Month: March 2008

MicroJena: Jena Ontology Management API for Mobile Clients

In Politecnico di Milano, together with Giorgio Orsi i supervised two students Fulvio Crivellaro and Gabriele Genovese that port Jena to run on J2ME.

The results has been amazing, the API we developed is even faster than the original Jena within 4000 tuples (more than enough on Mobile Systems).

The library available for download at: http://poseidon.elet.polimi.it/ca/?page_id=59

It has also been released in the jena-contrib package, see: http://jena.sourceforge.net/contrib/contributions.html

Please contact me for questions or suggestions.

 

PRISM: Graceful Schema Evolution Implemented

Supporting graceful schema evolution represents an unsolved problem for traditional information systems that is further exacerbated in web information systems, such as Wikipedia and public scientific databases: in these projects based on multiparty cooperation the frequency of database schema changes has increased while tolerance for downtimes has nearly disappeared. As of today, schema evolution remains an error-prone and time-consuming undertaking, because the DB Administrator (DBA) lacks the methods and tools needed to manage and automate this endeavor by (i) predicting and evaluating the effects of the proposed schema changes, (ii) rewriting queries and applications to operate on the new schema, and (iii) migrating the database.

Our PRISM system takes a big first step toward addressing this pressing need by providing: (i) a language of Schema Modification Operators to express concisely complex schema changes, (ii) tools that allow the DBA to evaluate the effects of such changes, (iii) optimized translation of old queries to work on the new schema version, (iv) automatic data migration, and (v) full documentation of intervened changes as needed to support data provenance, database flash back, and historical queries. PRISM solves these problems by integrating recent theoretical advances on mapping composition and invertibility, into a design that also achieves usability and scalability. Wikipedia and its 170+ schema versions provided an invaluable testbed for validating PRISM tools and their ability to support legacy queries.

 More details will be available about the Graceful Schema Evolution support tool Prism here.

In the news: Confidential US Air Force e-mails sent to tourism website

Confidential US Air Force (USAF) e-mails, some including flight plans for a presidential visit, have been mistakenly sent to a tourism website. 

The e-mails were meant to go to the US airbase at RAF Mildenhall, Suffolk, via its website.

But instead they went to a town tourism website which had a similar address.

 Among the information “wrongly” released there are Air Force One flight plans, military procedures and tactics marked as “‘Destroy by any means to prevent capture“, etc..

 It looks to me that some security has been compromised, but… 

 The USAF said there had been no “verified security breach” and it had advised airmen and other staff to use the correct e-mail address.

 Well now we can be sure we are safe, the military secrets have been protecting just by saying to the people “use the right address dude!“, i definitely feel safer now!! So we really have military confidential information running around the web via e-mails…  

check the full story on BBC:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/suffolk/7277392.stm