To look to the future of e-Science we take a long view that starts with its conception and draws on multiple models as we cast our gaze forwards. With a focus on people and collaboration, and noting the ongoing trend towards adoption of automation, we argue that the e-Science experience is crucial today to inform future practice. These insights may help engage with challenges such as environmental sustainability.

The projected number of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors makes battery maintenance a challenging task. Although battery-less IoT is technologically viable, the sensors should be somehow energized, either locally or remotely. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can respond to this quest via wireless power transfer (WPT). However, to achieve energy neutrality across the IoT networks and thus mitigate the maintenance issues, the UAVs providing energy and connectivity to IoT sensors must be supplied by recharging stations having multi-source energy harvesting (EH) capability. Yet, as these sensors rely solely on UAV-transferred power, the absence of UAVs causes sensor outages and hence loss of coverage when they visit recharging stations for battery replenishment. Hence, besides the UAV parameters (e.g., battery size and velocity), recharging duration and station density must be carefully determined to avoid these outages. To address that, this paper uses stochastic geometry to derive the coverage probability of UAV-powered sensors. Our analysis sheds light on the fundamental trade-offs and design guidelines for energy-neutral IoT networks with recharging stations in regard to the regulatory organization limitations, practical rectenna and UAV models, and the minimum power requirements of sensors.

With the increased digitalisation of our society, new and emerging forms of data present new values and opportunities for improved data driven multimedia services, or even new solutions for managing future global pandemics (i.e., Disease X). This article conducts a literature review and bibliometric analysis of existing research records on new and emerging forms of multimedia data. The literature review engages with qualitative search of the most prominent journal and conference publications on this topic. The bibliometric analysis engages with statistical software (i.e. R) analysis of Web of Science data records. The results are somewhat unexpected. Despite the special relationship between the US and the UK, there is not much evidence of collaboration in research on this topic. Similarly, despite the negative media publicity on the current relationship between the US and China (and the US sanctions on China), the research on this topic seems to be growing strong. However, it would be interesting to repeat this exercise after a few years and compare the results. It is possible that the effect of the current US sanctions on China has not taken its full effect yet.

Abstract This paper presents a new design for artificial intelligence in cyber-physical systems. We present a survey of principles, policies, design actions and key technologies for CPS, and discusses the state of art of the technology in a qualitative perspective. First, literature published between 2010 and 2021 is reviewed, and compared with the results of a qualitative empirical study that correlates world leading Industry 4.0 frameworks. Second, the study establishes the present and future techniques for increased automation in cyber-physical systems. We present the cybersecurity requirements as they are changing with the integration of artificial intelligence and internet of things in cyber-physical systems. The grounded theory methodology is applied for analysis and modelling the connections and interdependencies between edge components and automation in cyber-physical systems. In addition, the hierarchical cascading methodology is used in combination with the taxonomic classifications, to design a new integrated framework for future cyber-physical systems. The study looks at increased automation in cyber-physical systems from a technical and social level.

Abstract Digital technologies have changed the way supply chain operations are structured. In this article, we conduct systematic syntheses of literature on the impact of new technologies on supply chains and the related cyber risks. A taxonomic/cladistic approach is used for the evaluations of progress in the area of supply chain integration in the Industrial Internet of Things and Industry 4.0, with a specific focus on the mitigation of cyber risks. An analytical framework is presented, based on a critical assessment with respect to issues related to new types of cyber risk and the integration of supply chains with new technologies. This paper identifies a dynamic and self-adapting supply chain system supported with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) and real-time intelligence for predictive cyber risk analytics. The system is integrated into a cognition engine that enables predictive cyber risk analytics with real-time intelligence from IoT networks at the edge. This enhances capacities and assist in the creation of a comprehensive understanding of the opportunities and threats that arise when edge computing nodes are deployed, and when AI/ML technologies are migrated to the periphery of IoT networks.

The development and innovative application of digital research methods in humanities disciplines, characterised as Digital Humanities or e-Humanities, is an established feature of the e-Science and e-Research landscape. Typically these digital methods enable existing research questions to be tackled in new ways, at a scale and speed that transcend manual methods. In this paper we present a different approach to the application of digital techniques to humanities research, a branch of experimental humanities in which digital experiments bring insight and engagement with historical scenarios and in turn influence our understanding and our thinking today. We illustrate this through a series of experiments and demonstrations inspired by the work of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, including simulation of the Analytical Engine, use of a web-based music application, construction of hardware, and reproduction of earlier mathematical results using contemporary computational methods.

Whether in the science lab or the music studio, we go in with a plan, we perform, and we make a record of that performance for distribution, consumption, and reuse. Both domains are increasingly data-intensive, with the adoption of new technology, and also socially intensive with democratised and growing citizen engagement. The music industry has embraced digital technology throughout the lifecycle from composition to consumption; scientific practice, and scholarly communication, are also undergoing transformation. Is the music industry more digital than science? We suggest that comparing and contrasting these two systems will provide insights of mutual benefit. Our investigation explores the notion of the Digital Music Object, analogous to the Research Object, for rich capture, sharing and reuse of both process and content.

In the paradigm of service oriented science, scientific computing applications and data are all wrapped as web accessible services. Scientific workflows further integrate these services to answer complex research questions. However, our earlier study conducted on myExperiment has revealed that although the sharing of service-based capabilities opens a gateway to resource reuse, in practice, the degree of reuse is very low. This finding has motivated us to propose ServiceMap to provide navigation facility through the network of services to facilitate the design and development of scientific workflows. This paper proposes ReputationNet as an enhancement of ServiceMap, to incorporate the often-ignored reputation aspects of services/workflows and their publishers, in order to offer better service and workflow recommendations. We have developed a novel model to reflect the reputation of e-Science services/workflows, and developed heuristic algorithms to provide service recommendations based on reputations. Experiments on myExperiment have illustrated a strong positive correlation (with Pearson correlation coefficient 0.82) between the reputation scores computed and the actual performance (i.e. usage frequency) of the services/workflows, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach.

Many smartphone apps collect personal information used for a variety of purposes. Users, however, are often unaware of this kind of access even though they must grant the required permissions upon app installation. We have identified three reasons for this unawareness. First, relevant permissions c

SUMMARY Science, especially experimental science, has always depended on the careful capture of plans, actions, raw and processed data and conclusions. With scientific research now so inextricably dependent on computers, the use of an electronic laboratory notebook (ELN) is almost essential. The meticulous notebooks of Michael Faraday and other scientists of his era remain as role models for the recording that is necessary, but they cannot provide the essential support for discussion, sharing, collaboration and formal verification. A blog (a contraction of Web log) can form the basis for implementing an electronic notebook but does not suffice to meet all the needs of an ELN. This paper describes the LabTrove ELN, which is blog based but provides numerous additional features, such as version control, security policies and a flexible metadata scheme, and facilities for interchanging objects with other systems. The MyExperimentalScience project links LabTrove with myExperiment, a repository for workflows in a collaborative environment, thereby making LabTrove templates available for discovery and reuse. Collaboration, sharing and reuse are essential for scientific progress, which depends on individual scientists building on the results already produced by others. Open‐source ELNs such as LabTrove are ideal vehicles to support the growth of Open Notebook Science. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Workflows provide a popular means for preserving scientific methods by explicitly encoding their process. However, some of them are subject to a decay in their ability to be re-executed or reproduce the same results over time, largely due to the volatility of the resources required for workflow executions. This paper provides an analysis of the root causes of workflow decay based on an empirical study of a collection of Taverna workflows from the myExperiment repository. Although our analysis was based on a specific type of workflow, the outcomes and methodology should be applicable to workflows from other systems, at least those whose executions also rely largely on accessing third-party resources. Based on our understanding about decay we recommend a minimal set of auxiliary resources to be preserved together with the workflows as an aggregation object and provide a software tool for end-users to create such aggregations and to assess their completeness.

Scientific workflows are increasingly gaining momentum as the new paradigm for modeling and enacting scientific experiments. The value of a workflow specification does not end once it is enacted. Indeed, workflow specifications encapsulate knowledge that documents scientific experiments, and are, therefore, worth preserving. Our experience suggests that workflow preservation is frequently hampered by the volatility of the constituent service operations when these operations are supplied by third-party providers. To deal with this issue, we propose a heuristic for locating substitutes that are able to replace unavailable service operations within workflows. The proposed method uses the data links connecting inputs and outputs of service operations in existing workflow specifications to locate operations with parameters compatible with those of the missing operations. Furthermore, it exploits provenance traces collected from past executions of workflows to ensure that candidate substitutes perform tasks similar to those of the missing operations. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been empirically assessed.

Existing semantic representations of music analysis encapsulate narrow sub-domain concepts and are frequently scoped by the context of a particular MIR task. Segmentation is a crucial abstraction in the investigation of phenomena which unfold over time; we present a Segment Ontology as the backbone of an approach that models properties from the musicological domain independently from MIR implementations and their signal processing foundations, whilst maintaining an accurate and complete description of the relationships linking them. This framework provides two principal advantages which we explore through several examples: a layered separation of concerns that aligns the model with the needs of the users and systems that consume and produce the data; and the ability to link multiple analyses of differing types through transforms to and from the Segment axis.

Abstract Scientific workflows provide powerful middleware for scientific computing in that they represent a central abstraction in the research task by simultaneously acting as an editable action plan, collaboration tool, and executable entity. Taverna workflows, in particular, have been widely accepted in the bioinformatics community, due to their flexible integration with web service analytical tools that are the essential tools of any bioinformatician. However, the semantics of Taverna have so far only been qualified in terms of the functional composition and data processing. While correct, and useful for reasoning about functional and trace equivalences, this aspect does not help with modelling the throughput and utilization of individual services in the workflow. In this paper we present a stochastic process model for Taverna, and use it to perform execution simulations in Microsoft's SPIM tool. The model also opens up the possibilities for further static analyses that are explored. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper reviews current cloud computing business models and presents proposals on how organisations can achieve sustainability by adopting appropriate models. Using the Jericho Forum's Cloud Cube Model (CCM), we classify cloud computing business models into eight types: (1) Service Provider and Service Orientation; (2) Support and Services Contracts; (3) In-House Private Clouds; (4) All-In-One Enterprise Cloud; (5) One-Stop Resources and Services; (6) Government Funding; (7) Venture Capitals; and (8) Entertainment and Social Networking. We newly propose the Hexagon Model that includes six key elements for sustainability based on Sun Tzu's Art of War and literature review, and the sixth factor is rated based on case studies and peer reviews. Areas occupied in the Hexagon can represent strengths and weaknesses of a cloud business, and several cases are presented with rationale explained. Apart from the qualitative approach, the quantitative approach we use is the Capital Asset Pricing Model and Modern Portfolio Theory, both of which aim computing organisational sustainability and predict how well an organisation can perform. The OMII-UK data is used to demonstrate sustainability and study the impact on cloud businesses, and is presented by statistical computation, 3D visualisation and the Hexagon Model. We believe that adopting an appropriate cloud computing business model will help organisations investing in this technology to stand firm at all times.

This paper reviews current cloud computing business models and presents proposals on how organisations can achieve sustainability by adopting appropriate models. We classify cloud computing business models into eight types: (1) Service Provider and Service Orientation; (2) Support and Services Contracts; (3) In-House Private Clouds; (4) All-in-One Enterprise Cloud; (5) One-Stop Resources and Services; (6) Government funding; (7) Venture Capitals; and (8) Entertainment and Social Networking. Using the Jericho Forum's 'Cloud Cube Model' (CCM), the paper presents a summary of the eight business models. We discuss how the CCM fits into each business model, and then based on this discuss each business model's strengths and weaknesses. We hope adopting an appropriate cloud computing business model will help organisations investing in this technology to stand firm in the economic downturn.

Scientific data stands to represent a significant portion of the linked open data cloud and science itself stands to benefit from the data fusion capability that this will afford. However, simply publishing linked data into the cloud does not necessarily meet the requirements of reuse. Publishing has requirements of provenance, quality, credit, attribution, methods in order to provide the \emph{reproducibility} that allows validation of results. In this paper we make the case for a scientific data publication model on top of linked data and introduce the notion of \emph{Research Objects} as first class citizens for sharing and publishing.

We present a proof-of-concept system that demonstrates the utility of linked data for enhancing the application of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) workflows, both when curating collections of music signal data for analysis, and publishing results that can be simply and readily correlated to these, and other, collection sets and Linked Data sources. The system includes: linked data implementations of a signal repository, collection builder, and results explorer, an extension to the my Experiment workflow sharing environment to include Meandre workflows, and support within my Experiment and Meandre to retrieve and persist resources from the linked data repositories. By way of example we gather and publish RDF describing signal collections derived from the country of an artist. Genre analysis over these collections and integration of collection and result metadata enables us to ask: "how country is my country?".

The myExperiment social website for sharing scientific workflows, designed according to Web 2.0 principles, has grown to be the largest public repository of its kind. It is distinctive for its focus on sharing methods, its researcher-centric design and its facility to aggregate content into sharable `research objects'. This evolution of myExperiment has occurred hand in hand with its users. myExperiment now supports Linked Data as a step toward our vision of the future research environment, which we categorise here as 3rd generation e-Research.

Abstract In this work we address the management of very large data sets, which need to be stored and processed across many computing sites. The motivation for our work is the ATLAS experiment for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), where the authors have been involved in the development of the data management middleware. This middleware, called DQ2, has been used for the last several years by the ATLAS experiment for shipping petabytes of data to research centres and universities worldwide. We describe our experience in developing and deploying DQ2 on the Worldwide LHC computing Grid, a production Grid infrastructure formed of hundreds of computing sites. From this operational experience, we have identified an important degree of uncertainty that underlies the behaviour of large Grid infrastructures. This uncertainty is subjected to a detailed analysis, leading us to present novel modelling and simulation techniques for Data Grids. In addition, we discuss what we perceive as practical limits to the development of data distribution algorithms for Data Grids given the underlying infrastructure uncertainty, and propose future research directions. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract By making research content more reusable, and providing a social infrastructure that facilitates sharing, the human aspects of the scholarly knowledge cycle may be accelerated and ‘time‐to‐discovery’ reduced. We propose that the key to this is the sharing of methods and processes. We present myExperiment, a social web site for discovering, sharing and curating Scientific Workflows and experiment plans, and describe how myExperiment facilitates the management and sharing of research workflows, supports a social model for content curation tailored to the researcher and community, and supports Open Science by exposing content and functionality to the users' tools and applications. Based on this, we introduce the notion of the Research Object—the work objects that are built, transformed and published in the course of scientific experiments—and suggest that by encapsulating methods with results we can achieve research that is more reusable and repeatable and hence rapid and robust. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

With the emergence of "service oriented science," the need arises to orchestrate multiple services to facilitate scientific investigation-that is, to create "science workflows." We present here our findings in providing a workflow solution for the caGrid service-based grid infrastructure. We choose BPEL and Taverna as candidates, and compare their usability in the lifecycle of a scientific workflow, including workflow composition, execution, and result analysis. Our experience shows that BPEL as an imperative language offers a comprehensive set of modeling primitives for workflows of all flavors; while Taverna offers a dataflow model and a more compact set of primitives that facilitates dataflow modeling and pipelined execution. We hope that this comparison study not only helps researchers select a language or tool that meets their specific needs, but also offers some insight on how a workflow language and tool can fulfill the requirement of the scientific community.

Behavioural interventions packages of advice and support for behaviour change are one of the most important methodologies and technologies employed by social scientists for understanding and changing behaviour. A typical web-based behavioural intervention study includes the designing, deploying, piloting and trialling of the intervention as well as data analysis. We have developed a research environment named LifeGuide, which covers the full scope of this process, enabling social scientists to carry out intervention studies with minimal technical expertise. In this paper, we present how the LifeGuide can assist and accelerate intervention research, particularly focusing on supporting the running and analysis of trials of web-based behavioural interventions along with the case study of an intervention that has been developed within the LifeGuide.

Abstract Automation in science is increasingly marked by the use of workflow technology. Thesharingof workflows through repositories supports the verifiability, reproducibility and extensibility of computational experiments. However, the subsequentdiscoveryof workflows remains a challenge, both from a sociological and technological viewpoint. Based on a survey with participants from 19 laboratories, we investigate the current practices in workflow sharing, re‐use and discovery among life scientists chiefly using the Taverna workflow management system. To address their perceived lack of effective workflow discovery tools, we go on to develop benchmarks for the evaluation of discovery tools, drawing on a series of practical exercises. We demonstrate the value of the benchmarks on two tools: one using graph matching and the other relying on text clustering. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The scalability of the Web as a large scale distributed system can be attributed to the REST architectural style. Although originally established to support hypermedia document browsing, here we ask whether this same style can provide a programming abstraction for distributed programming over the Web infrastructure. This paper provides a preliminary exploration of an applicative programming style based on the REST abstraction.

The myExperiment virtual research environment supports the sharing of research objects used by scientists, such as scientific workflows. For researchers it is both a social infrastructure that encourages sharing and a platform for conducting research, through familiar user interfaces. For developers it provides an open, extensible and participative environment. We describe the design, implementation and deployment of myExperiment and suggest that its four capabilities - research objects, social model, open environment and actioning research - are necessary characteristics of an effective Virtual Research Environment for e-research and open science.

Many scientific workflow systems have been developed and are serving to benefit science. In this paper we look beyond individual systems to consider the use of workflows within scientific practice, and we argue that the tremendous scientific potential of workflows will be achieved through mechanisms for sharing and collaboration - empowering the scientist to spread their experimental protocols and to benefit from the protocols of others. We discuss issues in workflow sharing, propose a set of design principles for collaborative e-Science software, and illustrate these principles in action through the design of themyExperiment Virtual Research Environment for collaboration and sharing of experiments.

This paper presents the formal syntax and the operational semantics of Taverna, a workflow management system with a large user base among the e-Science community. Such formal foundation, which has so far been lacking, opens the way to the translation between Taverna workflows and other process models. In particular, the ability to automatically compile a simple domain-specific process description into Taverna facilitates its adoption by e-scientists who are not expert workflow developers. We demonstrate this potential through a practical use case.

The key element to support ad-hoc resource sharing on the Web is to discover resources of interest. The hypermedia paradigm provides a way of overlaying a set of resources with additional information in the form of links to help people find other resources. However, existing hypermedia approaches primarily develop mechanisms to enable resource sharing in a fairly static, centralized way. Recent developments in distributed computing, on the other hand, introduced peer-to-peer (P2P) computing that is notable for employing distributed resources to perform a critical function in a more dynamic and ad-hoc scenario. We investigate the feasibility and potential benefits of bringing together the P2P paradigm with the concept of hypermedia link services to implement ad-hoc resource sharing on the Web. This is accomplished by utilizing a web-based Distributed Dynamic Link Service (DDLS) as a testbed and addressing the issues arising from the design, implementation, and enhancement of the service. Our experimental result reveals the behavior and performance of the semantics-based resource discovery in DDLS and demonstrates that the proposed enhancing technique for DDLS, topology reorganization, is appropriate and efficient.

A key challenge in co-designing UbiComp is that users may have limited understanding or experience of these technologies. While the value of situated co-design activities for promoting understanding is known, the role of time is less well researched. Here we describe and reflect on a range of co-design activities carried out with the curators of an historic English manor house to create novel visitor tours. We show how an ensemble of situated co-design activities over time led to the unfolding of user understanding around issues of content, technology and user experience, in turn leading to a progressive re-imagining of practice. This points to the importance of time and variety of in-situ activities to help people engage as co-designers in creating novel UbiComp-enabled experiences.

Fieldtrips, traditionally associated with science, history and geography teaching, have long been used to support children’s learning by allowing them to engage with environments first-hand. Recently, ubiquitous computing (UbiComp) has been used to enhance fieldtrips in these educational areas by augmenting environments with a range of instruments, devices and sensors. However, the sorts of interaction design that UbiComp makes possible have the potential not just to enhance the value of educational techniques in known application areas, but also to expand the application of those techniques into new areas of curriculum. We report on a UbiComp-supported fieldtrip to support creative writing, associated with the learning of literacy skills. We discuss how the fieldtrip, designed and run in the grounds of a historic English country house with Year 5 UK schoolchildren, engendered interactions which changed both the processes and products of creative writing, with benefits for both teachers and children.

In this paper we describe an investigation into the requirements for and the use of in-situ authoring in the creation of location based pervasive and UbiComp experiences. We will focus on the co-design process with users that resulted in a novel visitor experience to a historic country estate. This has informed the design of new, in-situ, authoring tools supplemented with tools for retrospective revisiting and reorganization of content. An initial trial of these new tools will be discussed and conclusions drawn as to the appropriateness of such tools. Further enhancements as part of future trials will also be described.

We describe the design of a flood warning system which uses a set of sensor nodes to collect readings of water level and a grid-based flood predictor model developed by environmental experts to make flood predictions based on the readings. The reporting frequency of sensor nodes is required to be adaptive to local conditions as well as the flood predictor model to optimize battery consumption. We therefore propose an energy aware routing protocol which allows sensor nodes to consume energy according to this need. This system is notable both for the adaptive sampling regime and the methodology adopted in the design of the adaptive behavior, which involved development of simulation tools and close collaboration with environmental experts

Recent work by the `CombeChem' project together with the UK National Crystallography Service (NCS) has integrated the NCS into an e-Science environment. The existing high-throughput crystallography facility is enhanced by on-line feedback with the ability to monitor and steer diffraction experiments remotely. Security mechanisms are used to determine authorisation attributes and hence to allow user interaction at appropriate stages, together with access of a database recording the status of the submitted samples. The user can monitor the position of their samples, be alerted to all stages from submission to experiment and then analysis, visualise raw data as it is generated, be involved in the key decision-making during the parameterisation and initialization of the experiment and then track the data collection to ensure its successful completion. Results data are staged to a secure area and made available for download (either the raw diffraction data or a refined structure generated by NCS staff)

The GRIA project set out to make the grid usable by industry. The GRIA middleware is based on Web services, and designed to meet the needs of industry for security and business-to-business (B2B) service procurement and operation. It provides well-defined B2B models for accounting and QoS agreement, and proxy-free delegation to support account management and service federation. The GRIA v3 software is now being used by industry. By taking a business-oriented approach independent of the evolving Open Grid Services Architecture proposals from the Global Grid Forum, GRIA has demonstrated the need for a wider understanding of virtual organizations (VOs). Traditional academic VOs are persistent, resourceful and have logically centralized, membership-oriented management structures. In contrast, the GRIA experience has been that business VOs are likely to be project-focused and have distributed process-oriented management structures

Abstract The U.K. e‐Science Programme is a £250 million, five‐year initiative which has funded over 100 projects. These application‐led projects are underpinned by an emerging set of core middleware services that allow the coordinated, collaborative use of distributed resources. This set of middleware services runs on top of the research network and beneath the applications we call the ‘Grid’. Grid middleware is currently in transition from pre‐Web Service versions to a new version based on Web Services. Unfortunately, only a very basic set of Web Services embodied in the Web Services Interoperability proposal, WS‐I, are agreed by most IT companies. IBM and others have submitted proposals for Web Services for Grids—the Web Services ResourceFramework and Web Services Notification specifications—to the OASIS organization for standardization. This process could take up to 12 months from March 2004 and the specifications are subject to debate and potentially significant changes. Since several significant U.K. e‐Science projects come to an end before the end of this process, the U.K. needs to develop a strategy that will protect the U.K.'s investment in Grid middleware by informing the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute's (OMII) roadmap and U.K. middleware repository in Southampton. This paper sets out an evolutionary roadmap that will allow us to capture generic middleware components from projects in a form that will facilitate migration or interoperability with the emerging Grid Web Services standards and with ongoing OGSA developments. In this paper we therefore define a set of Web Services specifications, which we call ‘WS‐I+’ to reflect the fact that this is a larger set than currently accepted by WS‐I, that we believe will enable us to achieve the twin goals of capturing these components and facilitating migration to future standards. We believe that the extra Web Services specifications we have included in WS‐I+ are both helpful in building e‐Science Grids and likely to be widely accepted. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Grid computing offers significant enhancements to our capabilities for computation, information processing, and collaboration, and has exciting ambitions in many fields of endeavor. We argue that the full richness of the Grid vision, with its application in e-Science, e-Research, or e-Business, requires the "Semantic Grid." The Semantic Grid is an extension of the current Grid in which information and services are given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. To this end, we outline the requirements of the Semantic Grid, discuss the state of the art in achieving them, and identify the key research challenges in realizing this vision.

This paper highlights intrusiveness as a key issue in the field of pervasive computing environments and presents a multiagent approach to tackling it. Specifically, we discuss how interruptions can impact on individual and group tasks and how they can be managed by taking into account user and group preferences through negotiation between software agents. The system we develop is implemented on the Jabber platform and is deployed in the context of a meeting room scenario.

We explore a novel ontological approach to user profiling within recommender systems, working on the problem of recommending on-line academic research papers. Our two experimental systems, Quickstep and Foxtrot, create user profiles from unobtrusively monitored behaviour and relevance feedback, representing the profiles in terms of a research paper topic ontology. A novel profile visualization approach is taken to acquire profile feedback. Research papers are classified using ontological classes and collaborative recommendation algorithms used to recommend papers seen by similar people on their current topics of interest. Two small-scale experiments, with 24 subjects over 3 months, and a large-scale experiment, with 260 subjects over an academic year, are conducted to evaluate different aspects of our approach. Ontological inference is shown to improve user profiling, external ontological knowledge used to successfully bootstrap a recommender system and profile visualization employed to improve profiling accuracy. The overall performance of our ontological recommender systems are also presented and favourably compared to other systems in the literature.

My Grid is an e-Science Grid project that aims to help biologists and bioinformaticians to perform workflow-based in silico experiments, and help them to automate the management of such workflows through personalisation, notification of change and publication of experiments. In this paper, we describe the architecture of my Grid and how it will be used by the scientist. We then show how my Grid can benefit from agents technologies. We have identified three key uses of agent technologies in my Grid: user agents, able to customize and personalise data, agent communication languages offering a generic and portable communication medium, and negotiation allowing multiple distributed entities to reach service level agreements.

Tools for filtering the World Wide Web exist, but they are hampered by the difficulty of capturing user preferences in such a diverse and dynamic environment. Recommender systems help where explicit search queries are not available or are difficult to formulate, learning the type of thing users like over a period of time.We explore an ontological approach to user profiling in the context of a recommender system. Building on previous work involving ontological profile inference and the use of external ontologies to overcome the cold-start problem, we explore the idea of profile visualization to capture further knowledge about user interests. Our system, called Foxtrot, examines the problem of recommending on-line research papers to academic researchers. Both our ontological approach to user profiling and our visualization of user profiles are novel ideas to recommender systems. A year long experiment is conducted with over 200 staff and students at the University of Southampton. The effectiveness of visualizing profiles and eliciting profile feedback is measured, as is the overall effectiveness of the recommender system.

The Open Hypermedia model is based upon the separation of hypertext links from documents and treats them as separate entities. Distributed link services take this approach and implement an open hypermedia system above the infrastructure of the World Wide Web. This paper explores the suitability and applicability of extending the architecture of distributed link services by adding a messaging backbone based on secure asynchronous message passing, which provides support for mobile users of distributed hypermedia information systems.

Tools for filtering the World Wide Web exist, but they are hampered by the difficulty of capturing user preferences in such a dynamic environment. We explore the acquisition of user profiles by unobtrusive monitoring of browsing behaviour and application of supervised machine-learning techniques coupled with an ontological representation to extract user preferences. A multi-class approach to paper classification is used, allowing the paper topic taxonomy to be utilised during profile construction. The Quickstep recommender system is presented and two empirical studies evaluate it in a real work setting, measuring the effectiveness of using a hierarchical topic ontology compared with an extendable flat list.

We describe the integration of content based techniques for navigation of musical information (primarily in MIDI representation) into a multiagent system for distributed information management. This exercise illustrates the application of the multiagent approach to engineering distributed multimedia information systems and raises some design issues. Keywords Software agents, content based navigation, pitch contours, collaborative filtering, open hypermedia, query routing. 1. INTRODUCTION The goal of our research activity is to bring music into the distributed multimedia information space that we manage and navigate through the use of hypermedia tools. Music proves to be an excellent example of multimedia data: it exists in a variety formats, some highly structured, it can be transmitted using a store-and-forward or streaming model, it can be synchronized with other media. Hence our investigation addresses more general research issues in the application of software agents to mul...

The use of pitch contours is an established technique for content-based retrieval of music ('query by humming'). This paper presents a system which employs pitch contours to support content-based navigation around a body of multimedia documents including MIDI and digital audio files. The system adopts an open hypermedia model, enabling the user to find available hypermedia links from an arbitrary fragment in a piece of music, based on the content or location of that fragment. The design of the tools, contour database and the contour-matching algorithms are discussed.

The remote service request, a form of remote procedure call, and the global pointer, a global naming mechanism, are two features at the heart of Nexus, a library for building distributed systems. NeXeme is an extension of Scheme that fully integrates both concepts in a mostly-functional framework, hence providing an expressive language for distributed computing. This paper presents a semantics for this Scheme extension, and also describes a NeXeme implementation, including its distributed garbage collector.

Nowadays the Net is one of the most obvious driving forces. Yet, to consider it as one global store through which values and code may be shared is still immature. This paper suggests first-class environments as a means to achieve that goal in a multi-user Scheme framework. We propose two new special forms with a simple semantics. Our model allows precise control over environments (including extensible environments) and does not require (but does not prevent) reflective operations.

Many descriptions have been published of lightweight process models for specific physical and virtual machines. On the other hand, relatively little attention has been paid to the problem of defining a model which is adequate for serious programming yet can be realized on a wide variety of architectures and maintain the semantic model across those architectures. Programming language support for concurrency models does not always address the handling or propagation of errors, nor provision for event-based programming. In this paper, we describe a model which does deal with these issues, and we present the realisation of this model in a modern object-oriented language (EuLisp). Particular attention is drawn to the contract with the programmer is architecture independence is to be assured. Hence the sentiment expressed in the title: we provide a programming model which both accommodates and delivers non-determinism on diverse platforms, and which enables the programmer to work effectively in the presence of that non-determinism.