Open Systems, 2013, Volume 21, Number 6 (192)COVER FEATURES:

UNSTRUCTURED DATA ANALYSIS

Visual Analytics and Feedback Economy
Leonid Chernyak
The growth of analytics capabilities could become one of the first steps to the creation of new business management systems based on the feedback economy.

Visual Analysis of Social Media Data
Tobias Schreck, Daniel Keim
The application of visual analytics, which combines the advantages of computational knowledge discovery and interactive visualization, to social media data highlights the many benefits of this integrated approach.


Complex Analysis of Unstructured Data
Anton Ivanov
Every year, the volume of data generated globally grows, most of them unstructured, potentially containing useful insights for businesses and other organizations. Their analysis is an extremely complex task that requires integrated intelligent tools such as HP Autonomy.

Integrated Processing of Unstructured Data
Artyom Grishkovskiy
Unstructured business data analytics systems aid in uncovering hidden patterns that help create new management triggers for business processes. However, the most efficient means would be an integrated system that processes all organizational data to create a complete picture of the state of affairs. Yet, for the time being, the integrated approach is hard to implement in practice.

PLATFORMS
A High-Performance Protected Cloud Environment
Vladimir Zaborovskiy, Alexey Lukashin
To support dynamic development of a modern business, adequate scalable and reconfigurable systems are required. However, the transformation of isolated, static cloud services is hindered by the issues stemming from the flaws of existing virtualization and cloud technology. One of the possible solutions is through the automating the infrastructure management processes, creating a dynamic security system and increasing the performance of heterogeneous system configurations.

DBMS
A Database Made for Clouds
Mark Rivkin, Igor Melnikov
In June 2013, Oracle has offered Oracle Database 12c, a new release of its flagship database. The new version number translates to over 500 features that offer new capabilities both for users and application developers working with cloud services.


IT MANAGEMENT
ITIL Outside of IT and Almost Process-free

Dmitriy Vorobiyov
To implement ITIL, it is necessary to go beyond IT, forget about processes and performance indicators and start to «change minds».

SECURITY
The Childhood Disease of SDN
Valeriy Korzhov
The designers of network equipment tend to save on everything possible today, including reliability. However, the consequences of this tendency can be rather unexpected, which should be kept in mind when implementing software defined network principles.

STANDARDS
Ontology for Engineering Data
Viktor Agroskin, Anatoliy Levenchuk, Vladislav Golovkov
The integration of product lifecycle data is one of the most important tasks for the architects, builders and owners of complex engineering facilities. These data, accumulating in various systems, are characterized by exceptional heterogeneity of the exact same objects. For this reason, semantic technologies and standards such as ISO 15926 are increasingly used in the development of integration models.

EXTREME TECHNOLOGY
Actionable Analytics Technology

Leonid Chernyak
Management decision support systems require technology that differs from conventional business intelligence by its high speed and relatively low depth of analysis. These properties are present in visual analytics and data discovery solutions that place data in RAM or cache memory.

VIRTUALIZATION
Virtualization for Big Data
Vladimir Tkachyov
The business benefits of big data analysis are increasingly obvious. In the mean time, the share of unstructured data increases, and the deployment of unique physical infrastructures for data processing grows more complex threatening to become prohibitively expensive. The virtualization of Hadoop promises new opportunities for software developers.

Another Kind of Virtualization
Natalya Dubova
Data virtualization technology is not yet used widely, but analysts are sure that this will inevitably happen, as the sheer amount and diversity of corporate data sources require new approaches to data integration and flexible tools for rapid transfer of heterogeneous data into business analytics environment. This is precisely what data virtualization promises.


OS ACADEMY. IT UNIVERSITIES
Ural School of IT

Natalya Dubova
In June 2013, it was announced that the finals of ACM ICPC 2014 programming championship would be held in Yekaterinburg, Russia. It is unprecedented that Russia was chosen two years in a row to host the finals, and no doubt, this reflects the world’s acknowledgement of the country’s achievements in programming and computer science. The 2014 finals will take place at Ural Federal University (UrFU). The university’s rector Viktor Koksharov has told OSJ about the evolution of IT curriculum and scientific research in UrFU.

OS ACADEMY. TRAINING CENTER
Security through Play

Mark Gondree, Zachary N.J. Peterson, Tamara Denning
The authors describe some opportunities for exposing young audiences to cybersecurity via specialized board games, leveraging play for education and outreach.

OS ACADEMY. LIBRARY
The present and future of a data visualization

Sergey Kuznetsov
The main topic of the May issue of Computer Magazine (IEEE Computer Society, Vol. 46, No. 5, May 2013) is computerized visualization of data.