Weiß Armin
2019
A Web-Application for Publication-Import-Assistance
Bakk
In order to provide accurate statistics and information on how much work was
published by institutes and researchers, Graz University of Technology uses a com-
mercial research management system called PURE. The university would like to
have all work which was published by its institutes and researchers registered to this
system. However, registering older publications to this system is a daunting task be-
cause missing meta-information has to be entered manually. The project behind this
thesis was to develop an application which makes the import of meta-information
provided by other research portals into this system easier. This problem had to be
tackled by the development of smart algorithms to infer missing meta-information,
and an user-interface which supports the definition of default values for informa-
tion where no inference is possible. Those tasks involved working with public and
private API’s, parsing and generating large XML-files and the implementation of
an architecture which supports multiple different sources for meta-information on
publications. The development of this application was successful and the generation
of XML for a bulk import of meta-information from another research portal called
DBLP is now possible. The application is easily extensible in respect to the addition
of other research portals and provides versatile settings to adjust the generation
of import-XML more specifically. Users with administrative access to the PURE
server of the university can now select publications from supported research portals
and generate large XML-files for a bulk import of meta-information. Only a long-
term field test of this application will show whether or not the problem has been
completely solved by this work.
Bernhardt Florian
2019
From a User-Guided System to a System-Guided User in Warehouse Management
Bakk
In automatised warehouses often unwanted situations, which are called
problems, occur. In this bachelor’s thesis, a system component which col-
lects information about these problems and offers solutions to overcome
these was developed. This component was integrated into an existing ware-
house management system. Out of ten common problematic scenarios, 26
requirements which define functional and non-functional attributes of the
desired system component have been worked out. From process details like
recognition of problems, the definition of problems and their solutions and
handling of these by users are covered in this thesis. Then, a chosen set of
demands was implemented in a proof-of-concept solution. Additionally, the
introduced scenarios were implemented in a demonstration warehouse. In
the provided framework, the implemented scenarios can be observed and
handled by users. Handling problems is more than 68 per cent faster using
this framework. Even though adding new problems to handle is not simple
and the calculations made are very time-consuming, this thesis offers a big
first step from a user-guided system to a system-guided user.
Baronig Maximilian
2019
Development of a Secure Search Engine for a Data Virtualization Platform
Bakk
Data virutalization is an emergent technology for implementing data-driven business
intelligence solutions. With new technologies come new challenges, the complex
security and data models within business data applications require sophisticated
methods for efficient, scalable and accurate information retrieval via full text search.
The challenge we faced was to find a solution for all required steps from bringing data
into an index of a search engine to data retrieval afterwards, without enabling the
users to bypass the security policy of the company and thus preserve confidentiality.
We researched state-of-the-art solutions for similar problems and elaborated different
concepts for security enforcement. We also implemented a prototype as a
proof-of-work, provided suggestions for follow-up implementations and guidelines on
how the faced problems may be solved. Finally, we discussed our proposed solution
and examined the drawbacks and benefits arising from our chosen way. We figured
out, that a Late Binding approach for access control within the index delivers a fully
generic, zero-stale solution that, as we show in the evaluation, is sufficient for a small
set of documents with high average visibility density. However, to facilitate scalability,
our proposed solution incorporates both, early binding as pre-filtering as well as late
binding for post-filtering.
Wagner Lukas
2019
A browser based PDF annotation tool
Bakk
The Portable Document Format, also called PDF, plays an important role in industry,
academics and personal life. The purpose of this file format is to exchange documents
in a platform independent manner. The PDF standard includes a standardized way
to add annotations to a document, enabling users to highlight text, add notes and
add images. However, those annotations are meant be added manually in a PDF
reader application, resulting in tedious manual work for large documents.
The aim of this bachelor thesis was to create an application that enabled users to
annotate PDF documents in a semi-automatic way. First, users could add annotations
manually. Then, the application provided functionality to repeat the annotation
automatically based on certain rules. For instance, annotations could be repeated
on all, even or odd pages. Additionally, annotations can be repeated based on font
and font size.
The application was built using modern web technologies, such as HTML5 DOM
elements, front-end web frameworks, REST APIs and Node.js. The system compon-
ent responsible for automatic annotation repetition was implemented as a separate
service, resulting in a small-scale microservice architecture.
Evaluation showed that the application fulfills all use cases that were specified be-
forehand. However, it also showed that there were some major problems regarding
usability and discoverability. Furthermore, performance tests showed that in some
browsers, memory consumption can be an issue when handling large documents.
Reith Thomas
2019
Kafka: Implementing a Distributed Messaging System for Reporting
Bakk
As monolithic applications are becoming rarer a new problem occurs how
these smaller applications are communicating with each other it becomes
especially significant when looking into the topic of reporting which usually
requires data from multiple sources together.
We introduce Kafka as a distributed messaging system into our environment
as a means of inter-service communication. Additionally, two ways of storing
data are provided. MySQL for structured data and MongoDB for
unstructured data. The system is then evaluated in several categories. It will
be tested in terms of resiliency, performance tests with a high number of
messages and an increasing size of individual messages. The blockages of this
system will be assessed if this system is useful for reporting data to customers.
The experiments indicate that this system circumvents many problems in a
monolithic infrastructure. Nevertheless, it creates a performance bottleneck
when storing data received from Kakfa. Storing structured data turned out to
be way more problematic than unstructured data by a magnitude. Despite
this, we have been using a distributed messaging setup in production for some
years now and are also using this for reports with structured data. Storing
unstructured data in this new setup has not made it to production yet which
we are currently working on.