Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology
School of Information Technology
Department of Computer Science
Selected Highlights from Research Findings
The “NAD on the Grid” research project, which is led by Ms Serena Coetzee of the Department of Computer Science, investigates distributed address data maintenance. Also working on the project is Professor Judith Bishop from the Department.
The aim of the NAD on the Grid project is to investigate the use of grid computing and distributed database management technologies for a virtual national address database. The characteristic feature of such a virtual national address database is that it will not be located at any single physical place. Instead, the part of the database pertaining to a specific municipal area will reside at that municipality who are best placed to maintain the data. Through the use of distributed database management technologies these local databases will, however, be seamlessly integrated so that it appears to the user as a single, large database. Another important feature of the project is that it investigates the use of grid computing – in other words, the pooling and sharing of resources (processing power and hard drive space).
The advantage of grid computing in terms of establishing a virtual national address database is that it will allow smaller municipalities (who often do not have the funds to establish large computer databases) to house their databases in a pool of shared servers. The NAD on the Grid project is jointly funded by AfriGIS and the Department of Trade and Industry through THRIP
Contact person: Ms SM Coetzee.
The sustainability of software in the face of continued change is a major issue today. We have identified the vulnerability of software that relies on libraries that are only one step removed from the operating system or hardware levels. Our work on the Mirrors system was seen as a major breakthrough in this field when presented at the NASA Software Engineering Week in April 2006. Taking a longterm software engineering approach, we used the classic front-end to interface to back-end approach to remove all platform-dependent parts of our Views system, and replace them with a cross-platform GUI toolkit, in this case Qt. Our experiments have shown that the ViewsQt code is portable with only a few changes to the C++ classes to compile and execute the code on Linux and Mac OS X. On the Windows platform, ViewsQt works well with the .Net Framework, Mac OSX, Rotor and Mono. The basic function of Mirrors is to provide a way of creating the GUI, and giving the programmer easier access to the controls contained within that GUI. In this domain, our solution would encapsulate the essence of the TUI and enable the drivers or toolkits to migrate in time
Contact person: Prof JM Bishop.
|
