Attendees:
Dickson Lukose MIMOS, Renan Souza UFRJ/SLAC, Bebo White and Les Cottrell SLAC.
MIMOS & Semantic Technology
Dickson gave a brief introduction to MIMOS and their interest in Semantic Technology (ST).
MIMOS is a company set up by the Malaysian government to do research in Information Technology (IT) and move the technology to benefit the country. It is funded by the Ministry of Science. there are about 700 people at MIMOS. There are 3 divisions: software for ICT (including knowledge interaction, video analytics, wireless and security), hardware (includes micro energy technology), manufacturing.
The ST interest of Dickson's team began in 2007. It was very new then and there was a lot of learning and many experts were invited to MIMOS to assist in the learning process and to advise. They identified a niche area to focus on as being the area of analysis. The team has 3 major areas: Reasoning, Analysis and knowledge interaction. the y deal with unstructured data including multi-media. their serious work began in 2009 and they now have ~ 20 papers and are some of the technology developed to local industry and government.
PingER
Les Cottrell introduced PingER.
PingER is a Internet performance monitoring project going back to 1995. It use the simple ubiquitous Internet ping tool to make active end-to-end measurements every 30 minutes. It was originally set up to provide monitoring for High Energy Physics worldwide collaborations. Starting this century it was extended to quantify the Digital Divide in Internet performance for regions and countries of the world.
There are now ~ 90 monitoring sites in 21 countries making measurements to over 800 remote hosts in over 160 countries of the world. In all there are over 8000 monitor-remote host measurement pairs with the measurements being made every 30 minutes. The measurement data from the monitors is gathered nightly by two archive/analysis/presentation sites at SLAC and at NUST in Islamabad, Pakistan. There are direct metrics including: round trip time (min/avg/max), jitter, loss, unreachability, and out of order packets. In addition there are derived metrics including throughput, Mean Opinion Score, and directivity (identifies the directness of the connection between 2 nodes at known locations. Directness values close to one mean the path between the hosts follows a roughly great circle route. Values much smaller than 1 mean the path is very indirect.)
The results are available publicly via the web. It has been used for: identifying problems (in particular last mile problems); identifying sites that need upgrading; setting expectations for a collaboration such as High Energy Physics or the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization; setting up and verifying Service Level Agreements; deciding whether VoIP is going to work well enough for a phone conference; deciding where to base a software effort; evaluating the effects of major events such as the Japanese earthquake/tsunami, the cable cuts in the Mediterranean, uprisings such as the "Arab Spring"; quantifying the "Digital Divide", deciding which replicated server (such as Hotmail) to use to respond to a user; providing analysis and guidance to decision makers, funding agencies and politicians on he network performance in their area; etc.
Casting PingER data into RDF format
Renan is from UFRJ in Rio Da Janeiro, Brazil. Hehas been an intern at SLAC for 3 months.