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This bachelor thesis aims to use of geoinformatic methods in anthropology. Specifically methods of terrestrial laser scanning and close range photogrammetry. The theoretical part focuses on explaining functioning and usage of those methods. Practical part of this work discribes data collecting proces with those methods and following creation of 3D model of anthroplogical artifact, specifically human skull. In the end those models are compared with model from computed tomography which was provided, same as anthropological artifact, by Department of anthropology and human gentetics of Charles University.


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Proposal: Prevention of floods by cultivating rainwater in aquifer beds
Prevention of floods by cultivating rainwater in aquifer beds by luis fernando cepedes valencia
The proposal is the materialisation of a sewer by gravity of rainwater that will be used to recharge the aquifers,
About aquifer exploitation
Wells can dry out if the water table falls below its initial depth, which occasionally occurs in years of drought, and for the same reasons the springs can dry out. The recharge regime can be altered by other causes such as deforestation, considering that vegetation cover work like a sponge, allowing infiltrate water to the roots of trees or into underground aquifers without them water drains causing growing and floods
Or, otherwise, by eliminating forest from the mountains, the risk of floods is magnified and accessibility to good quality water decreases, especially in urban areas, or due to the extension of impermeable pavements, as occurs in urban and industrial areas. .
In some parts of the world, the expansion of irrigation and other activities that consume water has been made at the expense of aquifers whose recharge is slow or almost nil. This has had some negative consequences such as the drying of springs and wet areas or the intrusion of salt into coastal aquifers. In some cases overexploitation has favored the intrusion of saline water by the proximity of the coast, causing salinization of water and indirectly that of agricultural soils.
Several authors have referred to the issue of overexploitation, we report one of the most commonly accepted definitions.
Artificial recharge is a technique of management of water resources extended worldwide. It consists of the express introduction of large quantities of rainwater to the underground aquifer, through a variety of systems such as infiltration ponds, deep recharge wells, ditches and other mechanisms. These techniques are practiced not only in countries with water shortages to increase the resources available, countries since Water quality improves through its passage through the subsoil. The benefits of using groundwater are clearly demonstrated, as aquifers operate as a water storage, managed efficiently,
Direct consequences
1. The exploitation of groundwater for the carrying out of industrial or residential activities, whether of a legal or illegal nature, makes it necessary to pump from the underground aquifer mantle to the surface, inexorably generating the decrease in the piezometric level, either in the immediate surroundings of the wells or in a wide area. The descent occurs whenever there is extraction of groundwater in areas of little or no infiltration, because on the surface there is a layer of stony or cementitious material or an asphalt surface, although not The exploitation of the piezometric level is due to the non-existence of infiltration of rainwater. This is a clear sign that it may be in a situation of overexploitation, and a systematic monitoring of the recharge levels must be carried out.
2. Induced soil compaction; This phenomenon can be verified mainly in confined aquifers, where the decrease in interstitial pressure can lead to an irreversible rearrangement of loose particles, especially in detritic aquifers, causing soil subsidence.
3. Compartmentalization of aquifers; When the tectonic structure is complex, in the presence of steps in the impermeable substrate, with raised and other sunken sectors, when lowering the piezometric level, part of the aquifer can be separated, hidden behind an elevation of the impermeable bottom. This will cause a rapid and substantial reduction of aquifer capacity.
The current methods of guerrilla warfare used by the illegal actors of the conflict have not only incurred the deterioration of the vegetal cover, but also, in the elimination of the infiltration characteristics of the subsoil, since they go from the blasting of pipelines to the pollution of aqueducts, indiscriminate felling, the extraction of minerals, the alteration of the course of the rivers, among others. The explosion of oil pipelines and illegal mining, added to the abrupt changes imposed by the current macroeconomic model on land and river uses, as well as the concession of aquifers for the exploitation of natural gas and hydrocarbons, have generated damages serious environmental problems that can not yet be quantified. Land eroded by abandonment or inappropriate use, sources of water contaminated by the spill of hydrocarbons, species of fauna and flora extinct or at risk of extinction and we stopped that they should become true hydrographic reserves invaded by mining concessions, seeking to guarantee the profit of foreign multinationals, are some of the impacts that the war has caused on the environment in which the aquifers are immersed.
The damage caused by the spill of hydrocarbons in the territories is an action that contaminates the soils and, it is only comparable by extension and magnitude to the development of hydroelectric power stations since all the biota of the soil is lost, a set of factors that determine the processes of organic matter and generation of nutrients for plants. Removing oil from a soil is practically impossible, as well as removing large areas of water stored in areas that have to be abandoned, is unusable for the production of food or the generation of native forest or areas, if the oil is irrigated the earth causes irreversible damage, with water the deterioration is not minor. experts argue that aliphatic hydrocarbons isolate the surface of rivers or lakes from the atmosphere and there is no oxygen exchange, "and create an environment that is not suitable for life. One of the great consequences when there are spills on water is the total loss of the process of water infiltration on the ground
The aquifers mantos susceptible to be recharged that are in zone of conflict
Area with intense agricultural exploitation or area that arouses a certain environmental interest.
1. Aquifers with intense extraction for drinking purposes
2. Zones with an expected increase in extraction for the future, whether scheduled or spontaneous (for example: population growth in a city or town whose drinking water supply system is fed from aquifers, expansion of the agricultural frontier in farms supplied with groundwater, etc.)
3. Aquifers that show a progressive degradation of water quality
4. Areas with high concentrations of nitrates.
5. Areas with deteriorated environmental values ??or in danger of disappearing.
6. Areas with problems of continental or marine saline intrusion (coastal aquifers)
7. Aquifers in areas where the availability of surface water shows a marked seasonal variation
The various geological formations have different characteristics in terms of their porosity and their permeability. factors that allow easy movement of water, as is the case, of alluvium, sand, etc. Others will present a high porosity, being able consequently to store considerable amounts of water, but without allowing the easy displacement of the same, The diverse information will make of the variability in the level of precitaciones this determined to maximize the effects of lost of infiltrate in the zones where one or more factors associated with violence are present, seeking to determine the reality of the aquifer mantles under factors of degradation of the geological substrate material that supports it, which prevents rainwater from reaching the necessary depth for its storage, or passing to feed the flow of the rivers, or return directly to the seas because of the percolation, where the cycle begins again. taking into account the losses caused by the runoff towards contributions or losses towards the deep layers. However, for these layers the hydrological cycle is much longer than for the surface aquifer layers and is therefore not linked to the current climate rhythm. This hydrological cycle is of geological order (from a few millennia to hundreds of thousands of years.) The variation of the underground water reserves is associated with the amount of rainwater that is effectively infiltrated, and is defined as the water surface. that reaches the saturated zone, after the soil reaches a humidity equal to this capacity, a recharge occurs to the saturated layer.The intensity of the transpired water can exceed the intensity of the soil supply water,
At present, the central theme of the center-periphery vision proposed by ECLAC in the 1950s was the distribution of productivity increases that derive from technical change. The forms and mechanisms of this distribution have not changed over the last fifty years, bearing in mind that the central question remains more valid than ever. The consolidation of highly corrupt regional states and tyrannies that carry out the distribution of the increases of productivity between generating centers and propagators of technical progress which have specialized in the control of the world productive and peripheries, subordinated by the unscrupulous management of capital resources the first in terms of technological absorption and international productive positioning of strategic resources. renewable; and on the other, the distribution of these productivity gains within the centers and peripheries, taking into account the positions of the social groups that affect the productive process. In yellow, the overlapping of mining titles in areas of páramos, natural parks and other restricted areas for all mining activity is shown. A large part of the water supply basins, such as the large river of Magdalena, are titled for the mining or exploitation of hydrocarbons, an activity that generates a large amount of pollutants and which, in the case of gold, requires cyanide or mercury to be able to be carried finished. This goes against the fundamental right to water and the priority destination of liquid for human consumption. The strategic minerals nickel and blue iron, brown coal, gold and silver, the first factor in air pollution in the world and, therefore, as one of the main reasons for climate change. The second is a completely sumptuary good that to be extracted necessarily requires the use of mercury, a toxic substance that was banned by the European Parliament in the old continent, "since it is the only sure way to protect our water resources and ecosystems.
The main characteristic of the last three decades is the serious over-exploitation of Colombia's water and natural resources, this situation is associated with political violence that since the middle of the last century has spread over a large part of the national geography, creating necessary conditions for the establishment of illegal mining and over exploitation of aquifers, which has allowed the current hegemonic center of power, the United States forward the largest intervention in recent years in Latin America and causing one of the most serious environmental crisis in the world
since at present Colombia is in a situation of armed conflict framed in a war against natural resources, which is highlighted by the marginal nature of the conflict, which manifests itself in tolerance or complicity with the paramilitaries, the extreme harshness against the communist party and the armed left by sectors of the military forces, giving special significance to the generalization of violence due to the harshness of the institutional crisis and the disorganization of the social fabric associated with corruption, all of which is a central reference point of the armed division of society, for which it would be improper to describe civil war as a civil war, in which a large part of the American interests and of the State itself supports the expansion of paramitar on the appropriation of natural resources. The successor groups of the paramilitary activity have a brutal impact on the situation not only humanitarian but of destruction of the most strategic ecosystems of the country, the resurgence especially in Antioquia, where these groups coincided with a significant increase in the rates of internal displacement in the whole country from 2004 until at least 2016 and the partial destruction of the choco by foreign multinationals, which seek the illegal extraction of gold, silver and platinum from the Atrato basin
It is an integral system of recovery of hard waters to the industrial sector, mining, hotel, which not only uses alternative energy for its operation ostensibly lowering operating costs, but also returns the oxygen lost during the oxidation of metal ions
It allows the widening of water molecules by the continuous exchange of oxygen lost during oxidation and reduction processes with mineral agents present in degraded soil, but also facilitates the recovery of unwanted materials present in aqueous solutions, which are in the upper simplifying its collection, said process of separation of liquids is due to the difference in density between the various components of the solution, composed of a mixture of solids or suspensory liquids whose diameter allows easy separation by means mechanics,
All human activity and especially the urbanizing, mining, energy and agricultural sectors entails the deterioration of the infiltration capacity of the soil, by eliminating one of the main functions of natural vegetation, and is the ability to intercept precipitation and promote evapotranspiration , in addition to disappearing the set of irregularities in the ground turning them into storage mirrors of the precipitated water. This translates into the interruption of the natural water cycle and the recharge of aquifers, whose most relevant effects are:
The increase of peak flow or maximum flow registered during an avenue or flood, which allows a magnification of the risk of removal or mass drag
Higher runoff volumes, which leads to an increase in the potential risk of flooding due to gravity, as higher volumes of rainwater flow towards the floodplains
The increase of the potential risk of floods or mass removal phenomena, since the disappearance of the infiltration and evapotranspiration processes, the water circulating on the surface towards the hillside areas will increase.
The total number of people registered is 3,219.23914, 73% (2,350,207) are affected and the remaining 27% (869,032) affected, which means 7.0%
the national population. Similarly, in the rud, 874,464 valid homes are reported. The analysis in this chapter is based on the total number of people registered
(affected and affected).
In the only single registry of the affected population, 1,016 missing and 1,374 dead persons are identified. Atlántico, Bolívar and Magdalena register about 300 dead and missing each one. In Antioquia, Cesar, Chocó, Córdoba, Norte
Santander and Santander report between 100 and 200 dead or missing in each, and add up to 31.3% of the total (figure 2.3). Of the 21 municipalities with 20 or more people in that situation, 6 are in Magdalena.
1. Short term Preliminary vision: Design and determination of study areas The first step in the process of technical assistance for gravity flood control obeys the integrated development planning process, is to consult with local planners and decision-makers. of decisions, as the focus will be on measures to mitigate not only the flood risk but also the mass removal
2. Medium term, Evaluate natural events that impose a significant danger in the region associated with deforestation processes, legal or illegal mining through the existing information on hydrogeological threats that is probably sufficient; If the information on geological hydrogeological threats was not adequate, an analysis should be entrusted to a third agency. In relation to floods, landslides and desertification, it is likely that the planning team will be able to complete the existing information and prepare the analysis. Studies conducted in the departments of Atlántida and Islas de la Bahía, in Honduras, included an assessment of the flood threat in the coastal development plan and another on landslides in some inland regions.
Long term; have not yet been contemplated
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwj0u9He0uTZAhUDzFMKHfC7Aa8QFggmMAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fcenca.imta.mx%2Fpdf%2Fmanual-para-el-control-de-inundaciones.pdf&usg=AOvVaw3lGJauMlSQB6A8v9859cqI
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwj0u9He0uTZAhUDzFMKHfC7Aa8QFggzMAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.who.int%2Fhac%2Ftechguidance%2Fems%2Ffloods%2Fes%2F&usg=AOvVaw27H9KxMxFTd5YQVWaA_0JR
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwj0u9He0uTZAhUDzFMKHfC7Aa8QFghBMAI&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.oas.org%2Fdsd%2Fpublications%2Funit%2Foea57s%2Foea57s.pdf&usg=AOvVaw3pgEasunLQ4lLIATiOacLr
Importance of groundwater
Groundwater is the largest source of fresh water available, which is why more than half of the world's population uses it for its consumption; It also has a large
number of advantages, since it has excellent natural quality, because in general it is free of pathogens, color and turbidity, and can be consumed directly without treatment, or after a simple treatment; It is widely
distributed and supply systems can be developed in places very close to the places where the needs are presented, thus avoiding the construction of large distribution systems; their sources are reliable and in general they are not affected in the presence of short droughts; and its development can increase over time, thus avoiding the need to store large amounts of water.
1.http://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=AwrJzBleV6VauwIAI3_XdAx
2.http://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=AwrJzBleV6VauwIAJH_XdAx
3.http://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=AwrJzBleV6VauwIAKH_XdAx
http://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=AwrJzBleV6VauwIALH_XdAx
Prevention of floods by cultivating rainwater in aquifer beds
By: luis fernando cepedes valencia

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Q: Error: $injector:modulerr Module Error on ui.boostrap dependency injection I have been banging my head against the wall for a while now on this. I am trying to include UI-Bootstrap with my angular application. Unfortunately I keep getting this error when I try to include the ui.bootstrap dependency.
Error: $injector:modulerr
Module Error
Failed to instantiate module filtraApp due to:
Error: [$injector:modulerr] http://errors.angularjs.org/1.4.8/$injector/modulerr?p0=u...)
    at Error (native)
    at http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/angularjs/1.4.8/angular.min.js:6:416
    at http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/angularjs/1.4.8/angular.min.js:38:391
    at n (http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/angularjs/1.4.8/angular.min.js:7:333)
    at g (http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/angularjs/1.4.8/angular.min.js:37:488)
    at http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/angularjs/1.4.8/angular.min.js:38:134
    at n (http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/angularjs/1.4.8/angular.min.js:7:333)
    at g (http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/angularjs/1.4.8/angular.min.js:37:488)
    at eb (http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/angularjs/1.4.8/angular.min.js:41:249)
    at c (http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/angularjs/1.4.8/angular.min.js:19:463

Here is the top of my index.html file:
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Filtra</title>
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
  <script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/angularjs/1.4.8/angular.min.js"/>
  <script src="http://angular-ui.github.io/bootstrap/ui-bootstrap-0.14.3.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

And here is the top of my app.js file:
var app = angular.module("filtraApp", ['ui.bootstrap']);

Does anyone know what I am doing wrong here? I am happy to include more code if it helps? I should note that the whole application works as soon as I switch to this in my app.js file:
var app = angular.module("filtraApp", []);

Thanks in advance!

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


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Q: Можно ли nuGet пакетам указать конкретные используемые сборки Имею ошибку:
Метод не найден: "Newtonsoft.Json.JsonSerializerSettings System.Net.Http.Formatting.BaseJsonMediaTypeFormatter.get_SerializerSettings()".
Нашёл совет перейти на Newtonsoft.Json версии 6, однако другие сборки в моём проекте требуют 12ой версии и работают не корректно. Соответственно мне нужно как-то подсунуть в  System.Net.Http.Formatting использовать версию 6, а для других продолжить использовать обновляемую 12ую
(использую framework 4.6)


We also developed clearer contract language to establish what behaviour is cause for discipline versus what behaviour would be better responded to with training or policy review.
(a) "The Employee knows, or could reasonably be expected to know, what is required," but behaves differently.
(b) "The Employee is capable of carrying out what is required," but behaves differently.
Item© is an amendment and will hold employees responsible for situations where they've acted carelessly or neglectfully.
While we have not set future bargaining dates, we're hopeful our meetings will continue on a positive note.
We will update you as soon as we can on any progress or changes at the table. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact one of us.


Accra, Feb. 27, GNA - The GSE All-Share Index, the benchmark measure of performance of the Ghana Stock Exchange, lost a whopping 86.42 points on Friday to end a week of unimpressive performance. The index closed the session lower at 9,836.84 points as against 9,923.28 at the previous close on Thursday, pulled down by Ecobank Ghana price loss.
Change for the Year to date now stands at -5.70 per cent. Traded volumes were down at 11,100 shares from 14,800 shares. Market capitalisation fell at GH¢18,465.15 million from GH¢18,528.03 million. On the broader market Ecobank Ghana lost GH¢0.39 to close at GH¢3.80.


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Institute for Communication Systems
Air interface
Cognitive networks and future internet
Knowledge and Data Engineering
Radio access system optimisation
The 'internet of things' is a way of using technology to connect any device that can turn on and off with the internet, so that they can talk to us and other devices.
CityPulse
Real-Time IoT Stream Processing and Large-scale Data Analytics for Smart City Applications
The CityPulse project aims to design, develop and test a distributed framework for semantic discovery, processing and interpretation of large- scale real-time Internet of Things and relevant social data streams for knowledge extraction in a city environment. Smart city data is big data. It is not only large in volume, it is multi-modal, varies in quality, format, representation form and levels of dynamicity. CityPulse provides large-scale stream processing solutions to interlink data from Internet of Things and relevant social networks and to extract real-time information for the sustainable and smart city applications.
Dr Payam Barnaghi
FI-Core
FI-WARE has started to materialize as a powerful foundation for the Future Internet. FI-WARE is an innovative, open cloud-based infrastructure for cost-effective creation and delivery of services, at a scale not seen before. FI-WARE is now well under way to successfully achieve its goals of boosting the effectiveness of creating new services of high economic and societal value, reinforcing EU competitiveness and bringing opportunities for high-growth entrepreneurs and SME players.
Now, following an intensive period of research, development and experimentation, the FI-Core Consortium aims to complete the FI-WARE vision and support a truly open innovation ecosystem around FI-Lab, a working instance of FI-WARE that is distributed across multiple datacenters in Europe and is effectively operated using the suite of FI-Ops tools.
In this project, the FI-Core consortium will deliver:
Technology extensions, introducing new capabilities to the platform
A means for platform availability, including the launch of operational FI-Ware nodes across Europe with resources and tools to support them, as well as extensive FI-Ware education and training programs for Web entrepreneurs and SMEs plus
Processes and tools for platform sustainability, dissemination of current and on-going results, namely FI-WARE, FI-Ops and FI-Lab. These will be a globally competitive foundation for Europe's economy
frontierCities
European Cities driving the Future Internet
frontierCities is one of sixteen accelerator projects designed to promote the EU's future internet research platform, FIWARE. As an accelerator, it is the consortium's responsibility to encourage SMEs and startups with innovative ideas to enter the market and to create a sustainable business.
FrontierCities, in particular, is interested in funding ideas involving smart mobility concepts and applications. A total of approximately four million euros will be used to fund a number of innovative smart mobility ideas, with each idea having an anticipated budget of 50,000 to 150,000 euros each. A requirement for this funding is that the idea use several of the Generic Enablers developed under the FIWARE platform. The FrontierCities consortium will also provide expert technical and business advice to the startups and SMEs so as to give them the best chance for succeeding with their business idea.
The ICS is responsible for providing technical expertise and guidance to both the FrontierCities consortium and also to prospective participants interested in being funded. We have strong ties to the FIWARE programme which enables us to respond quickly to participant queries and issues. We are also providing leadership as we are work package and task leaders for a number of the work packages and sub-tasks for the project.
Hyper/Cat
Domain interoperability through the use of a hyper-catalogues
HyperCat is an open, lightweight JSON-based hypermedia catalogue format for exposing collections of URIs, it is simple to work with and allows developers to publish linked-data descriptions of resources. Each HyperCat catalogue may expose any number of URIs, each with any number of RDF-like triple statements about it.
HyperCat is designed for exposing information about IoT assets over the web. It allows a server to provide a set of resources to a client, each with a set of semantic annotations. Implementers are free to choose or invent any set of annotations to suit their needs. A set of best practices and tools are currently under development. Where implementers choose similar or overlapping semantics, the possibilities for interoperability are increased.
The University is involved in the HyperCat project in a number of areas.
It is responsible for delivering one of the nine use cases which are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the HyperCat model. The use case, MyGuaridan 2.0, is based upon the original application developed within the Eyehub project. This application is being designed to provide direct and indirect elements of safety and security to an individual as she travels.
For the direct elements, an alarm can be instantly activated on a mobile device by simply shaking it rigorously for several seconds. Upon activating the alarm, the mobile device's video camera and microphone are activated so that information about the event is recorded and sent to a backend server for storage. This information is tagged with the mobile device's GPS coordinates so as to provide authorities with a comprehensive account of an incident as possible.
In addition, the alarm generates a notification to the individual's 'guardian', a person chosen by the individual to be notified in the event of an emergency. Thus, between the forensic evidence generated by the mobile device, and the alert to the guardian, the necessary attention can be brought to an emergency situation almost immediately.
The MyGuaridan 2.0 application will provide indirect safety and security elements as well. Utilising the HyperCat functionalities, catalogues of resources near the individuals can be constantly searched for safety elements such as a store that is open late, a well-lit street, a busy pub, etc. so that if the individual starts to feel uneasy, the application can direct him or her to one of these 'safe havens'.
Additionally, other individuals using the application could be notified of any alarms generated by in their locality so as to bring an extra element of notification to the situation whilst also promoting social inclusion.
As well as the MyGuardian application, the University is involved in developing the HyperCat platform, particularly in the area of ontology interoperability as well as the development of mobile device ontologies.
Prof Klaus Moessner
iKaaS
Intelligent Knowledge as a Service
iKaaS is a Research and Innovation Action (RIA) project funded by the EU and is a joint research platform between the EU and Japan. The focus of the joint research is the development of innovative global cloud platform technologies to meet the new challenges of big data, mobile and IoT. It aims to address requirements from business and industrial applications, such as robotics or factory automation and/or societal applications, such as health management for an aging society.
In particular, the iKaaS project aims to develop an intelligent, privacy preserving and secure Smart City platform. This platform is based upon a 'Big Data' resource and an analytics engine built atop heterogeneous cloud platforms with data collected from a variety of sensors from Internet of Things (IoT) environments.
These IoT sensors are deployed as mobile terminals, smart devices, and components that comrprise smart homes. We envisage that this data and the analytics engine – a knowledge base – form fundamental building blocks for cross-border business-to-government (B2G), business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) applications, such as lifestyle recommendation, future city planning, academic research and analysis, location-and behaviour-specific targeted services and so on.
The platform features will be demonstrated by way of Smart City applications promoting self-management of health and safety of citizens, as well as an information system improving data analysis for a smarter life in the city, focusing on such areas like epidemiological surveillance.
The University of Surrey is leading this project by providing coordination and management services. In addition, the University will contribute to the following aspects of the project:
Definition and building of enablers for an intelligent Knowledge-as-a-service platform
Definition and support of the instantiation of data collection, rendering and search mechanisms across cloud instances
Developing knowledge-based IoT applications through analysis of extremely large data sets as well as of data streams obtained form smart city deployments and infrastructures
Validation of the distributed knowledge-base through experimentation on data sets obtained from smart city data models and data source
The University is also the Deputy Work Package Leader for the Platform Design and Implementation work package.
Crowdsourcing as a means to extend multidisciplinary IoT experiments
The IoT Lab is a European project which investigates the potential of crowdsourcing as a means to extend existing IoT testbed infrastructures for multidisciplinary experiments resulting in greater end-user interaction.
This will be achieved by federating heterogeneous testbeds from the FIRE community and improving their interaction through the use of virtualization and Cloud technologies. Testbed scale will be extended by including hundreds of mobile device users, each of them connected through their smartphones, tablets, etc. This will result in new and otherwise impossible experiments to be undertaken by researchers.
At the core of the project is a set of crowdsourcing tools which will be developed that will allow experimenters to easily design and deploy their experiments to a large number of participants by including their mobile phones into the existing testbed infrastructure. Participants actively participate in experiments by sharing their data, perception, feedback in a privacy preserving manner. The creation of societal value and the identification of profitable business models are just some of the key aspects that will be explored during the project in order to generate further value from the project.
As contributors to the IoT Lab Project, the University will provide access to its campus-wide IoT testbed so that it can be joined with other FIRE testbeds present in the project to extend experimentation capabilities. The University will leverage its expertise in mobile communications by leading the conceptualization and implementation of the crowdsourcing tools, with particular emphasis on the mobile application that will be used by participants. The areas of efficiency, user experience and scalability are some of the key areas to be addressed in order for the IoT Lab vision to be realised.
SocIoTal
Creating a socially aware citizen-centric Internet of Things
The SOCIOTAL project aims to create open, participatory ecosystems in which IoT devices and information streams can be freely shared in a secure and trusted manner.
These data streams are made available to communities and their citizens in order for benefits to be made to society as a whole. This approach helps to combat the current view that IoT deployments being used primarily by enterprises for the creating and optimisation of their business processes. Through the extraction of real-world knowledge from environments and consumer intelligence, SOCIOTAL will create tools and mechanisms that simplify complexity and lower the barriers of entry to the development of social awareness applications.
By utilising the notion of context and context-aware data generation, as well as the sharing of trusted citizen generated data, SOCIOTAL aims to encourage citizen participation in the IoT. Participation by citizens is further encouraged through the use of various incentivisation schemes. A key part of the project is the engagement with communities comprising both application users and developers in order to foster the creation of a SOCIOTAL ecosystem. The outcomes of the project will be trialled in the cities of Santander and Novi Sad.
The University of Surrey coordinates the SOCIOTAL project and will provide direction for the success of its ovreall vision in order to build an ecosystem of socially empowered IoT services. In order to enhance trust of citizens in sharing data, the University is leading the work on creating new privacy preserving communication mechanisms.
This will be achieved by defining new enablers that infer social relations from mobile phone interactions by citizens and to exploit these interactions in order to create a context-aware framework for data generation and the enforcement of sharing policies. Some of the provided solutions will be tested and evaluated involving the "citizens" of the campus-wide University IoT testbed.
Prof. Klaus Moessner
EYEHUB - 2013
Tackling IoT challenges through an innovative use of connected technologies
Eyehub is one of eight IoT Ecosystem Demonstrators co-funded by the UK's Technology Strategy Board. Eyehub's technology has the capability of creating a safer and more secure environment for people whilst enabling future smart city services and products. The technology is a combination of Flexeye's software and data hub services in combination with Eseye's hardware. Both ManagePlaces and the University of Surrey have utilised the sensor data and the cloud platform which is integrated with the hub to realise mobile applications to demonstrate some of the fundamental capabilities of the IoT.
Furthermore, Eyehub enables third party developers to write applications that use sensor data and control devices using standard REST APIs. It also enables integration with HyperCat, an open machine-readable catalogue format for discovering IoT resources. The Eyehub consortium invites developers of sensors or applications to have access to the hub's functionality and to help develop meaningful applications for people everywhere.
A key outcome of this project was the development of the MyGuardian mobile application. This application was developed as a means to utilise the University of Surrey's campus as an IoT ecosystem 'proving grounds'. The app can be used by staff and students to provide them with a means to improve their safety as they travel across campus or to offsite University-owned destinations, day or night.
The underlying concept of the app is the generation of information-rich notifications in situations where risks to safety may arise as an individual travels. This is accomplished by informing predetermined trustees in a timely manner so that appropriate actions can be taken to mitigate a particular risk.
Notifications can be generated via explicit user requests, or implicitly triggered by IoT technologies which may detect a problematic situation (i.e. the application user has not arrived at their intended destination in a predetermined time). Depending on the situation, the notifications generated by the application are delivered to a trustee who is chosen by the user prior to embarking on their trip.
Trustees can be 'guardian angels' – trusted persons explicitly nominated by a user or perhaps members of the University's Security Department. Based upon the notification generated, additional actions may be triggered such as a call back to the user from the trustee, for example.
The MyGuardian application suite consists of two distinct service components:
A safety button
This button can be invoked from the user's mobile phone in situations where the application user feels threatened or frightened. This button triggers an alarm immediately to the trustee. Optionally it can establish a direct call to the trustee from the user so that more information about the situation can be obtained.
A timer-based check-out/check-in service
Prior to embarking on their trip, the user identifies the destination s/he is travelling to and sets this in the application. The user then 'checks out' of their current location using their mobile phone to scan a QR code/NFC tag placard placed at the entrances of various University buildings, or by using their current GPS coordinates
The user then begins travelling toward their destination. If the user fails to check in within a predetermined time, an instant notification is passed to their chosen trustee. The application has been fitted with a 'snooze' button which will allow the user to delay a notification being generated if the user is delayed from reaching their destination due to innocuous causes (e.g. the user stops to speak with a friend who happens to be passing by). This button will therefore minimise false alerts being generated
The service may also be used to record a user's travel path so that if s/he fails to arrive at their destination and their trustee is unable to contact him/her, their last known location can be used to help locate him/her
The Android version of the MyGuardian application was developed by the University's Centre for Communications Systems Research with the iOS version developed by ManagePlaces Ltd. with backend server support provided by Flexeye Ltd. the consortium leaders.
Another key component of the trial infrastructure is the 'Touchpoint' QR Code/NFC tag placard. These placards have been installed throughout the University's main campus and also at the surrounding student accommodation properties. More than five hundred of these placards have been installed.
The purpose of these placards is to facilitate the check-in/check-out process for the app user. The user uses the application to either scan the QR code (available for both Android and iOS phones) or the NFC tag (most Android phones). These tags have been encoded with their location information so that the application can readily identify the user's location. Thus the user simply has to scan the tag before starting their trip and then again when the destination is reached.
The University also contributed to another IoT use case, which it helped to develop, the CityGuardian. This application aims to provide users, such as the Guildford Borough Council, a stakeholder in the consortium, with information about noise generated in a city landscape. This information will allow these key stakeholders to better understand and ultimately act upon the noise-related issues within and around the town centre.
PROBE-IT - 2011
Pursuing ROadmaps and BEnchmarks for the Internet of Things
Probe-IT is a Coordination and Support Action (CSA) supported by the EU's Framework Programme 7. The aim of Probe-IT was to analyze existing roadmaps that are driving current IoT research, and then identify sources of fragmentation that could affect research efforts and finally to try mitigate this fragmentation. This was done so as to avoid wasting research effort on solutions that are not commercially viable.
The most important aspect of this project was to guarantee the interoperability of the proposed solutions. To this extent, a different set of benchmarking metrics for existing IoT deployment was identified. These metrics were then applied as a means to measure interoperability of existing IoT deployments.
The result has been the definition and execution of different interoperability tests among different IoT deployments, spanning not only the boundaries of Europe but also China, Brazil and Africa, both at the data and network levels. Popular interoperability tests have addressed and validated 6LoWPAN interoperability. As result of these tests, guidelines to increase or guarantee interoperability have been developed, such as the design of semantic interoperable deployments.
In Probe-IT, the University of Surrey played the role of mediator in identifying concertation activities suitable for raising awareness about the Probe-IT project so as to guarantee its success.
FI-WARE - 2011
Open API's for Open Minds
FI-WARE seeks to provide a truly open, public and royalty-free architecture and a set of open specifications that will allow developers, service providers, enterprises and other organizations to develop products that satisfy their needs while still being open and innovative (see Figure below). FI-WARE will dramatically increase Europe's Information and Communications Technology competitiveness by introducing an innovative infrastructure that enables cost-effective creation and delivery of versatile digital services, high quality of service and security guarantees.
The platform aims to reduce obstacles and foster innovation and entrepreneurship in a variety of ways:
Offering a set of open APIs that allow developers to avoid getting tied to any specific vendor, therefore protecting application developer's investment
Providing a powerful foundation for the Future Internet, cultivating a sustainable ecosystem for:
Service providers delivering new applications and solutions meeting the requirements of established and emerging areas of use
End users and consumers actively participating in content and service consumption and creation
FIWARE will respond to the demands of end customers as well as enterprises and organizations. End customers want to gain access and easily consume applications that can effectively assist them in daily life situations. Some of the underlying problems involved in satisfying this are the management of ever-growing data and information (e.g. from sensor-enabled environments) and the seamless access anywhere, anytime and from any device. They also require improved means for real-time communication and collaboration within their social networks, families and neighbourhoods while being mobile, without risking any security or privacy requirements. Overall, these capabilities could transform communities, homes and cities into safer and better places to live and leverage the Internet as an additional utility for Society.
Enterprises and organizations on the other hand, wish to get closer to their customers in order to deliver an even more compelling user experience and better service. For this reason, they would like to exploit contextual user data which may lead to a more personalized interaction experience and service offering, creating stronger participation of users in all phases of product and service lifecycles. In order to develop and operate these services, new methods, technologies and tools are needed to speed up the time to market, establish value added services and simplify access to relevant resources and capabilities, e.g., from the Internet of Things. Additional requirements on business services include reduced complexity of ICT provisioning, scaling, global availability and meeting security requirements from customers and legal authorities. An appropriate Future Internet platform would greatly contribute to meeting these demands from business customers.
Generic Enablers:
The FI Core Platform comprises a set of technological Generic Enablers (GE) which are considered general purpose and common to almost any "usage areas", GE implementation can be assembled in a specific Fi-Ware instance of a particular usage area. The GE Open Specifications contain all the information required in order to build compliant products which can work as alternative implementations of GEs developed in FI-WARE.
Those specifications will typically include, but not necessarily will be limited to, information such as:
Description of the scope, behaviour and intended use of the GE
Terminology, definitions and abbreviations to clarify the meanings of the specification
Signature and behaviour of operations linked to APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that the GE should export. Signature may be specified in a particular language binding or through a RESTful interface
Description of protocols that support interoperability with other GE or third party products
The FI-WARE consortium intends to deliver a reference implementation for each of the Generic Enablers defined in the FI-WARE Architecture. Some components of these reference implementations may be closed source while others may be open source.
The concrete open source license selected by the owning partners who work together in the implementation of a given component will be agreed by them, taking into account the Access Rights obligations and avoiding any impact on other Project partners they don't desire.
Note that not all components in a compliant implementation of a GE need to interoperate with components linked to implementations of another GE, nor provide APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to Application Developers. While implementations of Generic Enablers developed in compliance with FI-WARE GE Open Specifications should be replaceable, components linked to a particular implementation of a Generic Enabler may not.
OUTSMART - 2011
Contributing to the Future Internet (FI) through the development of innovative ecosystems
The goal of OUTSMART is to contribute to the Future Internet (FI) by developing five sustainable business eco-systems with FI technology at their core. These eco-systems aim to create a large variety of pilot services that can better utilise resources in their respective areas. The result is improved resource utilisation and a reduction in strain on the environment.
Reaching this goal requires the whole value chain, namely city authorities, utility operators, ICT companies as well as knowledge institutions. OUTSMART services and technologies are based on an open and standardised infrastructure as envisioned by the FI Private Public Partnership (FI PPP) and provided by a service framework designed to facilitate provisioning, development and access.
To this extent, OUTSMART has:
Delivered a set of detailed requirements for an FI enabled platform and corresponding business framework able to support the above described eco-systems
Provided a specification for the use of both generic enablers developed by FI-WARE as well domain-specific ones so that they may be utilised in a Proof of Concept demonstration
Delivered a business framework specification which serves as blueprint for the foreseen local eco-systems so as to demonstrate their sustainability beyond the PPP funding lifetime
Delivered a detailed plan for pilot services in the envisioned local eco-systems, which act as initial light house show cases for Europe in the Utility and Environment applications domain.
For the OUTSMART project, the University was responsible for providing management of the UK's ecosystem cluster. It was responsible for developing Smart Mobility use cases, with FIWARE technology at its foundation. It also developed a proof-of-concept application which utilised heterogeneous data streams to provide users with a real-time travel application. This application was called TRAVELsmarter.
iCORE - 2011
Empowering IoT Through Cognitive Technologies
iCore is a research project with a key target of developing a cognitive framework for use in IoT environments. While cognition, knowledge building and autonomicity in general are notions widespread in the traditional fixed and mobile telecommunications world, the same cannot be claimed for the IoT world.
Something which reduces the otherwise almost endless opportunities arising from exploiting the vast amount of processing, sensing, actuating and communication resources offered by the internet connected devices in real life deployments, in a viable, secure, scalable and cost effective manner.
Towards this end iCore is working towards developing a holistic cognitive framework, which covers all aspects of the management and exploitation of internet connected devices. From their proper representation and abstraction of their capabilities, hiding low level technological heterogeneity, to the efficient interworking and composition of capabilities, for provisioning of services of various levels of complexity always in a user friendly and automated way.
In order for the application/domain, agnostic nature of the framework to be demonstrated, several diverse in nature use cases are being considered by the project for prototyping instantiations of the framework to illustrate and highlight the iCore induced added value.
The University contributed to iCore by investigating cognitive approaches, covering all areas involved in the service provisioning chain, from the technology-unaware mapping of service requests efficiently, to the available every time resources and the efficient technology-aware utilization of them at real world device level.
Prototyping activities undertaken by UniS have been demonstrating the benefits of these approaches in the handling and management of meetings (Smart Meeting use case), covering the whole lifecycle of a meeting, from its organization, to its execution and the eventual wrap-up and aftermath.
IoT.est - 2011
Internet of Things Environment for Service Creation and Testing
To date, implementations of Internet of Things (IoT) architectures are confined to particular application areas and tailored to meet only the limited requirements of their specific applications. The silo solutions used in these individual sectors hinder the uptake and penetration of specific tailored services for Internet of Things applications, in particular for innovative business processes.
Hence the provisioning of IoT enabled business services (in short IoT services) is a time and cost extensive process. The complexity involved in data acquisition, quality control, context interpretation, decision support, and action control hinders uptake and penetration of specific tailored services for "Internet of Things" applications, in particular for innovative business processes. The challenge applies to object-to-object (O2O) and object-to-person (O2P) communication services. As a result, a lot of opportunities remain often unused in today's Internet-connected objects platforms.
To overcome technology & sector boundaries and therefore dynamically design and integrate new types of services and generate new business opportunities requires a dynamic service creation environment that gathers and exploits data and information from sensors and actuators that use different communication technologies/formats.
The EU FP7 IoT.est project develops a test-driven service creation environment for Internet of Things enabled business services. The service creation environment will enable the acquisition of data and control/actuation of sensors, objects and actuators. The project provides techniques and tools to describe, publish and instantiate IoT services that exploit data across domain boundaries and facilitate run-time monitoring, which enables autonomous service adaptation to environment/context and network parameter (e.g. QoS) changes.
IoT.est provides adaptable techniques and solutions for the creation and provision of IoT enabled business services by bringing together the three disciplines Internet of Things, Service Engineering and Testing.
The project consortium, that was lead by the University of Surrey, consists of 8 industry and academic partners. The main focus of the University of Surrey team in this project is on supporting goal-oriented and knowledge-driven service creation and provisioning through Semantic Web technologies.
The university has contributed to the areas of knowledge representation through interoperable description models, analysis of the semantic description of the Internet of Things-enabled services, environment and platform data to create methods for publication, distributed discovery mechanisms and run-time adaptation of the services.
The goal-oriented service creation enablers facilitate dynamic binding of matching services to workflow, integration of service testing in the service creation process and a dynamic deployment configuration based on semantic platform recommendation. Dealing with dynamicity and changes in the IoT environments is handled by including efficient monitoring and adaptation mechanisms in the service lifecycle.
For more information on the University's involvement in this project, please contact:
Dr Suparna De
IoT-i - 2010
A coordinated action that supports the development of the European IoT community
Of all the proposed dimensions of the Future Internet, the Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to most directly touch and affect every European citizen through its pervasive integration into their everyday activities in healthcare, transport, business, energy consumption and communications. The IoT will bring every citizen into close contact with the real world Internet that will bring benefits of immediacy, involvement, interaction and efficiency.
Additionally, the IoT impacts European enterprises, both in Business-to-Business (B2B) and Business-to-Consumer (B2C) markets, as the integration of IoT technologies into their processes enables greater efficiency, visibility and traceability and opens new markets. Already businesses have begun to incorporate these new technologies into their processes, but the integration is in its early stages and focussed on vertical markets.
While the IoT concept is at a peak on the "Gartner Hype Cycle", it remains a research area that is interpreted by individuals and groups of industrials and academics in many different ways, resulting in a highly fragmented field featuring diverging approaches. Technologies that drove and still largely drive the term IoT originate from the Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) sector, but other technologies increasingly have a stake and contribute to the concepts, but risk confusing and fragmenting the topic. Machine-to-Machine (M2M), Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (WS&AN) and generally Networked Embedded Devices (NED) are important technologies for the IoT.
This fragmentation inevitably leads to a lack of coherency that could hinder the integration of the IoT into the Future Internet and could prevent the IoT achieving its full potential for European businesses and citizens: the IoT research communities are typically aligned with one or other of the current IoT strands; the development of common horizontal middleware is difficult; standardisation activities follow vertical application profiles. Overall, the major risk is that this fragmentation could prevent the technical solutions from achieving the critical mass and cost targets necessary for mass deployment of IoT-based solutions.
From the non-technical perspective, many issues are associated with IoT, whether the wide adoption of IoT-enabled application/consumer products by the end-user or simply the regulation of IoT are considered. As well are important the common understanding of economical and business implications of IoT and ethical issues brought by IoT, as IoT is still considered by many citizen as an invasive and potentially privacy-threatening technology.
The IoT-I project has proposed a number of instruments (and setting up an IoT International Forum was one of them) and actions that will reduce these risks and co-ordinate IoT research activities to enable European enterprises to show leadership in IoT, while addressing the societal implications of IoT for the European citizen.
During the course of the project IoT-I came up with the following results:
Building-up an IoT community and setting up an IoT International Forum where European and International actors and stakeholders in IoT can meet and debate technical and non-technical aspects associated with IoT
Three widely attended events were organised in 2011 and 2012
The IoT Forum will become a standalone legal entity early 2013 onward
Producing an extensive Strategic Research Agenda identifying IoT-related research challenges;
Identifying a set of strategic applications for IoT together with Business Models, and identifying barriers and challenges to their deployment and adoption
Producing reports on Social acceptance and impact evaluation
Producing report and web-site on Ethical issues associated with IoT and recommendations
Producing a white paper on Reference Model where the Reference Model proposed by the IoT-A is validated against existing IoT Reference Models and Architectures
Dr Francois Carrez
SmartSantander - 2010
A unique city-scale experimental research facility in support of typical applications and services for a smart city
As part of the Future Internet Research and Experimentation (FIRE) initiative, the EU FP7 Project SmartSantander developed a large IoT experimental facility unique in its kind and available for experimentation to experimenters community, service providers and end-users.
Within the three years project, over 20000 sensors have been integrated into the testbed, by federating different sites across Europe, with the main deployment in the city of Santander and others in Guildford, Belgrade and Lubeck. Together with the support for a more traditional experimentation of protocols, algorithms for validation of new IoT technologies, a number of different use cases, ranging from smart parking monitoring, smart bus tracking and smart energy building monitoring, have been implemented thus generating a large amount of data accessible to experimenters through a federated Big Data cloud platform.
Additionally, by including real users through the realization of two mobile apps, named Participatory Sensing and Augmented Reality deployed in the city of Santander, a large amount of sensing data generated by users mobile phones is added to the Big Data cloud platform and is continuously growing.
Within the SmartSantander project, the University of Surrey led the definition of the testbed architecture and was responsible for the second largest testbed deployment within the consortium. The Guildford testbed comprises of 200 TelosB nodes, freely reprogrammable and extended with additional sensing capabilities, including environmental and energy metering capabilities.
As service testbed has a number of experiments including real users has been carried out and generated a large amount of data in the context of energy monitoring in Smart Building. Additionally, the University of Surrey team developed a semantic testbed resource description and a large set of advanced tools integrated with the testbeds for IoT experiment configuration, control and analysis.
IoT-A - 2010
A European Lighthouse Integrated Project which addresses the Internet-of-Things Architecture
There has been much hype about the so-called "Internet of Things". The idea of such a globally interconnected continuum emerged with the RFID technology, and this concept has considerably been extended to the current vision that envisages a plethora of heterogeneous objects interacting with the physical environment.
Today, a large number of different means are used to enable communication between heterogeneous devices. We see these as "Intranet of things" (see figure below), representing vertical silos that do not support interoperability. However, this balkanisation of efforts will lead to a predictable slowdown in devising a viable global solution. Furthermore, existing solutions do not address the scalability requirements for a future Internet of Things, they provide inappropriate models of governance and fundamentally neglect privacy and security in their design.
IoT-A, the Internet-of-Things Architecture, proposes the creation of an architectural reference model together with the definition of an initial set of key building blocks. Together they are envisioned as crucial foundations for fostering a future Internet of Things. Using an experimental paradigm, IoT-A will combine top-down reasoning about architectural principles and design guidelines with simulation and prototyping to explore the technical consequences of architectural design choices.
IoT-A will lead to the following tangible outcomes:
Architectural reference model for the interoperability of Internet-of-Things systems, outlining principles and guidelines for the technical design of its protocols, interfaces, and algorithms
Corresponding mechanism for its efficient integration into the service layer of the Future Internet
Novel resolution infrastructure, allowing scalable look-up and discovery of Internet-of-Things resources, entities of the real world, and their associations
Novel platform components;
Implementation of real-life use cases demonstrating the benefits of the developed Architecture
After the end of IoT-A (end November 2013) the ARM sustenance will be ensured by the Forum Working Group on technology (at least) with the main aim of specifying specific "profiles" and pushing them to standardization.
SENSEI - 2008
Integrating the Physical with the Digital World of the Network of the Future
In order to realise the vision of Ambient Intelligence in a future network and service environment, heterogeneous wireless sensor and actuator networks (WS&AN) have to be integrated into a common framework of global scale and made available to services and applications via universal service interfaces.
SENSEI creates an open, business driven architecture that fundamentally addresses the scalability problems for a large number of globally distributed WS&A devices. It provides necessary network and information management services to enable reliable and accurate context information retrieval and interaction with the physical environment. By adding mechanisms for accounting, security, privacy and trust it enables an open and secure market space for context-awareness and real world interaction.
Tangible results of the SENSEI project are:
A highly scalable architectural framework with corresponding protocol solutions that enable easy plug and play integration of a large number of globally distributed WS&AN into a global system – providing support for network and information management, security, privacy and trust and accounting.
An open service interface and corresponding semantic specification to unify the access to context information and actuation services offered by the system for services and applications.
Efficient WS&AN island solutions consisting of a set of cross-optimised and energy aware protocol stacks including an ultra low power multi-mode transceiver targeting 5nJ/bit.
Pan European test platform, enabling large scale experimental evaluation of the SENSEI results and execution of field trials - providing a tool for long term evaluation of WS&AN integration into the Future Internet.
M:Ciudad - 2007
A Metropolis of Ubiquitous Services
m:Ciudad takes mobile device technology a step closer to mobile user-generated services (called micro-services). It is a service infrastructure, a set of mobile tools and a platform to allow:
Instantaneous, on the go service creation and provision
Efficient context utilization: Automatic /Manual context-aware content generation and publication
Discovery, access and mobile-to-mobile communication in a very distributed and volatile way
The main components of the m:Ciudad architecture, with a clear focus on the various micro-service descriptions, is shown in the figure below. Therein:
SCK (Service Creation Kit): is used to create micro-service from scratch, or alternately to customise an existing one already published to the KWH and SWH;
SWH (Service Warehouse): it acts as a repository for service templates and description files;
KWH (Knowledge Warehouse): is the central place where is published any semantic information about the micro-services and related pieces of content;
SEE (Service Execution Environment): Resides on user's terminals and executes the micro-services.
Semantics play an important role in the publishing process (see left-bottom picture) as it will ease the discovery of micro-services by members of the m:Ciudad community. Ontologies are widely used to characterise micro-services and generated content
The Semantic Search Engine (not shown) is used to discover services based on advanced search criteria, and is also used to ease the service creation process, and ensure the consistency of the block based approach.
The University played an active role in the definition of the architecture, the definition of the general concepts and specifications of various parts (but the SEE) like the KWH, Semantic Search Engine, SWH, etc.
For more information on this project, please contact:
e-SENSE - 2006
Capturing Ambient Intelligence for Beyond 3G Mobile Communication Systems through Wireless Sensor Networks
Ambient Intelligence is a key component for future beyond 3G mobile and wireless communication systems. However, the enabling technology that provides systems with information to allow for Ambient Intelligence has been neglected and currently consists of many independent modes of input, mainly relying on active user interactions or specialised sensor systems gathering information.
e-SENSE proposes a context capturing framework that enables the convergence of many input modalities, mainly focussing on energy efficient wireless sensor networks that are multi-sensory in their composition, heterogeneous in their networking, either mobile or integrated in the environment e.g. from single sensors to thousands or millions of sensors collecting information about the environment, a person or an object. This framework will be able to supply ambient intelligent systems with information in a transparent way hiding underlying technologies thus enabling simple integration.
Email: s.sway@surrey.ac.uk
James Clerk Maxwell building


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Environmental Law in Australia
Home › Essays › Environmental Law in Australia
Natural resources are limited, and without controlled use and effective management, they will become depleted very fast. In today's world, pollution and destruction of natural resources has gained global attention. It is worth to note that pollution of the environment is not constrained within geographical borders; instead, its effects spread across countries and continents. As a result, world governments and other responsible authorities have risen to mitigate further destruction of the natural resources to promote sustainability. For instance, in Australia, there are legislations that have been enacted to safeguard the environment against misuse and destruction by humanity.
The Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act of 1999
This legislation was enacted in 1999 with the aim of protecting the environment and the ecosystem, especially within the areas acknowledged being of national importance. It is regarded as the nationwide environmental law in Australia. It, therefore, implies that all the matters addressed by the legislation are of national significance (EPBC Act 2009). EPBC Act further applies to functions done on the land of the Commonwealth of Australia, as well as those by the government of Australia and its agencies that might have tremendous influence on the environment. This law calls for any person who intends to carry out an activity that can create a considerable impact on the environment to get consent from the environment minister first. Once the project is submitted to the office of the Australian environment minister, its impacts on the ecosystem are evaluated, and decision made on whether to grant the approval or not (EPBC Act 2009). The evaluation process is very thorough and is carried out by a certified institution such as the Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts.
In addition to individuals and organisations, local governments in Australia are supposed to get authorization from the country's environment minister in case they are intending to undertake an activity that will touch on an issue that is regulated by the EPBC Act. This subject is hence accorded very serious considerations in order to ensure sustainability in the future (Smith & Ogle 2002). For instance, if a person or an organisation plans to engage in projects that require cutting the indigenous vegetation, controlling pests or diverting the natural water course, they require authorization first (McGrath 2005). Such activities that portray tremendous impact on national matters are referred to the environment minister, who is supposed to assess them and decide on whether to give endorsement or not. After presenting a proposal to the environment minister for approval, the following requirements are supposed to be met (Bates 2002). First of all, the action by the individual of the organisation should not create a significant impact on the World heritage standards of an acknowledged world heritage asset (McGrath 2005). Moreover, the person or the organisation ought not to undertake an action that is likely to cause significant impact. Thus, the proposal will be declined if the action has or is expected to have a significant impact on the environment.
The Hypothetical Case
The issue involves a property owner whose 4,000 hectares of land border and even form part of the Ramsar declared wetland. She intends to increase her economic activities and, therefore, she wants to clear 150 hectares of land, which is within the declared wetlands and close to Cessnock River. She goes ahead and clears around 200 hectares, which is way beyond the initial intended value. Besides, the landowner interferes with the biodiversity of the area because the cleared region harboured dry sclerophyll forest. The forest provided a habitat for many threatened species in New South Wales. Furthermore, the forest is a home for the Dwarf Eastern Sun Bat (DESB), which shares a symbiotic relationship with the tree. The bat benefits by eating leaves of these trees while the tree gains from being pollinated. DESB was found to aid in pollination of Eucalyptus insectivus among other plants. Shannon does not like the dry sclerophyll forest vegetation and, as a result, she intends to do away with it as much as she can. Destruction of these tree species will create a significant impact on biodiversity in the area no matter how gradual it may be done. This implies that Shannon violated the EPBC Act and should not be allowed to continue with her plans. Her actions are found to cause significant impact on the ecosystem in the area. The environmental law is empowered with considerable criminal and civil punishments for those who violate it. Also, this legislation gives permission to the general citizenry to seek a court ruling that will prevent and even halt an activity that has the potential to cause tremendous impact on the nationally guarded resources. This calls for the public participation in the process of safeguarding and implementing environmental legislations.
The Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities defines wetland as areas of lands where water covers the soil all year or at certain times of the year. Wetlands can be natural, like the Cessnock Wetlands, or can be artificial. The water found in the wetlands can be fresh, saline or flowing like in the case of Cessnock Wetlands. In this case where Dr. Chambers is seeking to obtain an injunction to stop Shanon from making further clearing to expand her agricultural area, it would be important that he demonstrates the importance of wetlands to the courts. Some of the significant roles played by Cessnock Wetlands that Dr. Chambers should prove to the courts include how they reduce the impact of floods from Cessnock River, its role in absorbing pollutants and improving water quality.
Dr. Chambers could also argue that there is an international obligation to conserve wetlands. The international obligation accrues from the Ramsar Convention on wetlands. This convention was signed in 1971 and aims to stop the worldwide loss of wetlands by encouraging proper management of the current wetlands (The Ramsar Convention on Wetland 2013). Since the Cessnock Wetland has been identified as one of the Ramsar Site, the state has already put in place a management framework whose purpose is to protect, conserve and ensure that wetlands are used wisely. By clearing the land that is within the Ramsar declared Cessnock Wetlands, Shannon will be contravening the Ramsar convention treaty rules and regulation.
Many lands that are government protected In Australia are for the conservation of forests and other terrestrial ecosystems. Of the protected areas, the national parks are the prevalent covering about 60 million hectares (Stubbs n.d.). The Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Act of 1999 is the principle commonwealth legislation that establishes management of protected areas. The Act has established the Director of National Parks who is responsible for; administration, management and control of Commonwealth reserves and conservation zones, conservation and management of biodiversity and heritage in Commonwealth reserves and conservation zones. The Director of National Parks also researches and investigates during the establishment and management of national parks and nature reserves (2013). This being the case, Dr. Chambers should bring the court the fact that the Cessnock Wetlands National Park falls under the protection of the EPBC Act of 1999. Shannon, therefore, is supposed to be prevented from her ongoing clearing of land because some of the area she intends to clear is within the Cessnock Wetlands National Park, which is protected by the Director of National parks.
Environmental areas that are listed in by the Commonwealth and the government Acts of environmental protection include the World heritage sites, national heritage sites, and wetlands of national importance. The animal species that are listed for protection involve nationally threatened species, common marine life and migratory species. The importance of this listing is that it provides protection to the environment and especially matters of national environment significance. These listings go a long way in protecting Australia's biodiversity and international biodiversity by controlling international movement of wildlife, protecting the national heritage and promoting ecologically sustainable development (Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation [EPBC] Act 1999 2011). By clearing the Eucalyptus insectivus, Shannon will be doing harm to the areas biodiversity in that she will have destroyed DESB's habitat together with that of other wild life found in that area. This will destabilize the area's ecological system greatly.
The best Commonwealth legislation that Dr. Chambers should use in this case is the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999. This because the Act affects landowners like Shannon, developers, industries, farmers, councils, state and territory agencies together with commonwealth agencies. Under the EPBC Act, those planning to carry out any activity on a national park or a wetland of international importance are to find out whether the activity has a significant effect on the surrounding environment. The Act thus requires looking carefully whether the development would impact the wetland, the development would affect any species of threatened plants, animals, or ecological communities, whether the activity will affect world or national heritage places and finally whether the development will affect migratory animals (EPBC Act 1999 2011). In this case, the defendant, Shannon, clearly seems not to have taken all of the above factors into consideration and worse still, she had not applied for approval to proceed under the EPBC Act.
In presenting his case, Dr. Chambers could utilise the precautionary principle to obtain a court injunction on Ms. Shannon. Since the 1980's, the precautionary principle has been used widely applied in environmental laws and is mostly applied in areas such as climate change, hazardous waste and ozone layer depletion, fisheries management and general management of the environment. The precautionary principle gives Dr. Chambers an advantage as it states that in protecting the environment preventive action should be taken. What is more, environmental damage is expected to be rectified at the source and those contributing to the pollution are to pay. It goes ahead to state that in case of serious threat to the environment, lack of scientific certainty should not be used for delaying environmental protection measures (Stein 1999). Dr. Chambers, therefore, having these facts will prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the clearing of land being carried out by Ms. Shannon may cause irreversible damage to the environment surrounding her Chateau Plonk. As a penalty for ignoring the Commonwealth and the national environmental acts, Ms. Shannon should be made to pay a fine as will be determined by the courts, and also re-plant the already destroyed Eucalyptus insectivus tree species.
Similar Cases: Booth v. Bosworth Case
The outcome of our hypothetical case can be predicted by focusing on a similar case between Dr. Booth and Frances Bosworth. This case was filed in October 2001 at the Federal Court under the EPBC Act. It illustrated the immense value of third party's rights, which showed that the EPBC Act could be taken outside a World heritage area that would probably create a considerable force on its values. Dr. Booth argued that Frances Bosworth and his colleague Rohan who were farmers had installed an electric fence around their farm to protect their crops and ended up electrocuting thousands of flying foxes. Although they had not obtained legal permission to kill the animals in a bid to protect their crops, they were not prosecuted by the government of Queensland (Environmental Defenders' Office 2013). The Federal government did not also take any action. Nevertheless, later on, a ruling was made against the farmers because the use of an electric grid was found to cause a tremendous impact on the population of flying foxes in the area. The court found out that there were approximately 18,000 flying foxes that were killed during one plant season in 2000 (Environmentail Defenders' Office 2013). The judge ruled out that if the lives of the flying foxes were at danger and their species would be lost if they continued to be killed at that rate. Mr. Bosworth's application to the environment minister in 2002 was declined, which became the first ever to be rejected under the Act.
In addition, depletion of flying fox species would create a great impact on the biodiversity of the World heritage area. Booth v. Bosworth case can require us to find out clarifications on some of the concepts used in the environmental law. For instance, it raised the need to understand the meaning of an event that had a significant impact. A great effect would refer to an occurrence that is vital, outstanding, and one that has regard to its framework or intensity. However, it is worth to note that an activity will most likely create a noticeable influence depending on the nature and degree of the impact (Bienen & Tabor, 2002). Additionally, other factors for considering include its worth, quality of the environment where it is impacted, and size as well as geographic degree of the effect. Therefore, in the Booth v. Bosworth case, installation of an electric grid was an action that created a significant impact on the population of flying foxes and the entire ecosystem of the area (Environmental Defenders' Office, 2013).


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2016 has been a wild ride; with shoots all over the country, the addition of Brandon Schrichten as Editor and AC and an ever growing list of amazing clients!
We are incredibly proud to share a few of our favorite moments with you!
A huge shout out to all of our clients, stylists, talent and production crews that helped to make all of this possible. Visual storytelling is a collaborative process and requires people working together as a team to create amazing work and we have been fortunate to work with some of the best people around!


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guest: Shunji Iwai
Th 25 Nov 12:00
Shunji Iwai ("The 12 Day Tale of the Monster That Died in 8")
Adriana Prodeus
Natalia Mętrak-Ruda
Every year at the Five Flavours we cannot miss a good selection of Independent Japanese Cinema. We talk about the themes it tackles today, the dilemmas faced by the position of an independent auteur in Japan and filmmakers who are still looking for new ways to create cinema.
The studio's guest is Shunji Iwai, one of the most interesting filmmakers in Japanese cinema today, who has been captivating and surprising audiences for over two decades with his harmonious blend of pop culture and lyrical aura.
Shunji Iwai
Born in 1963, graduate of Yokohama National University. The audiences' favorite and one of the most influential filmmakers of his generation, renowned for his unique visual style and avant-garde narration. Apart from directing, he is also a producer, actor and screenwriter. He wrote a novel, composed music for several of his films. Together with his band Ikire, he recorded three songs for "The 12 Day Tale."


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Racked obsesses about retail and shopping—from sidewalks to catwalks—in the country's most influential fashion centers. Racked editors take particular pleasure in being first in line, whether the story is a hot sample sale, a flagship store opening, or a burgeoning retail trend. In New York City since 2007, Racked opened in Los Angeles in early '08 and went national in 2010. Racked National is dedicated to online sales, celebrity fashion, and national retail.
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When American airspace was closed in the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, more flights were diverted to Halifax, and more passengers to Vancouver, than anywhere else. But the small town of Gander — a former refueling stop in Newfoundland, with a two-person police force — was probably the most altered, its population of about 9,000 swollen for nearly a week by the arrival of 7,000 "plane people" (and a few animals) who had been en route from Europe to the U.S. The enormous job of housing, feeding, and caring for them all is the subject of the unlikely and aggressively nice new musical Come From Away, which opens tonight in a production that reflects a triumph of the human spirit and an honorable mention of the theatrical. It's by no means the best musical on Broadway, but it's surely the goodest.
That a story is basically true does not make it more believable onstage, which is why there are so few great nonfiction musicals. The authors of Come From Away have exacerbated the problem by fashioning their representative sampling of characters from composites of real ones. You can feel this in their vagueness. We aren't so much given the mayor of Gander as a bunch of local mayors superimposed. The nervous young TV reporter who cutely mixes up the Elks and the Moose clubs has no particular characteristics except those that serve the action, partly because she's based on two different people. Not helping matters is the ambitious number of stories the show wants to tell. The cast of 12 plays at least 40 roles, both locals and plane people, most of them whizzing past our attention too quickly and indistinguishably (despite Toni-Leslie James's clever quick-change costume elements) to make lasting impressions. Even when they do, the show's pageantlike structure, in which bits of story are connected by setting and theme rather than by action, prevents those impressions from deepening over time the way they must. There's a lot of snow in Gander but no accumulation.
To make up for it, the production, tightly directed by Christopher Ashley, with a handsome woodsy set by Beowulf Boritt and fine lighting by Howell Binkley, does its damnedest to knock you into submission. The songs, also by Sankoff and Hein, are pleasant, in a folk-rock-meets-Celtic-revival vein that the show exploits with the mercilessness of a phlebotomist. (Cue the fiddle, bodhran, and uilleann pipes.) There is much spirited if obligatory stomping. (The choreography is by Kelly Devine.) The lyrics, though rarely well rhymed — "kitchen"/ "pins in"? — are unfailingly and sometimes absurdly uplifting, as for instance when the Ganderites describe their home as "the land where the winds tried to blow / and we said no." Still, the songs are sung beautifully by the cast, mostly chorally but with occasional welcome solos to break up the monotony. The solos also allow two of the actors — Jenn Colella, as an American Airlines pilot, and Q. Smith, as the mother of a New York City firefighter — to develop characters instead of merely restating the themes divertingly.
The whole question of diversion is uncomfortable, though, in a musical about something as fundamentally tragic as September 11. In facing the problem of making its story palatable as a stage work, Come From Away, despite its good heart, has possibly lost its way. A series of campy fantasy intrusions into the narrative — a gym teacher who can translate for Spanish passengers appears as a full-dress torero; a chorus line of stranded cardiologists volunteers to clean bathrooms — seems desperate. The hoary gay material feels like pandering or pinkwashing. (This even though Sankoff and Hein's only previous musical was My Mother's Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding, based, their bio says, on Hein's mother's story.) And in the last 15 minutes, when it becomes clear that the emptying of the town as the airspace is opened cannot in itself produce a rousing finale, the show loses all self-control with several postscript sequences telling us all the hilarious and touching things that happened to everyone over the next ten years. The deaths of 3,000 people in New York and elsewhere are only gingerly mentioned; it's like the child who cries for equal attention when another child is hurt.
Do we? In this cute musical there's a lot more of the latter than the former. Anyway, all the commemoration in the world cannot turn a civic virtue like kindness into a dramatic one.
Come From Away is at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre.
*A version of this article appears in the March 20, 2017, issue of New York Magazine.


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Little Scholars School of Early Learning offers a Government Approved quality kindergarten program and believes that this is the foundation of early childhood education and prepares children for school. We have been assessed and certified by the Queensland Government to ensure all Little Scholars children receive a consistent, quality education and are ready for the transition to formal schooling.
PROMISE NURSERY - Nursery near Al Nahda - 052 679 2809.