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Blockchain
(2018)
The term blockchain has recently become a buzzword, but only few know what exactly lies behind this approach. According to a survey, issued in the first quarter of 2017, the term is only known by 35 percent of German medium-sized enterprise representatives. However, the blockchain technology is very interesting for the mass media because of its rapid development and global capturing of different markets.
For example, many see blockchain technology either as an all-purpose weapon— which only a few have access to—or as a hacker technology for secret deals in the darknet. The innovation of blockchain technology is found in its successful combination of already existing approaches: such as decentralized networks, cryptography, and consensus models. This innovative concept makes it possible to exchange values in a decentralized system. At the same time, there is no requirement for trust between its nodes (e.g. users).
With this study the Hasso Plattner Institute would like to help readers form their own opinion about blockchain technology, and to distinguish between truly innovative properties and hype.
The authors of the present study analyze the positive and negative properties of the blockchain architecture and suggest possible solutions, which can contribute to the efficient use of the technology. We recommend that every company define a clear target for the intended application, which is achievable with a reasonable cost-benefit ration, before deciding on this technology. Both the possibilities and the limitations of blockchain technology need to be considered. The relevant steps that must be taken in this respect are summarized /summed up for the reader in this study.
Furthermore, this study elaborates on urgent problems such as the scalability of the blockchain, appropriate consensus algorithm and security, including various types of possible attacks and their countermeasures. New blockchains, for example, run the risk of reducing security, as changes to existing technology can lead to lacks in the security and failures.
After discussing the innovative properties and problems of the blockchain technology, its implementation is discussed. There are a lot of implementation opportunities for companies available who are interested in the blockchain realization. The numerous applications have either their own blockchain as a basis or use existing and widespread blockchain systems. Various consortia and projects offer "blockchain-as-a-serviceänd help other companies to develop, test and deploy their own applications.
This study gives a detailed overview of diverse relevant applications and projects in the field of blockchain technology. As this technology is still a relatively young and fast developing approach, it still lacks uniform standards to allow the cooperation of different systems and to which all developers can adhere. Currently, developers are orienting themselves to Bitcoin, Ethereum and Hyperledger systems, which serve as the basis for many other blockchain applications.
The goal is to give readers a clear and comprehensive overview of blockchain technology and its capabilities.
Various kinds of typed attributed graphs are used to represent states of systems from a broad range of domains. For dynamic systems, established formalisms such as graph transformations provide a formal model for defining state sequences. We consider the extended case where time elapses between states and introduce a logic to reason about these sequences. With this logic we express properties on the structure and attributes of states as well as on the temporal occurrence of states that are related by their inner structure, which no formal logic over graphs accomplishes concisely so far. Firstly, we introduce graphs with history by equipping every graph element with the timestamp of its creation and, if applicable, its deletion. Secondly, we define a logic on graphs by integrating the temporal operator until into the well-established logic of nested graph conditions. Thirdly, we prove that our logic is equally expressive to nested graph conditions by providing a suitable reduction. Finally, the implementation of this reduction allows for the tool-based analysis of metric temporal properties for state sequences.
Every year, the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) invites guests from industry and academia to a collaborative scientific workshop on the topic Operating the Cloud. Our goal is to provide a forum for the exchange of knowledge and experience between industry and academia. Co-located with the event is the HPI’s Future SOC Lab day, which offers an additional attractive and conducive environment for scientific and industry related discussions. Operating the Cloud aims to be a platform for productive interactions of innovative ideas, visions, and upcoming technologies in the field of cloud operation and administration.
In these proceedings, the results of the fifth HPI cloud symposium Operating the Cloud 2017 are published. We thank the authors for exciting presentations and insights into their current work and research. Moreover, we look forward to more interesting submissions for the upcoming symposium in 2018.
3D geovisualization systems (3DGeoVSs) that use 3D geovirtual environments as a conceptual and technical framework are increasingly used for various applications. They facilitate obtaining insights from ubiquitous geodata by exploiting human abilities that other methods cannot provide. 3DGeoVSs are often complex and evolving systems required to be adaptable and to leverage distributed resources. Designing a 3DGeoVS based on service-oriented architectures, standards, and image-based representations (SSI) facilitates resource sharing and the agile and efficient construction and change of interoperable systems. In particular, exploiting image-based representations (IReps) of 3D views on geodata supports taking full advantage of the potential of such system designs by providing an efficient, decoupled, interoperable, and increasingly applied representation.
However, there is insufficient knowledge on how to build service-oriented, standards-based 3DGeoVSs that exploit IReps. This insufficiency is substantially due to technology and interoperability gaps between the geovisualization domain and further domains that such systems rely on.
This work presents a coherent framework of contributions that support designing the software architectures of targeted systems and exploiting IReps for providing, styling, and interacting with geodata. The contributions uniquely integrate existing concepts from multiple domains and novel contributions for identified limitations. The proposed software reference architecture (SRA) for 3DGeoVSs based on SSI facilitates designing concrete software architectures of such systems. The SRA describes the decomposition of 3DGeoVSs into a network of services and integrates the following contributions to facilitate exploiting IReps effectively and efficiently. The proposed generalized visualization pipeline model generalizes the prevalent visualization pipeline model and overcomes its expressiveness limitations with respect to transforming IReps. The proposed approach for image-based provisioning enables generating and supplying service consumers with image-based views (IViews). IViews act as first-class data entities in the communication between services and provide a suitable IRep and encoding of geodata. The proposed approach for image-based styling separates concerns of styling from image generation and enables styling geodata uniformly represented as IViews specified as algebraic compositions of high-level styling operators. The proposed approach for interactive image-based novel view generation enables generating new IViews from existing IViews in response to interactive manipulations of the viewing camera and includes an architectural pattern that generalizes common novel view generation. The proposed interactive assisting, constrained 3D navigation technique demonstrates how a navigation technique can be built that supports users in navigating multiscale virtual 3D city models, operates in 3DGeoVSs based on SSI as an application of the SRA, can exploit IReps, and can support collaborating services in exploiting IReps.
The validity of the contributions is supported by proof-of-concept prototype implementations and applications and effectiveness and efficiency studies including a user study. Results suggest that this work promises to support designing 3DGeoVSs based on SSI that are more effective and efficient and that can exploit IReps effectively and efficiently. This work presents a template software architecture and key building blocks for building novel IT solutions and applications for geodata, e.g., as components of spatial data infrastructures.
In recent years, the ever-growing amount of documents on the Web as well as in closed systems for private or business contexts led to a considerable increase of valuable textual information about topics, events, and entities. It is a truism that the majority of information (i.e., business-relevant data) is only available in unstructured textual form. The text mining research field comprises various practice areas that have the common goal of harvesting high-quality information from textual data. These information help addressing users' information needs.
In this thesis, we utilize the knowledge represented in user-generated content (UGC) originating from various social media services to improve text mining results. These social media platforms provide a plethora of information with varying focuses. In many cases, an essential feature of such platforms is to share relevant content with a peer group. Thus, the data exchanged in these communities tend to be focused on the interests of the user base. The popularity of social media services is growing continuously and the inherent knowledge is available to be utilized. We show that this knowledge can be used for three different tasks.
Initially, we demonstrate that when searching persons with ambiguous names, the information from Wikipedia can be bootstrapped to group web search results according to the individuals occurring in the documents. We introduce two models and different means to handle persons missing in the UGC source. We show that the proposed approaches outperform traditional algorithms for search result clustering. Secondly, we discuss how the categorization of texts according to continuously changing community-generated folksonomies helps users to identify new information related to their interests. We specifically target temporal changes in the UGC and show how they influence the quality of different tag recommendation approaches. Finally, we introduce an algorithm to attempt the entity linking problem, a necessity for harvesting entity knowledge from large text collections. The goal is the linkage of mentions within the documents with their real-world entities. A major focus lies on the efficient derivation of coherent links.
For each of the contributions, we provide a wide range of experiments on various text corpora as well as different sources of UGC.
The evaluation shows the added value that the usage of these sources provides and confirms the appropriateness of leveraging user-generated content to serve different information needs.
Scalable data profiling
(2018)
Data profiling is the act of extracting structural metadata from datasets. Structural metadata, such as data dependencies and statistics, can support data management operations, such as data integration and data cleaning. Data management often is the most time-consuming activity in any data-related project. Its support is extremely valuable in our data-driven world, so that more time can be spent on the actual utilization of the data, e. g., building analytical models. In most scenarios, however, structural metadata is not given and must be extracted first. Therefore, efficient data profiling methods are highly desirable.
Data profiling is a computationally expensive problem; in fact, most dependency discovery problems entail search spaces that grow exponentially in the number of attributes. To this end, this thesis introduces novel discovery algorithms for various types of data dependencies – namely inclusion dependencies, conditional inclusion dependencies, partial functional dependencies, and partial unique column combinations – that considerably improve over state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of efficiency and that scale to datasets that cannot be processed by existing algorithms. The key to those improvements are not only algorithmic innovations, such as novel pruning rules or traversal strategies, but also algorithm designs tailored for distributed execution. While distributed data profiling has been mostly neglected by previous works, it is a logical consequence on the face of recent hardware trends and the computational hardness of dependency discovery.
To demonstrate the utility of data profiling for data management, this thesis furthermore presents Metacrate, a database for structural metadata. Its salient features are its flexible data model, the capability to integrate various kinds of structural metadata, and its rich metadata analytics library. We show how to perform a data anamnesis of unknown, complex datasets based on this technology. In particular, we describe in detail how to reconstruct the schemata and assess their quality as part of the data anamnesis.
The data profiling algorithms and Metacrate have been carefully implemented, integrated with the Metanome data profiling tool, and are available as free software. In that way, we intend to allow for easy repeatability of our research results and also provide them for actual usage in real-world data-related projects.
Version control is a widely used practice among software developers. It reduces the risk of changing their software and allows them to manage different configurations and to collaborate with others more efficiently. This is amplified by code sharing platforms such as GitHub or Bitbucket. Most version control systems track files (e.g., Git, Mercurial, and Subversion do), but some programming environments do not operate on files, but on objects instead (many Smalltalk implementations do). Users of such environments want to use version control for their objects anyway. Specialized version control systems, such as the ones available for Smalltalk systems (e.g., ENVY/Developer and Monticello), focus on a small subset of objects that can be versioned. Most of these systems concentrate on the tracking of methods, classes, and configurations of these. Other user-defined and user-built objects are either not eligible for version control at all, tracking them involves complicated workarounds, or a fixed, domain-unspecific serialization format is used that does not equally suit all kinds of objects. Moreover, these version control systems that are specific to a programming environment require their own code sharing platforms; popular, well-established platforms for file-based version control systems cannot be used or adapter solutions need to be implemented and maintained.
To improve the situation for version control of arbitrary objects, a framework for tracking, converting, and storing of objects is presented in this report. It allows editions of objects to be stored in an exchangeable, existing backend version control system. The platforms of the backend version control system can thus be reused. Users and objects have control over how objects are captured for the purpose of version control. Domain-specific requirements can be implemented. The storage format (i.e. the file format, when file-based backend version control systems are used) can also vary from one object to another. Different editions of objects can be compared and sets of changes can be applied to graphs of objects. A generic way for capturing and restoring that supports most kinds of objects is described. It models each object as a collection of slots. Thus, users can begin to track their objects without first having to implement version control supplements for their own kinds of objects. The proposed architecture is evaluated using a prototype implementation that can be used to track objects in Squeak/Smalltalk with Git. The prototype improves the suboptimal standing of user objects with respect to version control described above and also simplifies some version control tasks for classes and methods as well. It also raises new problems, which are discussed in this report as well.
With recent advances in the area of information extraction, automatically extracting structured information from a vast amount of unstructured textual data becomes an important task, which is infeasible for humans to capture all information manually. Named entities (e.g., persons, organizations, and locations), which are crucial components in texts, are usually the subjects of structured information from textual documents. Therefore, the task of named entity mining receives much attention. It consists of three major subtasks, which are named entity recognition, named entity linking, and relation extraction.
These three tasks build up an entire pipeline of a named entity mining system, where each of them has its challenges and can be employed for further applications. As a fundamental task in the natural language processing domain, studies on named entity recognition have a long history, and many existing approaches produce reliable results. The task is aiming to extract mentions of named entities in text and identify their types. Named entity linking recently received much attention with the development of knowledge bases that contain rich information about entities. The goal is to disambiguate mentions of named entities and to link them to the corresponding entries in a knowledge base. Relation extraction, as the final step of named entity mining, is a highly challenging task, which is to extract semantic relations between named entities, e.g., the ownership relation between two companies.
In this thesis, we review the state-of-the-art of named entity mining domain in detail, including valuable features, techniques, evaluation methodologies, and so on. Furthermore, we present two of our approaches that focus on the named entity linking and relation extraction tasks separately.
To solve the named entity linking task, we propose the entity linking technique, BEL, which operates on a textual range of relevant terms and aggregates decisions from an ensemble of simple classifiers. Each of the classifiers operates on a randomly sampled subset of the above range. In extensive experiments on hand-labeled and benchmark datasets, our approach outperformed state-of-the-art entity linking techniques, both in terms of quality and efficiency.
For the task of relation extraction, we focus on extracting a specific group of difficult relation types, business relations between companies. These relations can be used to gain valuable insight into the interactions between companies and perform complex analytics, such as predicting risk or valuating companies. Our semi-supervised strategy can extract business relations between companies based on only a few user-provided seed company pairs. By doing so, we also provide a solution for the problem of determining the direction of asymmetric relations, such as the ownership_of relation. We improve the reliability of the extraction process by using a holistic pattern identification method, which classifies the generated extraction patterns. Our experiments show that we can accurately and reliably extract new entity pairs occurring in the target relation by using as few as five labeled seed pairs.
Self-adaptive data quality
(2017)
Carrying out business processes successfully is closely linked to the quality of the data inventory in an organization. Lacks in data quality lead to problems: Incorrect address data prevents (timely) shipments to customers. Erroneous orders lead to returns and thus to unnecessary effort. Wrong pricing forces companies to miss out on revenues or to impair customer satisfaction. If orders or customer records cannot be retrieved, complaint management takes longer. Due to erroneous inventories, too few or too much supplies might be reordered.
A special problem with data quality and the reason for many of the issues mentioned above are duplicates in databases. Duplicates are different representations of same real-world objects in a dataset. However, these representations differ from each other and are for that reason hard to match by a computer. Moreover, the number of required comparisons to find those duplicates grows with the square of the dataset size. To cleanse the data, these duplicates must be detected and removed. Duplicate detection is a very laborious process. To achieve satisfactory results, appropriate software must be created and configured (similarity measures, partitioning keys, thresholds, etc.). Both requires much manual effort and experience.
This thesis addresses automation of parameter selection for duplicate detection and presents several novel approaches that eliminate the need for human experience in parts of the duplicate detection process.
A pre-processing step is introduced that analyzes the datasets in question and classifies their attributes semantically. Not only do these annotations help understanding the respective datasets, but they also facilitate subsequent steps, for example, by selecting appropriate similarity measures or normalizing the data upfront. This approach works without schema information.
Following that, we show a partitioning technique that strongly reduces the number of pair comparisons for the duplicate detection process. The approach automatically finds particularly suitable partitioning keys that simultaneously allow for effective and efficient duplicate retrieval. By means of a user study, we demonstrate that this technique finds partitioning keys that outperform expert suggestions and additionally does not need manual configuration. Furthermore, this approach can be applied independently of the attribute types.
To measure the success of a duplicate detection process and to execute the described partitioning approach, a gold standard is required that provides information about the actual duplicates in a training dataset. This thesis presents a technique that uses existing duplicate detection results and crowdsourcing to create a near gold standard that can be used for the purposes above. Another part of the thesis describes and evaluates strategies how to reduce these crowdsourcing costs and to achieve a consensus with less effort.