Tele-education Process Modelling supported by the ODP Enterprise Viewpoint Language

This paper reports on applying the ODP enterprise viewpoint in the domain of tele-education. The work is conducted as part of a research activity that aims at designing a tele-education system to support planning, execution and evaluation of dynamic distributed educational processes. We explore the ODP enterprise viewpoint as a basis for communication and co-operation between educational scientists and ODP systems designers involved in the design process. Our application of the enterprise viewpoint involves four main steps. First, an educational language is proposed to describe educational processes in generic terms. Second, a set of appropriate enterprise language concepts is selected. Third, a relationship is established between the educational language and enterprise language concepts. Fourth, an educational process is modelled in terms of an entity-oriented model and a behaviour-oriented model. It is hoped that the experience gained in this exercise will provide useful feedback to both the educational and ODP communitie

The political economy of public utilities : a study of the Indian power sector

In this paper, we attempt at an analysis of the political economy of the Indian power sector with special reference to Kerala in the light of a generic model of the political economy of public utilities we develop in the first part of the paper. The model seeks to explain the political economy of the rent seeking drives in a non-Smithian imperfect regime of self-interest maximisation, with a regulatory structure of the public utility described in a framework of the principal-agent relationship. In contrast to the usual neo-classical monolithic representation of principal and agent, we characterise each entity in a Marxian-Kaleckian vein, as a composite set of conflicting sectional interests. This helps us develop a comprehensive perspective of the politico-economic implications of the relationship among the public, government and utility. Based on this generic model, we seek to analyse, in the second part of the paper, the political economy of the power sector in India, with emphasis on Kerala. We also attempt, wherever possible, to estimate the costs of corruption involved in the administration of the power sector. JEL Classification: E11, H10, H4, L94, N4, P16 Key Words: India, political economy, rent seeking, principal-agent, public utility, power secto

Compiling ER Specifications into Declarative Programs

This paper proposes an environment to support high-level database programming in a declarative programming language. In order to ensure safe database updates, all access and update operations related to the database are generated from high-level descriptions in the entity- relationship (ER) model. We propose a representation of ER diagrams in the declarative language Curry so that they can be constructed by various tools and then translated into this representation. Furthermore, we have implemented a compiler from this representation into a Curry program that provides access and update operations based on a high-level API for database programming.Comment: Paper presented at the 17th Workshop on Logic-based Methods in Programming Environments (WLPE2007

Matrix powers algorithms for trust evaluation in PKI architectures

This paper deals with the evaluation of trust in public-key infrastructures. Different trust models have been proposed to interconnect the various PKI components in order to propagate the trust between them. In this paper we provide a new polynomial algorithm using linear algebra to assess trust relationships in a network using different trust evaluation schemes. The advantages are twofold: first the use of matrix computations instead of graph algorithms provides an optimized computational solution; second, our algorithm can be used for generic graphs, even in the presence of cycles. Our algorithm is designed to evaluate the trust using all existing (finite) trust paths between entities as a preliminary to any exchanges between PKIs. This can give a precise evaluation of trust, and accelerate for instance cross-certificate validation

A core ontology for business process analysis

Business Process Management (BPM) aims at supporting the whole life-cycle necessary to deploy and maintain business processes in organisations. An important step of the BPM life-cycle is the analysis of the processes deployed in companies. However, the degree of automation currently achieved cannot support the level of adaptation required by businesses. Initial steps have been performed towards including some sort of automated reasoning within Business Process Analysis (BPA) but this is typically limited to using taxonomies. We present a core ontology aimed at enhancing the state of the art in BPA. The ontology builds upon a Time Ontology and is structured around the process, resource, and object perspectives as typically adopted when analysing business processes. The ontology has been extended and validated by means of an Events Ontology and an Events Analysis Ontology aimed at capturing the audit trails generated by Process-Aware Information Systems and deriving additional knowledge