Continuous Process Auditing (CPA): an Audit Rule Ontology Approach to Compliance and Operational Audits

Continuous Auditing (CA) has been investigated over time and it is, somewhat, in practice within nancial and transactional auditing as a part of continuous assurance and monitoring. Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) that run their activities in the form of processes require continuous auditing of a process that invokes the action(s) speci ed in the policies and rules in a continuous manner and/or sometimes in real-time. This leads to the question: How much could continuous auditing mimic the actual auditing procedures performed by auditing professionals? We investigate some of these questions through Continuous Process Auditing (CPA) relying on heterogeneous activities of processes in the EIS, as well as detecting exceptions and evidence in current and historic databases to provide audit assurance

An approach to the semantic intelligence cloud

Cloud computing is a disruptive technology that aims to provide a utility approach to computing, where users can obtain their required computing resources without investment in infrastructure, computing platforms or services. Cloud computing resources can be obtained from a number internal or external sources. The heterogeneity of cloud service provision makes comparison of services difficult, with further complexity being introduced by a number of provision approaches such as reserved purchase, on-demand provisioning and spot markets.The aim of the research was to develop a semantic framework for cloud computing services which incorporated Cloud Service Agreements, requirements, pricing and Benefits Management.The proposed approach sees the development of an integrated framework where Cloud Service Agreements describe the relationship between cloud service providers and cloud service users. Requirements are developed from agreements and can use the concepts, relationships and assertions provided as requirements. Pricing in turn is established from requirements. Benefits Management is pervasive across the semantic framework developed.The methods used were to provide a comprehensive review of literature to establish a good theoretical basis for the research undertaken. Then problem solving ontology was developed that defined concepts and relationships for the proposed semantic framework. A number of case studies were used to populate the developed ontology with assertions. Reasoning was used to test the framework was correct.The results produced were a proposed framework of concepts, relationships and assertions for a cloud service descriptions, which are presented as ontology in textual and graphical form. Several parts of the ontology were published on public ontology platforms and, in journal and conference papers.The original contribution to knowledge is seen in the results produced. The proposed framework provides the foundations for development of a unified semantic framework for cloud computing service description and has been used by other researchers developing semantic cloud service description.In the area of Cloud Service Agreements a full coverage of the documents described by major standards organisations have been encoded into the framework. Requirements have been modelled as a unique multilevel semantic representation. Pricing of cloud services has been developed using semantic description that can be mapped to requirements. The existing Benefits Management approach has been reimplemented using semantic description.In conclusion a proposed framework has been developed that allows the semantic description of cloud computing services. This approach provides greater expression than simplistic frameworks that use mathematical formulas or models with simple relationships between concepts. The proposed framework is limited to a narrow area of service description and requires expansion to be viable in a commercial setting.Further work sees the development of software toolsets based on the semantic description developed to realise a viable product for mapping high level cloud service requirements to low level cloud resources

30th International Conference on Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases

Information modelling is becoming more and more important topic for researchers, designers, and users of information systems. The amount and complexity of information itself, the number of abstraction levels of information, and the size of databases and knowledge bases are continuously growing. Conceptual modelling is one of the sub-areas of information modelling. The aim of this conference is to bring together experts from different areas of computer science and other disciplines, who have a common interest in understanding and solving problems on information modelling and knowledge bases, as well as applying the results of research to practice. We also aim to recognize and study new areas on modelling and knowledge bases to which more attention should be paid. Therefore philosophy and logic, cognitive science, knowledge management, linguistics and management science are relevant areas, too. In the conference, there will be three categories of presentations, i.e. full papers, short papers and position papers

Smart Energy Management for Smart Grids

This book is a contribution from the authors, to share solutions for a better and sustainable power grid. Renewable energy, smart grid security and smart energy management are the main topics discussed in this book