation model on a Cloud infrastructure (Amazon EC2). Specifically, we show how the required computational tasks can be factorized and expressed as MapReduce functions. A key contribution of our work is a thorough evaluation of platform configuration and tuning, an aspect that is often disregarded and inadequately addressed in prior work, but crucial for the efficient utilization of resources. Finally we report experimental results about the achieved speedup in various settings.     

PROTON: A Prolog Reasoner for Temporal ONtologies in OWL

We present PROTON, a reasoner for managing temporal information over OWL ontologies. We adopt the so called 4d-fluent or 4-dimensionalist approach for representing temporal information in ontologies i.e. for time points or intervals and for events that occur in time points or intervals. Also, we propose an extension to the situation calculus in order to encapsulate time. PROTON is implemented using this extension.     

Overlay networks for task allocation and coordination in large-scale networks of cooperative agents

This paper proposes a novel method for scheduling and allocating atomic and complex tasks in large-scale networks of homogeneous or heterogeneous cooperative agents. Our method encapsulates the concepts of searching, task allocation and scheduling seamlessly in a decentralized process where no accumulated or centralized knowledge or coordination is necessary. Efficient searching for agent groups that can facilitate the scheduling of tasks is accomplished through the use of a dynamic overlay structure of gateway agents and the exploitation of routing indices. The task allocation and the scheduling of complex tasks are accomplished by combining dynamic reorganization of agent groups and distributed constraint optimization methods. Experimental results display the efficiency of the proposed method.     

Mapping of soil nutrients in an abandoned Chinese coal mine and waste disposal site

The present paper attempts to identify the spatial patterns of soil nutrients in the abandoned Haizhou opencast coal mine and waste disposal site, in China. A geostatistical approach was used to overcome problems due to the heterogeneity of the site (some parts have been abandoned for more than 30 years, lack of clean soil, presence of overburden and low-grade ore, co-disposal of wastes from adjacent sites) and the limited number of available samples. One hundred and eight soil samples were collected from an area of 332 ha and analyzed for pH, organic matter (OM), NH₄–N, available phosphorus (AP) and available potassium (AK). The results indicate that nutrients exhibit different spatial distribution and only NH₄–N showed strong spatial dependence and a relatively large nugget effect. Relatively high content of OM, NH₄–N, AP and AK was seen in the northeastern part, whereas pH was higher in central north and southern parts of the site. The determination of the spatial variability and heterogeneity of nutrients in mining and waste disposal sites assesses the need for amendments and assists in the selection of the most feasible revegetation scheme.     

Design of efficient shape feature for object-based watermarking technology

Multimedia Tools and Applications - The accelerated development of IT technologies on the Internet for fast provision of commercial multimedia services has stimulated an urgent demand for reliable...