A relational–XML data warehouse for data aggregation with SQL and XQuery

Integrating information from multiple data sources is becoming increasingly important for enterprises that partner with other companies for e‐commerce. However, companies have their internal business applications deployed on diverse platforms and no standard solution for integrating information from these sources exists. To support business intelligence query activities, it is useful to build a data warehouse on top of middleware that aggregates the data obtained from various heterogeneous database systems. Online analytical processing (OLAP) can then be used to provide fast access to materialized views from the data warehouse. Since extensible markup language (XML) documents are a common data representation standard on the Internet and relational tables are commonly used for production data, OLAP must handle both relational and XML data. SQL and XQuery can be used to process the materialized relational and XML data cubes created from the aggregated data. This paper shows how to handle the two kinds of data cubes from a relational–XML data warehouse using extract, transformation and loading. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

MatSeek: An Ontology-Based Federated Search Interface for Materials Scientists

The MatSeek system is an ontology-based federated search interface to key materials science databases and analytical tools. By combining Semantic Web and Web 2.0 technologies, MatSeek provides materials scientists with a single Web interface that enables them to search across disparate databases containing crystal-structure data, ionic-conductivity data, and phase stability data; render 3D crystal-structure images; calculate bond lengths and angles; retrieve relevant scholarly references; and identify potential new materials with the structure and properties required to satisfy specific applications. The MatOnto ontology underlying MatSeek enables integration of data across disparate databases, and Web 2.0 technologies enable iterative searching across the databases. The results retrieved from searching the previous database are used as input to the query on the next database. By providing materials scientists with a single, integrated Web interface to the critical materials science databases and analytical tools, MatSeek represents a significant advance toward a full-fledged materials-informatics workbench.     

Structural study of titanium oxide films synthesized by ion beam-assisted deposition

The application of titanium dioxide (TiO(2)) films as surgical implant coatings for antibiotic attachment depends crucially on their available surface area and thus their surface morphology and crystallinity. Here, we report our fabrication of high Wenzel ratio TiO(2) films targeted to increase the film surface area using the ion beam-assisted deposition (IBAD) technique at high-deposition temperatures (approximately 610 degrees C). The modulation of the films' surface morphology was accomplished by varying the chemical identity of the concurrent ion beams bombarded on the films during the e-beam evaporation process. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) were employed to investigate the surface morphology of the as-deposited films. X-ray diffractometry (XRD) revealed that these nanocrystalline films primarily consist of anatase phase TiO(2). Wenzel ratio, the ratio of the actual surface area to the projected area, of IBAD films prepared with argon, oxygen, and nitrogen ion beams was measured to be 1.52, 1.31 and 1.49, respectively. The effect of the differences in chemical reactivity and ion size of these three type ion beams are discussed to explain the present results.     

Towards a web-based progressive handwriting recognition environment for mathematical problem solving

The emergence of pen-based mobile devices such as PDAs and tablet PCs provides a new way to input mathematical expressions to computer by using handwriting which is much more natural and efficient for entering mathematics. This paper proposes a web-based handwriting mathematics system, called WebMath, for supporting mathematical problem solving. The proposed WebMath system is based on client–server architecture. It comprises four major components: a standard web server, handwriting mathematical expression editor, computation engine and web browser with Ajax-based communicator. The handwriting mathematical expression editor adopts a progressive recognition approach for dynamic recognition of handwritten mathematical expressions. The computation engine supports mathematical functions such as algebraic simplification and factorization, and integration and differentiation. The web browser provides a user-friendly interface for accessing the system using advanced Ajax-based communication. In this paper, we describe the different components of the WebMath system and its performance analysis.     

A Monte Carlo Simulation approach for the modeling of free-molecule squeeze-film damping of flexible microresonators

Squeeze-film damping on microresonators is a significant damping source even when the surrounding gas is highly rarefied. This article presents a general modeling approach based on Monte Carlo (MC) simulations for the prediction of squeeze-film damping on resonators in the free-molecule regime. The generality of the approach is demonstrated in its capability of simulating resonators of any shape and with any accommodation coefficient. The approach is validated using both the analytical results of the free-space damping and the experimental data of the squeeze-film damping on a clamped–clamped plate resonator oscillating at its first flexure mode. The effect of oscillation modes on the quality factor of the resonator has also been studied and semi-analytical approximate models for the squeeze-film damping with diffuse collisions have been developed.     

Data-driven testing methodology for RFID systems

A radio-frequency identification (RFID) system including hardware and software may be updated from time to time after first time deployment. To ensure the reliability of the system, extensive tests are required. However, enumerating all test cases is infeasible, especially when the tests involve time-consuming hardware operations. To solve this problem, we propose a testing methodology for RFID systems which does not enumerate all test cases but rather those which are representative. A clustering method is adopted in selecting representative test cases. Although a small number of selected test cases are run, we can still obtain a relatively high bug detection rate compared with running the enumerated test cases. Our extensive experiments show the efficiency and effectiveness of our testing methodology.     

Implementation issues in RFID-based anti-counterfeiting systems

RFID has emerged as a potential tool to combat product counterfeiting, which undermines the global economy hugely. Recently, a number of anti-counterfeiting approaches have been proposed for such purpose. This paper presents a track-and-trace system for RFID-based anti-counterfeiting, and addresses possible implementation issues, such as tag selection, product tagging, tag programming and locking. A packaging line for bottled products is developed and integrated with the proposed system for investigation of these issues. Experiments are conducted to determine the critical tag moving speed beyond which the tag programming rate or reliability of tagged products being transferred on a convey drops significantly. The critical tag moving speed is vital not only for determining the maximum production throughput possible, but also for setting up RFID equipment needed to ensure tagged products with erroneous tagging can be sorted out from the packaging line accordingly.     

Barrier synchronization on wormhole-routed networks

In this paper, we propose an efficient barrier synchronization scheme on networks with arbitrary topologies. We first present a distributed method in building a barrier routing tree. The barrier messages can be delivered adaptively according to the hierarchy of the established barrier tree to void congestion and faulty nodes in the network. We then propose a new technique, called bandwidth-preempting technique, for a blocked barrier message to preempt a channel occupied by a data message so that the latency of a barrier message can be controlled without affecting much of the overall system performance. We also propose an analytical performance model and present simulation results for the performance evaluation of the proposed scheme. Performance evaluations show that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing algorithms for barrier synchronization     

Design and Implementation of a PKI-Based End-to-End Secure Infrastructure for Mobile E-Commerce

The popularity of handheld mobile devices and deployment of the public key infrastructure in many parts of the world have led to the development of electronic commerce on mobile devices. For the current version of mobile phones, the main challenge is the limited computing capacity on these devices for PKI-based end-to-end secure transactions. This paper presents a new architecture and protocol for authentication and key exchange as well as the supporting infrastructure that is suitable for the mobile phone environment. The system requirements and our solutions in addressing these requirements in the restrictive environment are discussed. An evaluation of the system performance is also included. The system has been implemented and is supporting some real-life applications.     

Efficient Multimedia Distribution in Source Constraint Networks

In recent years, the number of peer-to-peer (P2P) applications has increased significantly. One important problem in many P2P applications is how to efficiently disseminate data from a single source to multiple receivers on the Internet. A successful model used for analyzing this problem is a graph consisting of nodes and edges, with a capacity assigned to each edge. In some situations however, it is inconvenient to use this model. To that end, we propose to study the problem of efficient data dissemination in a source constraint network. A source constraint network is modeled as a graph in which, the capacity is associated with a node, rather than an edge. The contributions of this paper include (a) a quantitative data dissemination in any source constraint network, (b) a set of topologies suitable for data dissemination in P2P networks, and (c) an architecture and implementation of a P2P system based on the proposed optimal topologies. We will present the experimental results of our P2P system deployed on PlanetLab nodes demonstrating that our approach achieves near optimal throughput while providing scalability, low delay and bandwidth fairness among peers.