Knowledge Representation Concepts for Automated SLA Management

Outsourcing of complex IT infrastructure to IT service providers has increased substantially during the past years. IT service providers must be able to fulfil their service-quality commitments based upon predefined Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with the service customer. They need to manage, execute and maintain thousands of SLAs for different customers and different types of services, which needs new levels of flexibility and automation not available with the current technology. The complexity of contractual logic in SLAs requires new forms of knowledge representation to automatically draw inferences and execute contractual agreements. A logic-based approach provides several advantages including automated rule chaining allowing for compact knowledge representation as well as flexibility to adapt to rapidly changing business requirements. We suggest adequate logical formalisms for representation and enforcement of SLA rules and describe a proof-of-concept implementation. The article describes selected formalisms of the ContractLog KR and their adequacy for automated SLA management and presents results of experiments to demonstrate flexibility and scalability of the approach.Comment: Paschke, A. and Bichler, M.: Knowledge Representation Concepts for Automated SLA Management, Int. Journal of Decision Support Systems (DSS), submitted 19th March 200

Security policy refinement using data integration: a position paper.

In spite of the wide adoption of policy-based approaches for security management, and many existing treatments of policy verification and analysis, relatively little attention has been paid to policy refinement: the problem of deriving lower-level, runnable policies from higher-level policies, policy goals, and specifications. In this paper we present our initial ideas on this task, using and adapting concepts from data integration. We take a view of policies as governing the performance of an action on a target by a subject, possibly with certain conditions. Transformation rules are applied to these components of a policy in a structured way, in order to translate the policy into more refined terms; the transformation rules we use are similar to those of global-as-view database schema mappings, or to extensions thereof. We illustrate our ideas with an example. Copyright 2009 ACM

Managing Knowledge as Business Rules

In today’s business environment, it is a certainty that will manage to survive especially those organizations which are striving to adapt quickly and with low costs to the new demands of market competition. Knowledge represented by internal business rules of an organization can help crystallize their orientation in order to ensure a competitive advantage in the market. In this context and in a relatively short time, a new trend in software development has arisen, ex-tending current methods and putting a strong emphasis on business rules. This article outlines the importance of managing business rules in an organized manner using dedicated software products and furthermore presents a general prototype for a business rules repository.Business Rules, Management, Knowledge, Rule Engine, Repository Prototype

Users Integrity Constraints in SOLAP Systems. Application in Agroforestry

SpatialData Warehouse and Spatial On-Line Analytical Processing are decision support technologies which offer the spatial and multidimensional analysis of data stored in multidimensional structure. They are aimed also at supporting geographic knowledge discovery to help decision-maker in his job related to make the appropriate decision . However, if we don’t consider data quality in the spatial hypercubes and how it is explored, it may provide unreliable results. In this paper, we propose a system for the implementation of user integrity constraints in SOLAP namely “UIC-SOLAP”. It corresponds to a methodology for guaranteeing results quality in an analytical process effectuated by different users exploiting several facts tables within the same hypercube. We integrate users Integrity Constraints (IC) by specifying visualization ICs according to their preferences and we define inter-facts ICs in this case. In order to validate our proposition, we propose the multidimensional modeling by UML profile to support constellation schema of a hypercube with several fact tables related to subjects of analysis in forestry management. Then, we propose implementation of some ICs related to users of such a system