One of the pro­jects I’m work­ing on at Fraunhofer IGD is GeoR­ocket, a high-per­form­ance data store for geo­spa­tial files. It’s my pleas­ure to an­nounce that my re­search pa­per about this ap­plic­a­tion has just been pub­lished in Soft­wareX, an open-ac­cess journal by El­sevier.

For the last couple of years, I’ve been work­ing on a sci­entific work­flow man­age­ment sys­tem called Steep. I’m more than happy to an­nounce that, here at Fraunhofer IGD, we de­cided to make Steep Open-Source! You can down­load the bin­ar­ies and the source code of Steep from its Git­Hub re­pos­it­ory.

The new ver­sion of cite­proc-java 2.0.0, the Cita­tion Style Lan­guage (CSL) pro­cessor for Java has just been re­leased. cite­proc-java in­ter­prets CSL styles and gen­er­ates cita­tions and bib­li­o­graph­ies. Some of the high­lights are:

Today, I’m happy to an­nounce the new ma­jor ver­sion 4.0.0 of the pop­u­lar gradle-down­load-task. With this Gradle plug­in, you can down­load files in your build scripts and dis­play pro­gress in­form­a­tion. The new ver­sion con­tains many new fea­tures and up­dat­ing is re­com­men­ded for all users.

Geo­spa­tial data sets of­ten con­tain sens­it­ive in­form­a­tion, for ex­ample, about urban in­fra­struc­tures. Since clouds are usu­ally provided by third parties, this data needs to be pro­tec­ted. In our pa­per en­titled Dy­namic search­able sym­met­ric en­cryp­tion for stor­ing geo­spa­tial data in the cloud, we present an en­cryp­tion scheme al­low­ing users to en­crypt their data in the cloud and make it search­able at the same time. The pa­per has just been pub­lished to the In­ter­na­tional Journal of In­form­a­tion Se­cur­ity by Springer.

Smart Cit­ies make use of ICT tech­no­logy to ad­dress the chal­lenges of mod­ern urban man­age­ment. The cloud provides an ef­fi­cient and cost-ef­fect­ive plat­form on which they can man­age, store and pro­cess data, as well as build ap­plic­a­tions per­form­ing com­plex com­pu­ta­tions and ana­lyses. The quickly chan­ging re­quire­ments in a Smart City re­quire flex­ible soft­ware ar­chi­tec­tures that let these ap­plic­a­tions scale in a dis­trib­uted en­vir­on­ment. Smart Cit­ies have to deal with huge amounts of data in­clud­ing sens­it­ive in­form­a­tion about in­fra­struc­ture and cit­izens. In or­der to lever­age the be­ne­fits of the cloud, in par­tic­u­lar in terms of scalab­il­ity and cost-ef­fect­ive­ness, this data should be stored in a pub­lic cloud. However, in such an en­vir­on­ment, sens­it­ive data needs to be en­cryp­ted to pre­vent un­au­thor­ized ac­cess.