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In this work, a flexible and extensive digital platform for Smart Homes is presented, exploiting the most advanced technologies of the Internet of Things, such as Radio Frequency Identification, wearable electronics, Wireless Sensor Networks, and Artificial Intelligence. Thus, the main novelty of the paper is the system-level description of the platform flexibility allowing the interoperability of different smart devices. This research was developed within the framework of the operative project HABITAT (Home Assistance Based on the Internet of Things for the Autonomy of Everybody), aiming at developing smart devices to support elderly people both in their own houses and in retirement homes, and embedding them in everyday life objects, thus reducing the expenses for healthcare due to the lower need for personal assistance, and providing a better life quality to the elderly users.

The management of IoT solutions is a complex task due to their inherent distribution and heterogeneity. IoT management approaches focus on devices and connectivity, thus lacking a comprehensive understanding of the different software, hardware, and communication components that comprise an IoT-based solution. This paper proposes a novel four-layer IoT Management Architecture (IoTManA) that encompasses various aspects of a distributed infrastructure for managing, controlling, and monitoring software, hardware, and communication components, as well as dataflows and data quality. Our architecture provides a cross-layer graph-based view of the end-to-end path between devices and the cloud. IoTManA has been implemented in a set of software components named IoT management system (IoTManS) and tested in two scenarios—Smart Agriculture and Smart Cities—showing that it can significantly contribute to harnessing the complexity of managing IoT solutions. The cross-layer graph-based modeling of IoTManA facilitates the implemented management system (IoTManS) to detect and identify root causes of typically distributed failures occurring in IoT solutions. We conducted a performance analysis of IoTManS focusing on two aspects—failure detection time and scalability—to demonstrate application scenarios and capabilities. The results show that IoTManS can detect and identify the root cause of failures in 806ms to 90,036ms depending on its operation mode, adapting to different IoT needs. Also, the IoTManS scalability is directly proportional to the scalability of the underlying IoT Platform, managing up to 5,000 components simultaneously.

This paper presents a decentralized Web-based architecture designed to support the development of distributed, dynamic, context-aware and interoperable services and applications. The architecture enables the detection and notification of changes over the Web of Data by means of a content-based publish-subscribe mechanism where the W3C SPARQL 1.1 Update and Query languages are fully supported and used respectively by publishers and subscribers. The architecture is built on top of the W3C SPARQL 1.1 Protocol and introduces the SPARQL 1.1 Secure Event protocol and the SPARQL 1.1 Subscribe Language as a means for conveying and expressing subscription requests and notifications. The reference implementation of the architecture offers to developers a design pattern for a modular, scalable and effective application development.

This article presents Tarsier, a tool for the interactive 3D visualization of RDF graphs. Tarsier is mainly intended to support teachers introducing students to Semantic Web data representation formalisms and developers in the debugging of applications based on Semantic Web knowledge bases. The tool proposes the metaphor of semantic planes as a way to visualize an RDF graph. A semantic plane contains all the RDF terms sharing a common concept; it can be created, and further split into several planes, through a set of UI controls or through SPARQL 1.1 queries, with the full support of OWL and RDFS. Thanks to the 3D visualization, links between semantic planes can be highlighted and the user can navigate within the 3D scene to find the better perspective to analyze data. Data can be gathered from generic SPARQL 1.1 protocol services. We believe that Tarsier will enhance the human friendliness of semantic technologies by: (1) helping newcomers assimilate new data representation formats; and (2) increasing the capabilities of inspection to detect relevant situations even in complex RDF graphs.

The need for high-quality out-of-hospital healthcare is a known socioeconomic problem. Exploiting ICT's evolution, ad-hoc telemedicine solutions have been proposed in the past. Integrating such ad-hoc solutions in order to cost-effectively support the entire healthcare cycle is still a research challenge. In order to handle the heterogeneity of relevant information and to overcome the fragmentation of out-of-hospital instrumentation in person-centric healthcare systems, a shared and open source interoperability component can be adopted, which is ontology driven and based on the semantic web data model. The feasibility and the advantages of the proposed approach are demonstrated by presenting the use case of real-time monitoring of patients' health and their environmental context.

Semantic Web technologies act as an interoperability glue among different formats, protocols and platforms, providing a uniform vision of heterogeneous devices and services in the Internet of Things (IoT). Semantic Web technologies can be applied to a broad range of application contexts (i.e., industrial automation, automotive, health care, defense, finance, smart cities) involving heterogeneous actors (i.e., end users, communities, public authorities, enterprises). Smart-M3 is a semantic publish-subscribe software architecture conceived to merge the Semantic Web and the IoT domains. It is based on a core component (SIB, Semantic Information Broker) where data is stored as RDF graphs, and software agents using SPARQL to update, retrieve and subscribe to changes in the data store. This article describes a OSGi SIB implementation extended with a new persistent SPARQL update primitive. The OSGi SIB performance has been evaluated and compared with the reference C implementation. Eventually, a first porting on Android is presented.

Producing the Linked Open Data (LOD) is getting potential to publish high-quality interlinked data. Publishing such data facilitates intelligent searching from the Web of data. In the context of scientific publications, data about millions of scientific documents published by hundreds and thousands of publishers is in silence as it is not published as open data and ultimately is not linked to other datasets. In this paper the authors present SPedia: a semantically enriched knowledge base of data about scientific documents. SPedia knowledge base provides information on more than nine million scientific documents, consisting of more than three hundred million RDF triples. These extracted datasets, allow users to put sophisticated queries by employing semantic Web techniques instead of relying on keyword-based searches. This paper also shows the quality of extracted data by performing sample queries through SPedia SPARQL Endpoint and analyzing results. Finally, the authors describe that how SPedia can serve as central hub for the cloud of LOD of scientific publications.

In the next few years, the W3C Web of Things (WoT) platform will represent a reference solution toward the deployment of fully interoperable systems, hence unlocking the potential of the IoT paradigm on several use-cases characterized by the current fragmentation of devices and technologies. At the same time, the worlwide adoption of the W3C WoT architecture depends on many factors, including also the availability of support tools that might facilitate the deployment of novel WoT applications or the integration with traditional IoT systems. To this purpose, the paper presents the WoT Store, a complete software platform enabling the discovery and management of W3C Things, the monitoring of its properties and events, and the invoking of actions, all within the same dashboard. In addition, the platform leverages on the semantic description of each Thing with the goal of easing and automatizing the installation and execution of WoT applications, e.g. defining the behaviour of a Thing or implementing mash-up operations from multiple Things. We sketch the main features, the architecture and the prototypal implementation of the WoT Store. Moreover, we discuss the WoT Store capabilities on three IoT use-cases, i.e. industry 4.0, smart agriculture and home automation.

We propose a study showing a novel role of Gcn5p and Ubp8p in the process of ubiquitylation of the yeast proteome which includes main glycolytic enzymes. Interestingly, in the absence of Gcn5p and Ubp8p glucose consumption and redox balance were altered in yeast. We believe that these results and the role of Gcn5p and Ubp8p in sugar metabolism might open new perspectives of research leading to novel protocols for counteracting the enhanced glycolysis in tumors. Protein ubiquitylation regulates not only endocellular trafficking and proteasomal degradation but also the catalytic activity of enzymes. In Saccharomyces cerevisiae , we analyzed the composition of the ubiquitylated proteomes in strains lacking acetyltransferase Gcn5p, Ub-protease Ubp8p, or both to understand their involvement in the regulation of protein ubiquitylation. We analyzed His6Ub proteins with a proteomic approach coupling micro-liquid chromatography and tandem mass spectrometry (μLC-MS/MS) in gcn5 Δ, ubp8 Δ and ubp8 Δ gcn5 Δ strains. The Ub-proteome altered in the absence of Gcn5p, Ubp8p, or both was characterized, showing that 43% of the proteins was shared in all strains, suggesting their functional relationship. Remarkably, all major glycolytic enzymes showed increased ubiquitylation. Phosphofructokinase 1, the key enzyme of glycolytic flux, showed a higher and altered pattern of ubiquitylation in gcn5 Δ and ubp8 Δ strains. Severe defects of growth in poor sugar and altered glucose consumption confirmed a direct role of Gcn5p and Ubp8p in affecting the REDOX balance of the cell. IMPORTANCE We propose a study showing a novel role of Gcn5p and Ubp8p in the process of ubiquitylation of the yeast proteome which includes main glycolytic enzymes. Interestingly, in the absence of Gcn5p and Ubp8p glucose consumption and redox balance were altered in yeast. We believe that these results and the role of Gcn5p and Ubp8p in sugar metabolism might open new perspectives of research leading to novel protocols for counteracting the enhanced glycolysis in tumors.

Many of the molecular mechanisms affected by ubiquitylation are highly conserved from yeast to humans and are associated to a plethora of diseases including cancers. To elucidate the regulatory role of epigenetic factors such as the catalytic subunits of SAGA complex, KAT-Gcn5 and Ub-protease Ubp8, on ubiquitylation of non-histone proteins we have performed a comprehensive analysis of the Ub-proteome in yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae in strains disrupted in Gcn5, Ubp8 or both respect to wild type. We found significative alteration of ubiquitylation in proteins belonging to different functional categories with a recurrence of identical proteins in absence of Gcn5 or Ubp8 indicating shared targets and their interlaced function. Among the processes involved we noteworthy identified all major enzymes engaged in energy metabolism and glycolysis such as PFK1, PFK2 and others showing increased ubiquitylation respect to WT. We showed that the higher degree of ubiquitylation found is at post-translational level and does not depend on transcription. Noteworthy, we found in vivo severe defects of growth in poor sugar medium and inability to adaptive switch from fermentative to respiratory growth in strains lacking Gcn5 and Ubp8. Our findings data provide a novel, direct link, between metabolism and epigenetic control with a novel role of DUB-Ubp8 and KAT-Gcn5 on the ubiquitylation marking all the main glycolytic enzymes required for an effective execution of the glycolytic flux. Collectively our experimental results and the proposed model can lead to future research and innovative strategies that by targeting epigenetic modulators might be able to lower sugar utilization also in human cells.