Anette Weisbecker

Solutions for biomedical grid computing—Case studies from the D-Grid project Services@MediGRID

The project Services@MediGRID consortium established a tool set of grid-based biomedical services since 2008. The services are related to genetic analysis, genome data visualization, and pharmacokinetic modeling. Furthermore, business concepts for these services have been examined which are supported by an accounting and billing service. While the tools cover a whole service chain for biomedicine, the business concepts are rather heterogeneous. However, the overall addressed target market areas show promising potential. In addition, a structured coaching process reduces friction in the technology transfer from grid computing to biomedicine. This should be considered for similar future endeavors.

Trust factors for the usage of cloud computing in small and medium sized craft enterprises

Although many benefits of cloud computing exist for SMEs, the development and usage of cloud computing solutions still face various challenges. The decision for applying cloud computing solutions, depend mainly on the length of time an enterprise exists, the degree of specialization, and finally the degree of need for security. Therefore, one of the key obstacles towards the adoption of cloud computing is among technical issues the establishment of trust into the performance, security, data protection and other features of cloud services and their providers. However, trust strongly depends on the target users and their characteristics. Over 16 percent of German SMEs apply cloud computing and realize its potentials. In the research project CLOUDwerker, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economic and Technology, software as a service solutions for SMEs in the craft sector are examined and developed. In order to increase the usage of cloud computing at the target group of those SMEs, the paper focus on identifying and comparing the factors which influence trust into cloud computing solutions from the craft-specific view of small and medium sized craft enterprises and craft-specific cloud service providers who both have been addressed and questioned in two separate surveys. The results are considered to improve the development of trusted cloud computing applications which achieve a high user acceptance.

A Lightweight Approach for Extracting Product Records from the Web

Gathering product records from the Web is very important to both shoppers and on-line retailers for the purpose of comparing products and prices. For consumers, the reason for doing this is to find the best price for a product, whereas on-line retailers want to compare their offers with those of their competitors in order to remain competitive. Due to the huge number and vast array of product offers in the Web an automated approach for collecting product data is needed. In this paper we propose a lightweight approach to automatically identify and extract product records from arbitrary e-shop websites. For this purpose we have adopted and extended the existing technique called Tag Path Clustering for clustering similar HTML tag paths and developed a novel filtering mechanism especially for extracting product records from websites.

MediGRID – Grid Computing For Medicine and Life Sciences

MediGRID has established a grid infrastructure for medical and bioinformatical research. It enhances interdisciplinary and widely location-independent collaboration of researchers by providing grid services in a controlled e-Science platform which is continually available, economically calculable and secure. As part of the German e-Science initiative D-Grid MediGRID provides access to the available D-Grid resources by the MediGRID portal. This gives an easy, secure and transparent access to a broad spectrum of applications for bioinformatics, medical image processing and clinical research. The application uses the MediGRID middleware which realizes a service oriented architecture. Services for the management of data, workflows, and resources and for enhanced security are provided. The advantages of using grid computing for medical and life sciences applications are the reduction of processing times, world-wide usage for a broad community of users and access to distributed information sources of academic and clinic providers.

Stammdatenmanagement: Datenqualität für Geschäftsprozesse

ZusammenfassungStammdatenmanagement ist eine Unternehmensfunktion, die sämtliche Planungs-, Überwachungs- und Bereitstellungsaktivitäten für Stammdaten umfasst und deren Ziel die Sicherung der Stammdatenqualität ist. Stammdaten von hoher Qualität sind die Voraussetzung, damit Unternehmen verschiedene strategische Anforderungen erfüllen können. Dieser Beitrag beschreibt diejenigen Bereiche, die beim Aufbau eines unternehmensweiten Stammdatenmanagements zu gestalten sind.

Migration zu serviceorientierten Architekturen — top-down oder bottom-up?

ZusammenfassungenDas Paradigma der serviceorientierten Architekturen (SOA) verspricht eine bessere Unterstützung bei der Entwicklung von flexiblen und an den Geschäftsprozessen orientierten IT-Systemen. Bei der Konzeption einer serviceorientierten Architektur sind die Identifikation und Definition von geeigneten Services eine der wesentlichen Herausforderungen. Meist wird zur Ableitung der Services ein Top-down-Ansatz, ausgehend von den zu unterstützenden Geschäftsprozessen, propagiert. In der Praxis kann jedoch nur äuβerst selten von einer »grünen Wiese« ausgegangen werden. Stattdessen besteht die Aufgabe meist darin, eine vorhandene IT-Landschaft hin zu einer serviceorientierten Architektur zu migrieren. In diesem Fall muss der Top-down-Ansatz um ein Bottom-up-Vorgehen ergänzt werden, bei dem die weiter zu betreibenden Altsysteme als Ausgangsbasis verwendet werden.

Extracting Product Offers from e-Shop Websites

On-line retailers as well as e-shoppers are very interested in gathering product records from the Web in order to compare products and prices. The consumers compare products and prices to find the best price for a specific product or they want to identify alternatives for a product whereas the on-line retailers need to compare their offers with those of their competitors for being able to remain competitive. As there is a huge number and vast array of product offers in the Web the product data needs to be collected through an automated approach. The contribution of this papers is a novel approach for automatically identify and extract product records from arbitrary e-shop websites. The approach extends an existing technique which is called Tag Path Clustering for clustering similar HTML tag paths. The clustering mechanism is combined with a novel filtering mechanism for identifying the product records to be extracted within the websites.

Extracting product unit attributes from product offers by using an ontology

Comparing products and prices of on-line offers is important to e-shoppers and on-line retailers. The e-shoppers compare products and prices for finding the best product or price whereas the retailers need to compare their own products and prices to those of their competitors in order to remain competitive. As there is a wide range of product offers available on the Web the product and price comparison need to be done by an automated approach. One challenging task of such an approach is the automated assignment of different product offers which refer to the same real-world product. Products are compared and assigned based on the calculation of the pairwise similarity of their attributes. Thus, the attributes need to be identified, extracted and harmonised. In the case of the comparison of unit attributes harmonisation means to convert the attributes and their values into the same unit. The contribution of this paper is an approach and a corresponding ontology for identifying, extracting and harmonising unit attributes of product offers. The unit attribute ontology is introduced, the extraction process is described and the adequacy of the approach is validated through an experiment.

Oversubscription of computational resources on multicore desktop systems

The increasing pervasiveness of multicore processors in todays computing systems will increase the demand for techniques to adapt application level parallelism. In this paper we demonstrate the impact of oversubscription in the context of a desktop scenario and show that using too many threads in one application can lead to significant performance loss for other applications within the system environment (in our example more than 30%). We examine how common parallelization tools are trying to exploit parallelism while not causing oversubscription and find that common tools do not offer a mechanism which sufficiently takes into account the computational load of the system. Oversubscription is not easy to detect from an application perspective due to the fair scheduling of common operating systems. Nonetheless, we do present an approach for detecting oversubscription by exploiting a scheduling artifact in the average execution time of a parallel code section.

Neue Chancen für den Mittelstand

ZusammenfassungKleine und mittelständische Unternehmen zeichnen sich durch ihre Flexibilität, Innovationsfreude, Internationalisierung und Marktkenntnis aus. Die Informationstechnik ist dabei zu einem entscheidenden Faktor geworden für den Unternehmenserfolg. Hierbei gilt es, neue Trends in der Informationstechnik zu erkennen und einzusetzen. Dazu gehören derzeit Cloud Computing, der Einsatz von mobilen Endgeräten und die Nutzung sozialer Netzwerke für Unternehmenszwecke. Beim Einsatz von IT handelt es sich nicht um rein technische Maßnahmen, sondern Prozesse und Organisation stehen im Vordergrund.