Navatec Applied Research
Navatec Applied Research |
Current Developments
New standards effort under auspices of George Boole Foundation (London) 5th March, 2012 The advance of proven state of the art in Plasma DB has been unexpectedly rapid. This has resulted in the standards work in support of this technology to have become out of date because the capabilities of the technology have been advancing more quickly than the efforts to document appropriate standards. In agreement with SEEL, Navatec and Visual Model a new standarization initiative will be started under the auspices of the George Boole Foundation (London) based upon demonstrations of concept followed by the issuance of "standard briefs" on elements of implementation that interface with existing web standards plus an explanation of internal standards to be appplied in building systems. Multi-lingual capabilities 29th February, 2012: Today, SEEL demonstrated a multi-lingual prototype for Plasma for 4 different languages. This was part of a George Boole Foundation Workshop attended by an invited audience. The demonstrator was Hector McNeill of SEEL. This system permits dialogues (web forms) to present desired languages but also look up lists are also consistent with dialog languages. The most important aspect of this system is that large sections of a database can be in one language but the DLO technique applied enables someone who only knows another language to drill down into the database and access all text content in their own language. An ongoing development will permit online analysis in any language with reporting in any language. The purpose of the prototype demonstration was to evaluate:
(b) There is no implication on functional speed associated with the number of languages although online multi-user tests have not been undertaken. Benchtest evaluations and performance data suggest online operations with multiple users across the language spectrum fall within normal operational parameters so performance should be acceptable. (c) code economy is significant. Compared with conventional multi-lingual solutions the DLO approach reduced overall coding by around 40%. Depending upon the extent of terminology included and number of languages this saving will probably tend towards 55%. Investigations continue to change syntax and apply primitives so as to reduce memory demand under operational conditions. (d) In the case of designing DLOs there is a need for some minor changes in the design system so as to make translation content input more easy. These changes should not require an elapsed time of more than 4 weeks. This system works well in the bench test system and therefore should work online in the same way. (e) Speed of turnaround is the time it takes to introduce a new language from scratch. This has not been assessed precisely because use was made of langauges well known to SEEL associates. A procedural model, based on the DLO design system, will be able to provide metrics and a more precise estimate. The DLO model greatly benefits from being the first set of modules applying the "fusion plasma seek operation" (FPSO) even although the data is "structured" FPSO represents significant gains in delivery speed. A Navatec spokesman stated at the end of the demos that,
Farm economics application The first development of a Plasma Database in a specific application has now been underway for 6 months and will be completed 2ndQ 2012. The work is being undertaken for an agricultural ministry in Europe as a prototype. European Union Farm Accountancy Data Network - FADN The application is a large data collection system for farm surveys to provide data for the Farm Accountancy Data Network. Europe-wide this system surveys samples representing a population of over 5,000,000 farms and which will increase to over 6,000,000 farms within the next 5 years. The sample including farm types of over 90% of the utilized agricultural area (UAA) and account for about 90% of the total agricultural production of the European Union. The information collected, for each sample farm, includes approximately 1000 variables. The application not only provides an online data input system it also provides validation and data review and updating facilities. More significantly, the nature of the Plasmadb enables the distribution of the dataset across several servers if necessary (often a requirement related more to political and administrative issues associated with devolved governance). Design-Implementation cycle In a comparison of other FADN systems in European Member States, candidate & accesssion countries, this Plasmadb development has required the professional input of one programmer and 70 working days to first operational release on a Microsoft Windows Server. Comparative systems using a range of state of the art conventional languages and data base systems are on record as taking between 150-300 working days and involving up to 3 programmers. This comparative information is preliminary and this will be revisited once the complete testing cycles have been successfully completed. Low Overhead Data Exchange - LODE Plasmadb combines high speed data computation with an unstructed data base1. Online operations require a timely completion of process cycles (request-data access-data processing-reponse). During initial benchtests and online evaluation the speed of processisng advcantages can be lost in the time taken to distrbute data across the Internet. The delays in data transmission are quite often caused by inappropriate data structures. In particular XML is very inefficient and slow for large datasets. In December 2011, SEEL developed LODE (Low Overhead Data Exchange) which reduces the bandwidth requirement to transfer data by a factor of around 35. That is, the LODE format is less than 3% of the size of an XML file. Major data transfers, for example that took XML data something like 1 minute to traverse between Seattle USA & Central Europe or Seattle USA to Portsmouth UK took less than 2 seconds using LODE. This has resulted in the Plasmadb "package" bringing significant performance benefits to data-intensive applications in particular and to help smaller appplications users experience inperceptible request cycle delays. Novel appplication - A Cross Compliance Register, Key to more efficient administration The failure to manage farm payments under the European Common Agricultural Policy regime has cost some Member States hundreds of millions of Euro in fines. A significant component of the cause of fines has been a lack of coherence in the intepretation of compliance norms on the part of the European Union, Ministries, Extension agencies, farmers and payment agencies. A solution to this issue was recently prototyped successfully using Plasmadb in the form of a Cross-Compliance Key. The complexity of the range of possible specific combined circumstances is why structured databases have had difficulties or have failed and where Plasmadb has been able to provide an easily managed solution. Design-implementation cycle The design and development cycle for the CCK was some 10 working days employing a single programmer. SEEL estimates that the benefit to each Ministry making use of the system varies from between €15M to €250M depending upon the size of the agriltural sector. This specific system will be demonstrated live in 2ndQ 2012. 1: The term unstructred database signifies that the Plasmadb does not follow the conventional norms of so-called Structural Data Bases and SQL although it provides equivalent query capabilities and in addition queries that go well beyond the SQL set. This is possible because the Plasmadb approach is based on Locational-State Theory which is particularly geared towards the resolution of handling diversity in nature (complexity). This same challenge is what gave rise to the origial concepts of Object Orientated Logic (programming - OOP) and the establishment of Simula. However, although OOP has come to dominate programming languages, the original paradigm of OOP actually related to the original Greek term paradeigma that was employed in ancient Greek texts to refer to the "model" used in the creation of nature (cosmos). Contemporary applications of OOP is somewhat mechanical and syntactical so that it's potential capabilities are, in general, not appreciated nor appllied. The original concept of OOP was to provide a more effective description of reality where reality consists largely of extremely diverse conditions; conventional structured databases and SQL cannot handle such complexity simply because current "structures" constrain the representation of reality in complex cases. The trend in data analysis is towards increased complexity and therefore there is a requirement for an ability to manage data of such complexity. |
The current work on the Plasma Database is to incorporate most of the theoretical concepts of the Locational-State Reference Base (LSRB), an advanced representation of reality (diversity). LSRB combines applied relativity vectors with object orientated elements and thereby achieving a more realistic representation of any phenomena.