On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: OTM 2014 Workshops

Business Process Management (BPM) gets increasing attention, both from practitioners and academics. However, studies recently start calling out the importance of a fit with the environment, which is called BPM contingency. This means that generic BPM principles and models do not always deliver the promised outcomes, as they fail to consider the specific environments in which certain organizations operate. Using a structured literature review, we present a state-of-the-art of contingency research on business processes.

Organizations are increasingly required to collaborate with each other in order to achieve their business goals. The service oriented paradigm is currently the preferred approach to carry out this collaboration as facilitates interconnecting the software systems of different organizations. More concretely, such integration is supported by integration platforms which are specialized middleware-based infrastructures enabling the provision, discovery and invocation of interoperable software services. On another hand, these integrated and collaborative environments (e.g. e-government, e-health, e-science, e-commerce and e-business) must comply with regulations originating in laws, sectorial regulations, service level agreements and standards, among others. This research aims at proposing solutions to monitor and enforce compliance requirements in inter-organizational service integration platforms. Particularly, this work addresses compliance requirements on services, information exchanged and the flow of interactions between organizations. The solutions, which are based on well-known enterprise integration patterns and other capabilities (e.g. adaptability and context-awareness), are then refined into specific middleware technologies, notably Enterprise Service Bus and Complex Event Processing engines.

Nowadays, business processes and their execution are corner stones in modern IT landscapes, as multiple process languages and corresponding engines for these languages have emerged. In practice, it is not feasible to select the best fitting engine, as engine capabilities are mostly hidden in the engine implementation and a comparison is hampered by the large differences and high adoption costs of the engines. We aim to overcome these problems by a) introducing an abstract layer to access the functionality of the engines uniformly, b) by revealing the engine capabilities through automated and isolated tests for typical requirements, and c) support the user in their selection of a process engine by determining and explaining the fitness of the engines for a single process or a given set of processes using policy matching against previously revealed engine capabilities. Early results show the general feasibility of our approach for BPEL engines for a single capability.

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) refers to ambient intelligent environments where health and personal care is monitored to help to ensure elder’s health, safety, and well-being, detecting possible situations that should be watched over. To effectively reason about a current situation and determine its criticality, it should be compared to past patterns. Current systems that learn patterns do not take into account the context in which they occur and we believe adding contextual variables to the description of patterns could improve the reasoning about current situations. Moreover, it can help improve the notification process to dynamically select who and what should be notified, maintaining the privacy of the elder and avoiding spam. In this paper we detail our proposal for a system that adds context to behavior patterns in order to then create personalized messages to the different members of the network of care of an elder living alone.

Due to rapid global economic growth and competition, there is an increased pressure on logistic companies. On one hand, they have to be flexible and agile, to meet Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) with clients, while on the other hand they have to comply with government regulations and environment protection laws. Better utilization of different modes of transport and improved decision making can contribute to solving both these challenges. This requires increased co-operation between logistic service providers (LSPs). Our aim is to develop an IT platform which facilitates increased cooperation between logistic partners and allows them to function in a synchromodal way. We use the principles of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to design the IT platform. Using this platform, a single consignment can be fulfilled using different modes of transport and unforeseen problems in transportation can be dealt with. A consortium of leading Dutch logistic companies will be the test bed for this research.

Context-aware systems that make use of sensor information to reason about their context have been proposed in many domains. However, it is still hard to design

effective

context-aware applications, due to the absence of suitable domain theories that consider dynamic context and associated user requirements as a precursor of system development. In this paper, we discuss a theory for the

well-being

domain and propose a model-driven development process that exploits the proposed theory to build effective, i.e. user-centric, context-aware applications.

Providing proof of the trustworthiness of the digital contents, supported by digital objects, goes through the reconstruction of information which could address replication of preserving repositories, heterogeneity in the maintenance approaches, and differences of the technological applications. In this research will be investigated how to use Semantic Web technology for providing technological evidence, about custody chain, ensuring that the digital content is what it was purported to be at its creation time.

Flexibility is a key concern in business process management and mature solutions and systems have been developed during the last years. What can be observed is that the approaches mostly consider process instances that are executed based on a process schema reflecting a process type, e.g., an order process. The process instances might be adapted during runtime in an individual manner (ad-hoc changes) or the process schema evolves due to, for example, new regulations. We studied cases from four different domains for their requirements on flexibility. These use cases are characterized by long running, highly adaptive, and individual instances, i.e., instances that are not based on a common process schema, but develop during runtime based on context and process-relevant data. The requirements analysis shows that can only part of them can be met by existing approaches. To illustrate an initial solution meeting the identified requirements, a prototypical implementation of the care domain use case is demonstrated, followed by a discussion of lessons learned and a research agenda.

Requirement Engineering plays a key role in developing complex space systems successfully. How to achieve efficient and effective information exchange during the whole life cycle of a space system is a challenge, which can be tackled by realizing

semantic interoperability

between involved partners (as presented in ECSS-E-TM-10-23A [1]). Using academic works related to fact based modelling (FBM), the European Space Agency (ESA) has initiated the development of a new knowledge management system (called Fact-based Modeling Unifying System or FAMOUS) to provide means to tackle semantic interoperability. The Agency has also organized an international working group of FBM experts to support this objective. In this paper, two Requirement Engineering use cases currently developed at ESA will be presented: one related to requirement analysis for spacecraft on-board software and the other one to requirement management for human spaceflight missions.

Renewable energy sources will play in the years to come a central role in moving the world onto a more secure, reliable and sustainable energy path. In this paper the case of an Italian power plant fed from biomass (de-oiled pomace and waste wood) is discussed for an agricultural district. The optimal operating conditions are addressed by setting up an information model for the improvement of accuracy of estimation of the potential of biomass from the sustainability perspective. Criticalities of data consistency and coherence are highlighted too as a function of the systemic problem introduced by the several sources within the agricultural district.

Industrial data in time series exhibit seasonal behavior like demand for materials for any Industry and this call for seasonal forecasting which is of considerable importance for any planning for an industry as the business profitability revolves around the decisions based on the results of forecasting. This paper tries to explore the situations in the business industry domain which concentrates on the analysis of seasonal time series data using Holt-Winters exponential smoothing methods and along with this exploration the paper tries to optimize most of the intermediate stage for detailed analysis using in-memory database and sql techniques.

We present a new Transport mechanism for the OPC-UA middleware. This mechanism, based on an overlay network, allows to find a new route for OPC-UA packets in case of routing failure.

Customers with production environment with massive customization in their logic leads to the challenge of traversing the Bill of Materials data hierarchy and its effective management for real time reporting which is required to accommodate diverse operations. There are various techniques to streamline the process of reporting but in present scenario, customers are doing it in batch processing manner and the reports are generated for past data and the tools and techniques used require human intervention. This paper comes up with effective in-memory database technique to traverse the complex BOM data hierarchy and facilitate in real time reporting. This not only helps the customer to customize their databases and have complex hierarchies but also helps in real time reporting which facilitates the customers to have insights to their business in real time with the advantage of streamlining their past and present performances and predict the future performances to edge the competition. The experiment was done with a top FMCG company data which provided us with the insights of de-complicating the traversal stage in an in-memory database paradigm leading to faster reporting times.

Companies are taking more and more advantage of cloud architectures for their IT systems. By combining private and public cloud resources, it is possible to facilitate data submissions by customers and processing with third parties, among other advantages. But this represents also a potential threat to personal data’s privacy and confidentiality. Even if legal obligations regulate the usage of personal data, for example requiring to disclose them in anonymised form, users do not have any visibility or control on data disclosure operations, nor on anonmymisation policies used by companies. To this extent, we propose a solution to establish and enforce data-centric security policies, in order to enable secure and compliant data processing operations. Our proposal is particularly fit for cloud architectures as it supports multiple actors with different roles, responsibilities and obligations. We also present a use case to demonstrate the peculiarities of our proposition.

Access control systems can be categorized in two classes: stateless or stateful. While stateless access control systems consider only current state of the system for access decision, stateful access control integrates past and current state of the system. The state of the system can change depending on the way how resources were used. We also observe that stateful access control systems strongly rely on centralised state monitoring infrastructure. In the context of distributed systems, state monitoring is very difficult to achieve, both for security and technical reasons. In this paper, we propose to use obligation execution proof to evaluate current distributed system state. Data usage conditions are defined as obligations expressing the actions that must be executed before or after granted access. In this paper, we aim at fostering distributed access control enforcement relying on certified obligations.

This paper complements the

privacy preserving distributed

OLAP

framework

proposed by us in a previous work by introducing

four major theoretical properties

that extend models and algorithms presented in the previous work, where the experimental validation of the framework has also been reported. Particularly, our framework makes use of the

CUR

matrix decomposition technique

as the elementary component for

computing privacy preserving two-dimensional

OLAP

views effectively and efficiently

. Here, we investigate theoretical properties of the

CUR

decomposition method, and identify four theoretical extensions of this method, which, according to our vision, may result in benefits for a wide spectrum of aspects in the context of privacy preserving distributed

OLAP

, such as

privacy preserving knowledge fruition schemes and query optimization

. In addition to this, we also provide a widespread experimental analysis of the framework, which fully confirms to us the major practical achievements, in terms of both efficacy and efficiency, due to our framework.

Cloud computing solutions imply chances for economic advantages concerning investment, administration and maintenance costs. On the downside these advantages are paid with a loss of autonomy; the service providers often predetermine configuration and authorization functionalities. The increase of participating actors represents recent privacy, security and legal issues for service providers and users. The different interests of all involved stakeholders raise a need for distributed access control functionalities, which consider the various restrictions of the stakeholders. The presented work designs and realizes a web interface, service users can use to express fine-grained access control policies concerning their resources. The increase of RESTful online services is addressed by a template approach that serves as a basis for the policy interface. A particular focus is set on the eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML), a standard for distributed access control. Following the XACML standard the web interface is realized within the XACML component model. Users’ requirements are retrieved via the web interface and translated into a complete XACML policy. The generated policies are tested for syntactic and semantic correctness as well as usability.

The processing of Big Data often includes sorting as a basic operator. Indeed, it has been shown that many software applications spend up to 25% of their time sorting data. Moreover, for compute-bound applications, the most energy-efficient executions have shown to use a CPU speed lower than the maximum speed: the CPU

sweet spot

frequency. In this paper, we use these findings to run Big Data intensive applications in a more energy-efficient way. We give empirical evidence that data-intensive analytic tasks are more energy-efficient when CPU(s) operate(s) at sweet spots frequencies. Our approach uses a novel high-precision, fine-grained energy measurement infrastructure to investigate the energy (joules) consumed by different sorting algorithms. Our experiments show that algorithms can have different sweet spot frequencies for the same computational task. To leverage these findings, we describe how a new kind of self-adaptive software applications can be engineered to increase their energy-efficiency.

Inspired by the emerging

Cloud Computing

challenge, in this paper we provide

a comprehensive framework for modeling and managing time bound constraints in data-intensive Grid and Cloud infrastructures

, along with its experimental assessment and analysis. We provide both conceptual and theoretical contributions of the proposed framework, along with a

heuristic scheme

, called

RGDTExec

, that solves all possible instances of the problem underlying the proposed framework by exploiting a suitable

greedy algorithm

, called

RGDTExecRun

. As we demonstrate throughout the paper, the framework keeps several aspects of research innovations that are beneficial in a wide range of application scenarios.

Online trading protocols enable participants to trade, barter, or sell goods and services over a private network or the global Net. Due to diversity of network and computational resources at their disposal, participants communicate and carry out their trading with different latencies. This scenario may give rise to

latency attacks

, where malicious parties (a.k.a.

fast traders

) exploit lower latency to attack trading protocols’ fairness and increase their income. With the advent of the cloud, the problem of identifying and preventing latency attacks is exacerbated by the fact that cloud providers and privileged users could collude to make latency attacks simpler and more effective. In this paper, we give an overview of network and storage latency attacks in multi-party trading protocols, focusing on cloud peculiarities and providing some empirical recommendations for protocol design.

In this paper we describe an approach that integrates a Configuration-Management-Database into fabric-process specification and automation in order to consider different conditions regarding to cloud-services. By implementing our approach, the complexity of fabric-processes gets reduced. We developed a prototype by using formal prototyping principles as research methods and integrated the Configuration-Management-Database Command into the Workflow-Management-System Activiti. We used this prototype to evaluate our approach. We implemented three different fabric-processes and show that by using our approach the complexity of these three fabric-processes gets reduced.

Cloud scenarios are a flexible and scalable solution for the creation, provisioning and consumption of services. Service providers and consumers typically decide and negotiate requirements for their services. However, as these are operated by the cloud platform, consumers have a reduced visibility on the actual fullfillement of the requirements. To increase their trust in the cloud, this paper proposes an approach for configuration validation that relies on a standard based language and adapts to the dynamic nature of cloud environments.

Collaborating business organisations have to face the challenge of being interoperable despite the growing complexity of products and services, and despite the increasing agility requirements. Changes to products and services and to supply network configurations occur frequently and require to maintain interoperability constantly in a dynamic way. Designed to formalize and handle interoperability issues, the Ontology of Enterprise Interoperability lacks means to capture the dynamics of modern business. We propose in this paper an extension based on the Complex Adaptive Systems theory. A use-cases is discussed by applying the ontology within a knowledge life cycle framework.

Requirements Engineering (RE) is an important activity in system engineering and produces, from the users’ needs, specifications related to what the final system must be. This process in complex systems engineering is extremely intense, because there is a large number of stakeholders involved, with expertise deriving from heterogeneous domains. Moreover, requirements’ improvements and variations are common during system life cycle phases. Thus, there is a risk of inconsistency of requirements during the engineering of a system. This paper provides a contribution in requirements engineering as it explores requirements interoperability in complex systems when multiples dimensions are involved. It discusses requirement management according to the cross-domains dimension, the cross-systems life cycle dimension, the cross-requirements dimension and the risk of inconsistency when three dimensions are involved simultaneously during the life cycle phases. The main result is an overview of the existing gaps in one and/or more dimensions allowing a discussion on the possibilities to cope with the problem of requirements inconsistency in multiples dimensions.

Today’s complexity of distributed application systems, such as dynamic supply networks, requires a system-of-systems (SoS) perspective for effective adaptation and sustainable use. Those systems not only need to be operated as separate systems (e.g., optimizing each transport modality in supply networks), but also are required to capture complex situations as interconnected entity (e.g., adapting a transport chain involving different modalities according to weather conditions). SoS can handle such challenges through emerging behavior, while letting each of the involved systems operate separately. The latter property requires interoperability of systems that can be preserved even in dynamically changing environments applying the theory of bigraphs. Abstract relationships allow not only the representation of dynamic interaction but also the respecification of these systems through behavior adaptations. This abstraction supports cross-system decomposition as well as composition of interaction patterns for the purpose of emergent behavior. We demonstrate the potential of this approach by orchestrating two distributed and independent systems. SoS behavior orchestration enables to directly respond to changes in the application system context.

Modern day enterprises need to be continuously “on the move” to deal with the many challenges and opportunities that confront them. The resulting changes can take shape as top-down and premeditated efforts, but are more likely to also take the form of numerous small changes that emerge bottom-up in a seemingly spontaneous fashion. Additionally, fixed organizational structures are being replaced by more dynamic networked enterprises, also blurring borderlines between existing enterprises within the same value web/chain.

We argue that the change processes of modern day enterprises are a key business process, next to the regular business processes involved in the operational activities. We therefore suggest to refer to the change processes as

second order

business processes, as they essentially change the regular (

first order

) business processes and their supportive structures. Second order business processes need the supported of information systems that capture, manipulate and disseminate information concerning different structural aspects (e.g. from value propositions, via business processes and supporting applications, to the underlying IT infrastructures) of a networked enterprise and its environment. We refer to such information systems as

second order information systems

.

In this position paper, we specifically zoom in on the need for interoperation of such second order information systems within networked enterprises that are “on the move”. This is what we will refer to as

second-order interoperation

.

Internet of things, mobile Internet, cloud computing and big data technologies build a sensing environment for all kinds of businesses. Inter enterprise collaboration is meeting new challenges of omni-channel marketing, closed-loop supply chain and enterprise networks integration. A data convergence oriented enterprise networks integration architecture is developed in the paper. How to use the developed technologies to solve problems of product lifecycle management and omni-channel marketing management are discussed in detailed cases studies.

Virtual reality simulators in medicine are becoming more widely used to train residents and interns. In this paper, we discuss the design of a Virtual Surgical Environment (VSE) for performing a class of orthopedic surgeries. The VSE focuses on providing training to residents in LISS plating based surgeries (for addressing fractures of the femur). Using such virtual environments enables medical residents to develop a better understanding of the various surgical steps along with enabling them to practice specific surgical steps involving surgical instruments as well as other components. A brief discussion of the network based implementation is also provided; such an approach enables multiple users from different geographical locations to interact with an expert surgeon at another location. This network based approach was demonstrated as part of Next Generation Internet activities related to the GENI and US Ignite projects.

In this article we will evaluate the different referencing modes in fact-based modeling and we will investigate to what extent the application of the fact based modeling methodology in a specific domain context has an impact on the choice of a referencing mode and under what conditions one referencing mode is preferred over another.

To systematically monitor the online customer satisfaction means to deal with a large amount of non-structured data and with many Natural Language Processing challenges. The purpose of the present research is to automatically identify the benefits and the drawbacks expressed by internet users in Italian customer reviews in free text format. The work is grounded on Italian lexical and grammatical resources that, together, are able to investigate the semantic relation between the product features and the opinions expressed on them. On the base of these resources we built DOXA, a linguistic-based application that gives a feedback of statistics about the positive or negative nature of the opinions and about the semantic categories of the features.

Innovation is one of the keys to success in the business world. More concretely, open innovation is gaining momentum so different tools for supporting the collaboration between experts and developers in this field are needed. On the other hand, ontologies and semantic technologies provide a consistent and reliable means to represent and aggregate knowledge from different sources. In this paper, an open innovation platform based on social networks and semantic web technologies to assist in managing innovative software projects is proposed. The platform takes advantage of semantic information that can be classified and annotated by means of domain ontologies. The behaviour of the system has been illustrated through a use case scenario in the software development domain.

Logical approaches-and ontologies in particular-offer a well-adapted framework for representing knowledge present on the Semantic Web (

). These ontologies are formulated in

(

), which are based on expressive

(

).

are a subset of

(

) that provides decidable reasoning. Based on

, it is possible to rely on inference mechanisms to obtain new knowledge from axioms, rules and facts specified in the ontologies. However, these classical inference mechanisms do not deal with :

probabilities. Several works recently targeted those issues (i.e.

,

,

, etc.), but none of them combines

with

(

) formalism. Several open source software packages for

are available (e.g.

,

,

, etc.). In this paper, we present

, a Java framework for reasoning with probabilistic information in the

.

incorporate three open source software packages for

, which is able to reason with uncertainty information, showing that it can be used in several real-world domains. We also show several experiments of our tool with different ontologies.

The government interoperability frameworks (GIFs) are mainly centered on technical perspective neglecting important actual issues in Public Administration (PA) as the performance of their services and process as well its strategic, legal and politic positioning. This wide spectrum of organizational knowledge demands specific interoperability assessment (IA) methods based on a preliminary step of identifying and organizing adequate attributes that allow a wider view on the PA domain regarding interoperability requirements. This paper proposes a knowledge discovering and extraction method from PA and IA literature, presenting a rationality through a conceptual model in order to identify and organize attributes that will be used as input for an IA model. A preliminary set of attributes is presented, as well as a future approach of how to deal with these attributes using AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) in order to evaluate them with experts through a specific structure suited to the IA process itself.

In recent years, researchers have become increasingly interested in developing frameworks and tools for searching business process model repositories. While research on searching structured repositories has been extensive, little attention was dedicated to searching business process content within unstructured repositories, such as the Web. We demonstrate why current search technologies are not useful for extracting process content from the Web, and explain the core reasons for the deficiency. We then express the requirements for a framework that could overcome the presented shortcomings.

This paper introduces a RDF vocabulary to semantically represent and compute quantitative indexes with the aim of providing a context-aware system to manage Customer Relationship Management (CRM) quality indicators. This tool is based on CRM Index, tailor made index based on Service Measurement Index to measure cloud CRM solutions. Apart from the tool itself, in the paper the authors introduce categories and attributes defined for the CRM world along with specific metrics.

Aging is becoming a critical issue for Europe and many countries around the world. It is imposing significant burden on societies and their national services. Enabling longer home independent living is seen one of the most promising ways to overcome this issue. However, to achieve a number of challenges need to be overcome, especially those related to management of health and disease let alone other social and logistical barriers. One of these challenges is malnutrition, which is considered one of the root causes for the occurrence of other diseases. This paper presents the design of a distributed system that enables homecare in the context of management of self-feeding through balanced nutritional intake. The design employs a service-based system that incorporates a number of services including monitoring of activities, nutritional reasoning for assessing feeding habits, diet recommending for food planning, and marketplace invocation for automating food shopping to meet dietary requirements.

Complex distributed information systems that run their activities in the form of processes require continuous auditing of a process that invokes the action(s) specified in the policies and rules in a continuous manner. A shared vocabulary, or common ontology, used to defined the processes, and the audit rule ontology for processes or modules are integrated to form a hybrid ontology that supports the acquisition and evolution of ontologies. A methodology to construct a Common Ontology and an audit rule ontology by coupling to an expert system for Continuous Process Auditing (CPA) has been introduced recently. In this paper, we present a policy-based authorization methodology incorporating Audit Rule Ontology for CPA within distributed audit rule ontology. We also propose the use of probabilistic risk determination and evaluation of risk level, along with access history heuristics that define the adaptable access control policies before making policy decisions.

Managing services in an intercloud environment is challenging since it requires large scale orchestration between users, service providers and heterogeneous cloud service providers. Each stakeholder in the intercloud services ecosystem needs to optimize their cost to performance ratio which is not trivial. This research paper proposes a dynamic service ranking and selection mechanism which allows users fine-grained control over service consumption, while maximizing service provider revenues. The mechanism is based on service performance analytics and provides seamless orchestration between all stakeholders. Initial experimental results establish the viability of the proposed mechanism.

Industrial automation systems are multi-technological systems that contain in-house developed and COTS hardware and software sub-systems. Automation systems can be used to control various industrial processes ranging from water management to pulp and paper production. These systems are used for a long time and are upgraded in order to keep the system up-to-date. Typically, automation system providers serve their customers worldwide, meaning that the service operations are spread geographically over several continents. Furthermore, the service organisation needs to cooperate internally with R&D and externally with customers and COTS providers so as to gain a necessary understanding of which upgrades are urgent and which can be done later. This paper discusses the importance of a systematic upgrade planning service in a distributed operational environment and presents as well as demonstrates the process description and related tools that have been composed based on an industrial case study in an automation company.

The motivation of our research is the design and the implementation of tools supporting brainstorming activities of teams and mainly distant teams which have to collaborate. During parallel sessions, each team interacts with a large multi-touch device, produces and manipulates virtual post-it notes displayed and synchronized on both surfaces.

Starting from an experimental point of view, the paper presents different tools that we consider mandatory for supporting these activities: a resource channel for displaying and synchronizing the resources on each device, a TV channel for allowing the oral and visual communication between teams and an informationg system for storing and retrieving the resources related to activities. The paper also mentions the architectural design of the distributed application used for the resource channel. It involves several tactile devices with different sizes that display the resources. Finally, the paper describes an experiment where two teams situated in Japan and in France used these tools.

Agile Global Software Development is gaining relevance and importance. While communication is key for exchanging information between team members, multi-site software development introduces additional obstacles and delays. This paper reports an exploratory study on the impact of infrastructure on communication. Although this topic has been a subject of interest many issues remain unaddressed. In this paper we address both team member communication and the combination of project and product development. One of the main conclusions is that communication can be improved if tool infrastructure combine different levels of information (i.e. team members, project status and product status). The use of simple tools, such as Vsee in SmartBoards is useful for reducing distance between sites. Dependency on bandwidth is not a new issue but is still relevant.

Distributed Integrated ehealth systems are becoming a key need for achieving improved healthcare, in which healthcare processes across organisations must work in tandem to achieve this goal. However, at its core, enabling data-sharing safely while maintaining privacy and confidentiality is a critical requirement. The wide spread of electronic health record systems to manage health data and healthcare processes may provide the needed infrastructure to facilitate data-sharing. However, most of these systems are often designed to work within localised settings and rarely across organisations. In a health service, organisations and individuals are autonomous and often obey different data governance policies and would require different levels of data-sharing needs, depending on their roles and goals within the service. This would make agent-oriented architecture a strong candidate to enable privacy-aware seamless data-sharing between participating organisations. The paper presents an approach for privacy-preserving agent-oriented architecture that enables organisations to work together overcoming sharing sensitive data and evaluates its use within a real-life project.

Software systems start small and grow in complexity and size. The larger a software system is, the more it is distributed over organizational and geographical confines. Thus, the modeling of software systems is necessary at a certain level of complexity because it can be used for communication, documentation, configuration and certification purposes. We came to the conclusion that several patterns of software modeling exist. The existence of such patterns is dependent on the history and the evolution of the system under consideration. We will show that a software system in its lifecycle has to face several crises. Such a crisis is a watershed in the application of new patterns. We provide an evolutionary view of software systems and models which helps understanding of current problems and prospective solutions.

Web Information Systems intend to adapt to the users’ preferences as new data available on the network. In this regard, the composition and reuse of services which are involved in a web application is an interesting research topic, since these techniques pursue the dynamic construction of applications that can be adapted at design or run time. As for the visualization of these applications, web user interfaces play a key role, serving as a connection point between users and the rest of the system. This article proposes an architecture for specification, storage, management and visualization of components, built from widgets complying with the W3C recommendation, for making web user interfaces. We follow a service-based approach for the interface deployment and communication management, introducing the concept of Widgets-as-a-Service (WaaS). To illustrate this proposal, an example of widget-based Web Information System is shown.

Cultural impact is significant in global or distributed software development. Due to cultural differences, co-ordination and collaboration problems have been reported in case studies and this also leads to low quality deliverables and high turnover in software industry. This paper presents a literature review of distributed software development (DSD) or global software development (GSD) and cultural issues. The main focus is to highlight the current research, observations, as well as practice directions in these areas. Many studies have been performed in culture and global software development, still impact of culture in distributed software development in different dimensions received less attention among researchers.

GitHub is a distributed code repository and project hosting web site. It is becoming one of the most popular web-based services to host both open-source projects and closed-source projects. In this paper, we review different kinds of version control systems and study the dynamics of GitHub, i.e., the ability and scalability of GitHub to process different requests and provide different services to different GitHub projects and GitHub users. Our study shows that GitHub could handle hundreds of thousands of requests a day for all the projects and thousands of requests for one project. This capability of GitHub makes it suitable for supporting distributed software development.

Personalization is the new magic buzzword of application development. To make the complexity of today’s application functionalities and information spaces ”digestible”, customization has become the new go-to technique. But while those technologies aim to ease the consumption of media for their users, they suffer from the same problematic: in the age of Big Data, applications have to cope with a conundrum of heterogeneous information sources that have to be perceived, processed and interpreted. Researchers tend to aim for a maximum degree of integration to create the perfect, all-embracing personalization. The results are wide-range, but overly complex systems that suffer from issues in performance and scalability. Starting from our own, similar experience, we argue for a

personalization of personalization

- a clear-cut customization of profiling by limiting the information maintained in the system to those elements that are crucially relevant for the target task. We demonstrate the concern based on an application developed in our laboratory: a system that profiles web users based on their browsing history, with the goal of personalizing digital advertisements.

We propose a two-fold approach that is able to both consume and exploit semantics encoded in the Linking Open Data (LOD) cloud, and create news that document events reported in micro-blogging posts that correspond to

documentary

tweets. A documentary tweet is similar to a newspaper headline and reports an incident or event. Knowledge extracted from documentary tweets are used to develop a story line which will be augmented with RDF facts consumed from the LOD cloud. The resulting news content is represented in RDF using the

rNews Ontology

, facilitating news generation and retrieval. We study effectiveness of our approach with respect to a gold standard of manually tagged tweets. Initial experimental results suggest that our techniques are able to generate content that reflects up to 76.38% of the manually tagged terms.

In a previous paper, we discussed a methodology for the extension of the service choreography model based on ontologies. The main purpose was to extract syntactically and semantically correct recommendations (model annotations) for the process modeler in view of model analysis and improvement. This paper presents ongoing work with a focus on the ontology used for recommendation retrieval and the way the semantic recommender captures and analyses the modeler’s intentions. We discuss similarity computation (which is at the basis of semantic model annotation) at several levels and illustrate it with examples.

Application scenarios for the data generated from the Internet of Things are on the rise. For example, given the appliances’ energy consumption data, energy measurement tools now make it possible to save energy whilst efficiently controlling the consumption of different household devices. Yet, when the precise structured data describing appliance models is missing, it is difficult for such application scenarios to be realized. The developed OpenFridge ontology defines a basic vocabulary for the domain of measuring a refrigerator’s energy consumption, showing that the needed ontology schemata are already in place, but need to be identified and skillfully applied. Further, the ontology has been populated from the Web using data scraping, and the created dataset semantically describing the specifics of 1032 refrigerator models with 18665 triples, make these valuable assets for the development of further applications.

sMilestone is a medical software solution which achieves the goal of helping people who have lost their ability to speak as a result of neurological injuries such as strokes or brain tumors. It aids patients in the recovery process, improving the speed at which they recover while also alleviating the psychological implications associated with such a condition. All this is achieved by using a device called Kinect for capturing facial muscle and tongue movement. These captured movements are then used as input for games and activities that make use of occupational therapy and hasten the recovery process. This paper goes through the details of how the tongue movement tracking algorithm was developed in order to be used in speech recovery sessions.

The paper proposes the study of the perception of the relationship between the organizational culture and innovation. More precisely, we propose to identify those features of the organizational culture that affect (determine or inhibit) innovation and elaborate on these observations. The methodology used in this approach is rooted in knowledge management theory and based on a questionnaire applied in the Engineering Department of a newly established multinational in the automotive industry in Romania. The observed relationship is exemplified with a real-world case study from the automotive industry.

The paper provides a framework that allows integrating services of Social Networking in different fields. In particular, its use by companies, healthcare professionals, teachers, tour operators, travel agencies and scientific researchers professionals and consumers in general are discussed. Within the framework users can select topics of interest (business/marketing, health, learning, tourism and/or scientific research) according to their profile (professional or consumer). The framework offers users the opportunity to share information knowledge and services related to their professional field.

Humans are exceptionally social, irrespective whether they are online or offline, a trait that is present in every society, irrespective of cultural variation. Both urban planners and evolutionary anthropologist have long recognized that the more frequently we have meaningful social contact with the members of our social network, the closer we feel to them, and the stronger our communities end up. The received wisdom in sociology is that communities fall apart when members of the community get involved in the majority of their social life outside the group, a phenomenon that has been thought to automatically happen with the rise of new online sociality-servicing technologies. However, in internet-based social networking most online interaction is local, supplementing rather than replacing local off-line interaction. Furthermore, much of dyadic interaction online is essentially identical to its offline nature, despite the fact that the manifestation can radically differ. Yet, it is very difficult to generate lasting online communities which are truly online only. Online communities tend to be similar to offline hobby clubs in their structure, and in almost all cases that are to last, after a while the need emerges to meet off-line. In these occasions people usually choose to engage in natural group bonding activities that release endorphins and create social bond in a literally

natural

way. As a consequence, current day human societies are heading towards social existence in which they are neither entirely off-line, but nor are entirely online. An integrated design for urban and digital sociality space would allow the natural rise of healthy and robust human communities.

News reports are currently one of the most studied data sources in the field of information extraction. Event descriptions that come from these sources are controversial, complementary and reflect relationships between the participating entities. The aim of the present work is to test a group of predefined patterns and rules to obtain sets of automatically filled scenario templates for socio-political events (case study: protests) and to apply clustering algorithms. At this stage the information is extracted from Russian news titles. The results of the pattern quality assessment and clustering are presented.

The rapid development of wireless communication technologies and the easy access to mobile computing devices has generated an increase in the development of innovative applications to leverage the benefits of these mobile technologies. Also, over the last decades new platforms and paradigms for intelligent data processing have gained much attention from practitioners and researchers: mobile computing, use of ontologies and Web services for the rapid information processing: In this article, we present an approach for semantic search of academic resources based on the integration of a multi-dimensional ontology model with inference facilities for query answering, and the deployment of Web services for supporting a mobile application. The approach was evaluated based on a set of general competency questions which were translated into a rule-based query language. Results show that the overall solution approach is technologically viable and promising.

During the design of multimodal interaction environments, the use of a corpus of multimodal sentences is very important in order to achieve various tasks of multimodal interaction. In last decade, several researchers addressed the creation of multimodal corpora for English, French, and various other languages. However, from the analysis of these multimodal corpora, there clearly is a lack of multimodal corpora for Italian. This paper describes the building process of an Italian multimodal corpus. Starting from the manual analysis of multimedia dialogues, this process extracts different multimodal data, i.e. speech and gestures, which are used to generate grammar rules and to train the multimodal interpreter in order to set the framework for the multimodal corpus building. Following that, the set framework is used to annotate semi-automatically multimodal information, such as syntactic roles and semantics, on new dialogues to be included in the corpus.

Collaborative tools enable teachers and students to easily create and share knowledge as well as edit content in a cooperative way anytime, anywhere, and with various devices. However, technical barriers increase difficulties for users with special needs if interfaces are not designed with accessibility in mind. Blind people in particular may experience great accessibility and usability issues when using collaborative editors via screen reader, with consequent difficulty of inclusion at school or work. In this paper, we discuss the design of usable Web interfaces for collaborative editing, especially focusing on how blind users interact with them. Google Docs was chosen as a case study of a collaborative tool in order to analyze the accessibility of its main collaborative features. Based on the results, five guidelines are proposed for supporting collaborative editing, including “accessible awareness” for blind users.

Information Systems (IS) should be based on consistent representations of the reality. Poor modeling results in problems throughout the IS development. Ontologies are key instruments for the improvement of conceptual modeling since they are able to provide well-defined semantics. This paper discusses the application of foundational ontologies in conceptual modeling, presenting partial results of a case study in which real UML diagrams were assessed according to ontological principles. Our findings indicate that violations of ontological restrictions of part-whole relations are somehow usual in modeling practices. In order to cope with this, we make a proposal for using part-whole relations based on ontological constraints, with the aim to seek for improvements in the practice of conceptual modeling.

In this context we present the Identification Ontology, as an application ontology for a knowledge-based solution to the entity matching problem in the context of the Semantic Web. The Identification Ontology has a threefold role: (1) represent a selection of attributes that are relevant for identification (or entity matching) of a set of entity types; (2) supporting the definition of a set of contextual ontological mappings to ease the problem of semantic heterogeneity affecting entity matching in the Semantic Web; and (3) represent meta-properties of the considered features to highlight their roles in the definition of a knowledge-based entity matching solution. The Identification Ontology taxonomy is defined refining and extending the Okkam Conceptual Model, as a top level ontology modeling the

identity and reference

domain. Furthermore, it defines also a set of top-level entity types and relative features relying on a methodology that combines results from cognitive studies and a survey of existing vocabularies available through Linked Open Vocabulary initiative. The Identification Ontology is currently used as part of the Okkam Entity Name System matching framework, which was successfully tested in entity matching experiments and used in large-scale (industrial) linkage tasks to enable data integration for applications dealing with tax assessment and credit risk analysis.

Managing research data often requires the creation or reuse of specialised metadata schemas to satisfy the metadata requirements of each research group. Ontologies present several advantages over metadata schemas. In particular, they can be shared and improved upon more easily, providing the flexibility required to establish relationships between datasets and concepts from distinct domains. In this paper, we present a preliminary experiment on the use of ontologies for the description of biodiversity datasets. With a strong focus on the dynamics of individual species, species diversity, biological communities and ecosystems, the Predictive Ecology research group of CIBIO has adopted the INSPIRE European recommendation as the primary tool for metadata compliance across its research data description. We build upon this experience to model the BIOME ontology for the biodiversity domain. The ontology combines concepts from INSPIRE, matching them against the ones defined in the Dublin Core, FOAF and CERIF ontologies. Dendro, a prototype for collaborative data description, uses the ontology to provide an environment where biodiversity metadata records are available as Linked Open Data.

The way people define and use identifiers to refer to entities has been under (philosophical) investigation for a long time. This problem gained attention also in the context of the Semantic Web, where the Identity Crisis has threatened one of the cornerstones of the proposed vision: the unambiguous identification of Resources. In this paper we present the application of OntoClean as a formal methodology to formally validate the Okkam Conceptual Model that was proposed to address the problem of identity and reference. In performing such analysis, we unfold some of the philosophical problems affecting the representation of several types of real world entities, presenting a literature review and arguing in favor of some interpretation. This is done with the twofold purpose of contributing to the ongoing debate, and fostering the definition of a shared vision about the problem that will support further advancements in development of the Semantic Web vision. Furthermore, we argue in favor of the adoption of the Okkam IDs as globally persistent and rigid identifiers as a sound solution to the problem of the Identity and Reference in the context of the Semantic Web.

The Public Administration (PA) is constantly on the lookout for new solutions to improve its performance. The ICT-enabled public sector innovation and the open government approach are needed to provide new data-driven services to improve the public governance. The challenge is how to organize the public information so that it can be easily used by users and PA itself. To support such needs, research is proposing new approaches. Among these approaches, semantic technologies are becoming predominant. We realized an innovative Ontology-driven system that automates the processes of data collection, knowledge extraction, and representation using different and heterogeneous sources. In particular, we show how this approach can be profitably used for automatic monitoring and systematic review of the web hosting service in PA. This paper is a report on a proof of concept demonstrating how our system can be successfully used to provide relevant information about PA scenarios and how such information can be used to lead PA decisional processes.

The process of establishing the ontology objectives by the stakeholders is fundamental for the ontology success. This process is unstructured by nature, being a continuum from the initial discussion of the purpose to the first agreed conceptual representation. The inherent (inter) subjectivity of the process and their outcomes together with an excessive informality are perhaps the reasons for being overlooked in the literature. This paper proposes an approach integrating competency questions (CQ) and conceptual graphs to the support of domain experts and knowledge specialists in defining the purpose and fundamental conceptual commitments of the ontology to be developed. The approach was experimented and validated with experts in a project in the chemical-pharmaceutical industry.

To execute an artifact-centric process model, current workflow execution approaches require it to be converted to some existing executable language (e.g., BPEL) in order to run on a workflow system. We argue that the transformation can incur losses of information and degrade traceability. In this paper, we proposed and developed a workflow execution platform that directly executes a collaborative (i.e., inter-organizational) workflow specification of artifact-centric business processes without performing model conversion.

In supply chains, companies are forced to produce in a more sustainable way. Amongst others, this involves the reporting of various sustainability indicators to legal entities. To gather necessary data from their suppliers, companies must employ long-running, cross-organizational data collection processes. Being dependent on many companies and contextual factors such processes imply great variability, are manually managed, and tend to be tedious and error prone. This paper proposes an approach for automated contextual process configuration that also supports humans with lightweight, correct modeling and execution of configurable processes.

Model Driven Software Development (MDSD) & Domain Specific Modeling (DSM) are means to overcome software development challenges like increased software complexity and shortened development cycle in many domains. However, in the computer game domain it is not widely and successfully applied yet since it is not easy to understand the complex domain knowledge and use the knowledge to develop qualified DSM solutions. These difficulties can be alleviated by a deep and thorough domain analysis. In our research, we proposed an ontology to structure and accelerate the domain analysis process. To make our work more concrete, we focus on the emerging pervasive (computer) game genre.

In this paper, we propose an approach for constructing Arabic Ontology based on normalized dictionaries. This approach mainly consists in transforming non structured Arabic dictionaries into LMF (Lexical Markup Framework) based-normalized ones. We are basically exploiting Arabic dictionaries of Hadith for experimentation. Then, from an Arabic normalized dictionary of Hadith, an ontology will be constructed. It represents hidden knowledge in Hadith texts. It will be next integrated into an information retrieval and navigation system. We will take advantage of it to semantically disambiguate Arabic terms of both the formulated user query and/or the Arabic texts with application on texts of Hadith.

Context-aware database has drawn increasing attention from both industry and academia recently by taking users’ current situation and environment into consideration. However, most of the literature focus on individual context, overlooking the team users. In this paper, we investigate how to integrate team context into database query process to help the users get top-ranked database tuples and make the team more competitive. We review naive method and propose an optimized query algorithm to select the suitable records and show that they output same results while the latter is more computational efficient. Extensive empirical studies are conducted to evaluate the query approaches and demonstrate their effectiveness and efficiency.

Many dialects in the fact-based approach (NIAM, ORM, CogNIAM) provide modeling constructs for the information perspective in semantic modeling. In this paper we will define a number of modeling constructs that allow us to model ‘behavioural perspective’ semantics in a way that is compatible with the existing fact-oriented semantic modeling constructs in the information perspective.