Crosswalk among Prominent Open Research Data Repositories

Open Access is a synergised global movement using Internet to provide equal access to knowledge that once hid behind the subscription paywalls. Many new models for scholarly communication have emerged in recent past. One among them is institutional or digital repositories which archive the scholarly content of an organization. While the concept of Open Access opened new arena for institutional or digital repositories in the form of Open repositories. Likewise, the Open repositories for Research Data Management (RDM) are initiative to organize, store, cite, preserve, and share the collected data derived from the research. There are many multidisciplinary and subject specific open repositories for RDM offering exquisite features for perpetual management of research data. The objective of the present study is to evaluate features of popular Open Data Repositories-Zenodo, FigShare, Harvard Dataverse and Mendeley Data. The evaluation provided insights about the key features of the selected Open Data Repositories and which enable us to select the best among them. Zenodo provides maximum data upload limit. While the major features required by a researcher like DOI, File Types, citation support, licenses, search (metadata harvesting) are provided by all three repositories.

Towards Trustworthy IoT: A Blockchain-Edge Computing Hybrid System with Proof-of-Contribution Mechanism

The emerging smart city is driving massive transformations of modern cities, facing the huge influx of sensor data from IoT devices. Edge computing distributes computing tasks to the near-edge end, which greatly enhances the service quality of IoT applications, that is, ultralow latency, large capacity, and high throughput. However, due to the constrained resource of IoT devices, currently, systems with a centralized model are vulnerable to attacks, such as DDoS from IoT botnet and central database failure, which can hardly provide high-confidence services. Recently, blockchain with a high security promise is considered to provide new approaches to enhancing the security of IoT systems. However, blockchain and IoT have obvious incompatibility, and low-capacity IoT devices can hardly be incorporated into blockchain with high computing requirements. In this paper, a blockchain-edge computing hybrid system (BEHS) is presented to make the adaptation of blockchain to edge computing and provide trustworthy IoT management services for a smart city. A novel extensible consensus protocol designed for proof-of-work, named proof-of-contribution (PoC), is proposed to regulate the data upload behaviors of nodes, especially the data upload frequency of IoT device nodes, so as to protect the system from attack about frequency. In order to secure the data privacy and authenticity, a data access control scheme is designed by integrating symmetric encryption with asymmetric encryption algorithm. We implemented a concrete BEHS on Ethereum, realized the function of PoC mechanism via smart contracts, and conducted a case study for smart city. The extensive evaluations and analyses show that the proposed PoC mechanism can effectively detect and automatically manage the behavior of nodes, and the time cost of data access control scheme is within an acceptable range.

Fault mitigation in real-time cloud computing

The introduction of computers has been a huge plus to human life in its entirety because it provides both the world of business and private an easy and fast means to process, generate and exchange information. However, the proliferation of networked devices, internet services and the amount of data being generated frequently is enormous. This poses a major challenge, to the procurement cost of high performing computers and servers capable of processing and housing the big data. This called for the migration of organizational and/or institutional data upload to the cloud for highlevel of productivity at a low cost. Therefore, with high demand for cloud services and resources by users who migrated to the cloud, cloud computing systems have experienced an increase in outages or failures in real-time cloud computing environment and thereby affecting its reliability and availability. This paper proposes and simulates a system comprising four components: the user, task controller, fault detector and fault tolerance layers to mitigate the occurrence of fault combining checkpointing and replication techniques using cloud simulator (CloudSim).

RNA-Seq Data Analysis in Galaxy

A complete RNA-Seq analysis involves the use of several different tools, with substantial software and computational requirements. The Galaxy platform simplifies the execution of such bioinformatics analyses by embedding the needed tools in its web interface, while also providing reproducibility. Here, we describe how to perform a reference-based RNA-Seq analysis using Galaxy, from data upload to visualization and functional enrichment analysis of differentially expressed genes.

ArchbotLit—the archaeobotanical literature database: an update of the search engine for literature on archaeological remains of cultivated plants since 1981

The online Archaeobotanical Literature Database (ArchbotLit) is an important tool for getting targeted access to archaeobotanical publications. It offers the opportunity for archaeobotanists, archaeologists, freelancers, students and an interested public to easily obtain information about cultivated plants and their development. In addition it increases the visibility of archaeobotanical studies beyond the inner circle and supports teaching in environmental archaeology. The ArchbotLit database builds upon the efforts of Jürgen Schultze-Motel, Gatersleben, and Helmut Kroll, Kiel, who have collected offprints of papers from archaeobotanists worldwide since the 1980s. The content was transferred into referenced plant lists that were published annually from 1992 to 2001 in the central organ of the “International Workgroup for Palaeoethnobotany (IWGP)”, the journal “Vegetation History and Archaeobotany” and as contributions entitled “Literature on archaeological remains of cultivated plants”. These were succeeded by the online database “archaeobotany.de”, comprising the literature from 1981 to 2004. To sustain this online-database in the public domain it was recently converted into the wiki-platform “ArchbotLit”, hosted at Kiel University. Here, we introduce the new wiki-online-database and its functionalities for data upload and as a search engine.

Data Uploading Strategy for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) have become a popular research topic due to the challenges of underwater communication. The existing mechanisms for collecting data from UWSNs focus on reducing the data redundancy and communication energy consumption, while ignoring the problem of energy-saving transmission after compression. In order to improve the efficiency of data collection, we propose a data uploading decision-making strategy based on the high similarity of the collected data and the energy consumption of the high similarity data compression. This decision-making strategy efficiently optimizes the energy consumption of the networks. By analyzing the data similarity, the quality of network communication, and uploading energy consumption, the decision-making strategy provides an energy-efficient data upload strategy for underwater nodes, which reduces the energy consumption in various network settings. The simulation results show that compared with several existing data compression and uploading methods, the proposed data upload methods has better energy saving effect in different network scenarios.