Víctor Guevara-Masís

WS-VLAM: towards a scalable workflow system on the grid

Large scale scientific applications require extensive support from middleware and frameworks that provide the capabilities for distributed execution in the Grid environment. In particular, one of the examples of such frameworks is a Grid-enabled workflow management system. In this paper we present WS-VLAM workflow management system, describe its current design and the developments targeting to support efficient and scalable execution of large workflow applications on the Grid.

Ontology-Based Automatic Data Structure Generation for Collaborative Networks

Different forms of web-based collaborations are continuously configured and growing. Such emerging collaborative networks (CNs) are exemplified by Virtual Organizations, Virtual Communities, and Virtual Laboratories. Design and development of these environments constitute long, incremental, and complex processes. One challenge in this process is the proper definition of required syntax for entities and concepts, to be shared over the networked environment. A current tendency to describe the information/knowledge models for CNs is to use ontology systems. This paper presents an innovative tool called DOSG that assists the developers of CN environments, by taking the ontological definitions of concepts and entities, and automatically generating data structures such as: the relational database schema, Java code, and XML Schema. The DOSG prototype is developed within the TeleCARE project. The main goal of the TeleCARE project is the development of a CN infrastructure, providing tele-assistance for elderly care. DOSG represents one component of the federated information management component of TeleCARE infrastructure.

An Agent-based Resource Management for a Service-Oriented Telecare Environment

This paper addresses the functionality of care devices and telecare applications in terms of agent interactions. It focuses on the kind of interactions involved between the agents, and how can agents determine or find other agents (or their functionality) in a service-oriented telecare environment. It explores the service-oriented architecture (SOA) together with the agent paradigm as a mechanism to deal with the handling, the negotiation and brokerage of telecare resources.

Using ontologies for collaborative information management: some challenges and ideas

Emerging collaborative networks (CNs) bring together the need for an effective collaborative information management (CIM) infrastructure. Achieving a common understanding of the concepts and entities in CNs, especially with the presence of different types of heterogeneity involved in such environments, represents a big challenge for the developers of the CIM infrastructure. This paper proposes some ontology-based solutions to this challenge in three different research domains. Among the described solutions, the first one addresses the challenges of data representation and implementation regarding the translation of semantic model into appropriate data structures, the second one suggests an ontology-based semi-automatic approach for the resolution of schematic and semantic heterogeneity, and the third one aims to assist scientists from different e-science domains when customizing their experimentation environments with user-defined experiments and data types.

Service-Oriented Architecture of TeleCARE

Developers of advanced services for tele-assistance need a way to reuse the functionality of resources, being hardware devices or software applications, at their disposal. The reusability of resources becomes even more important, when considering the continuous development of facilities (e.g. the emerging domotics) and services (e.g. the panic button) in this domain. The overall goal of the TeleCARE project is the provision of a configurable infrastructure supporting collaborative networked environments for tele-assistance applied to elderly care. It designs an open flexible horizontal infrastructure based on a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and a multi-agent system.

Federated management of information for TeleCARE

Distributed information management plays a fundamental role within the base infrastructure supporting the elderly care domain. Specificities of this domain include the autonomy and independence of its involved actors, the critical data that is handled about individuals, and the variety of hardware/software resources supporting the elderly care environment. A federated information management system coping with these requirements is designed and integrated as a core component of a mobile agent-based infrastructure, to support collaborative networks for elderly care. Functionalities for: federated schema management, federated query processing, HW/SW resource management, specification and enforcement of visibility/access rights to data and resources, and an ontology-based automatic schema generation facility are introduced, and their implementation details are briefly discussed.