The legal framework for groundwater allocation in Quebec: towards integrated water management

This paper aims at providing a model of the legal framework for groundwater allocation in the province of Quebec (Canada), identifying its potential deficiencies and suggesting possible improvements. In Quebec, groundwater is a res communis. The right to use it is tied to real estate property. This right forms the basis of the legal framework for the management of groundwater quantity. However, according to statutory law, the actual use of groundwater also depends on governmental authorisations that limit quantities used. The main statutory instrument for managing the resource is the Groundwater Catchment Regulation (GWCR), which aims at conflict prevention between first users and new users by means of governmental authorisations. In agricultural areas, an additional authorisation regime indirectly prioritises agricultural groundwater uses. Finally, legal mechanisms addressing conflicts between water users rely on the general litigation framework provided by Quebec law without establishing an order of priority for the different uses of the resource. According to Integrated Water Resources Management, four aspects of the legal framework for groundwater quantity management can be modified to increase the efficiency of the allocation regime: 1) provisions should be made to preserve a residual environmental flow; 2) an order of priority should be established between the different uses to minimise conflict; 3) the scope of the regime should be extended to all groundwater users to increase its efficiency; 4) stakeholders should participate in the management of the resource

Self-adaptive Authorisation Infrastructures

Traditional approaches in access control rely on immutable criteria in which to decide and award access. These approaches are limited, notably when handling changes in an organisation’s protected resources, resulting in the inability to accommodate the dynamic aspects of risk at runtime. An example of such risk is a user abusing their privileged access to perform insider attacks. This thesis proposes self-adaptive authorisation, an approach that enables dynamic access control. A framework for developing self-adaptive authorisation is defined, where autonomic controllers are deployed within legacy based authorisation infrastructures to enable the runtime management of access control. Essential to the approach is the use of models and model driven engineering (MDE). Models enable a controller to abstract from the authorisation infrastructure it seeks to control, reason about state, and provide assurances over change to access. For example, a modelled state of access may represent an active access control policy. Given the diverse nature in implementations of authorisation infrastructures, MDE enables the creation and transformation of such models, whereby assets (e.g., policies) can be automatically generated and deployed at runtime. A prototype of the framework was developed, whereby management of access control is focused on the mitigation of abuse of access rights. The prototype implements a feedback loop to monitor an authorisation infrastructure in terms of modelling the state of access control and user behaviour, analyse potential solutions for handling malicious behaviour, and act upon the infrastructure to control future access control decisions. The framework was evaluated against mitigation of simulated insider attacks, involving the abuse of access rights governed by access control methodologies. In addition, to investigate the framework’s approach in a diverse and unpredictable environment, a live experiment was conducted. This evaluated the mitigation of abuse performed by real users as well as demonstrating the consequence of self-adaptation through observation of user response

Self-managed cells and their federation

Future e-Health systems will consist of low-power, on-body wireless sensors attached to mobile users that interact with a ubiquitous computing environment. This kind of system needs to be able to configure itself with little or no user input; more importantly, it is required to adapt autonomously to changes such as user movement, device failure, the addition or loss of services, and proximity to other such systems. This extended abstract describes the basic architecture of a Self-Managed Cell (SMC) to address these requirements, and discusses various forms of federation between/among SMCs. This structure is motivated by a typical e-Health scenario

Quality assessment technique for ubiquitous software and middleware

The new paradigm of computing or information systems is ubiquitous computing systems. The technology-oriented issues of ubiquitous computing systems have made researchers pay much attention to the feasibility study of the technologies rather than building quality assurance indices or guidelines. In this context, measuring quality is the key to developing high-quality ubiquitous computing products. For this reason, various quality models have been defined, adopted and enhanced over the years, for example, the need for one recognised standard quality model (ISO/IEC 9126) is the result of a consensus for a software quality model on three levels: characteristics, sub-characteristics, and metrics. However, it is very much unlikely that this scheme will be directly applicable to ubiquitous computing environments which are considerably different to conventional software, trailing a big concern which is being given to reformulate existing methods, and especially to elaborate new assessment techniques for ubiquitous computing environments. This paper selects appropriate quality characteristics for the ubiquitous computing environment, which can be used as the quality target for both ubiquitous computing product evaluation processes ad development processes. Further, each of the quality characteristics has been expanded with evaluation questions and metrics, in some cases with measures. In addition, this quality model has been applied to the industrial setting of the ubiquitous computing environment. These have revealed that while the approach was sound, there are some parts to be more developed in the future

Scenariji izobrazevanja mentorjev v Romuniji - k izboljsevanju pripravnistva uciteljev

The aim of this paper is to examine the induction programme for newly qualified teachers and mentor education in Estonia, providing a comparative analysis of existing Estonian and possible Romanian models of mentoring. While the Estonian induction programme has been in place for more than ten years, induction in Romania is a relatively new and has only been mandatory since 2011 (National Law of Education 1/2011). The specifics of mentor professional development within the Romanian induction framework have yet to be explicated. This paper proposes two possible scenarios suitable for the Romanian system :1) long-term regulated academic education (part of master or doctoral level studies), and 2) flexible short-term in-service education. The advantages and disadvantages of both models are examined and ways to overcome some of the disadvantages are identified. Ultimately, the paper proposes that a flexible, needsdriven system which encompasses a degree of choice will best fulfil the professional development needs of teachers who wish to become mentors. (DIPF/Orig.

Context-Aware and Adaptive Usage Control Model

Information protection is a key issue for the acceptance and adoption of pervasive computing systems where various portable devices such as smart phones, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and laptop computers are being used to share information and to access digital resources via wireless connection to the Internet. Because these are resources constrained devices and highly mobile, changes in the environmental context or device context can affect the security of the system a great deal. A proper security mechanism must be put in place which is able to cope with changing environmental and system context. Usage CONtrol (UCON) model is the latest major enhancement of the traditional access control models which enables mutability of subject and object attributes, and continuity of control on usage of resources. In UCON, access permission decision is based on three factors: authorisations, obligations and conditions. While authorisations and obligations are requirements that must be fulfilled by the subject and the object, conditions are subject and object independent requirements that must be satisfied by the environment. As a consequence, access permission may be revoked (and the access stopped) as a result of changes in the environment regardless of whether the authorisations and obligations requirements are met. This constitutes a major shortcoming of the UCON model in pervasive computing systems which constantly strive to adapt to environmental changes so as to minimise disruptions to the user. We propose a Context-Aware and Adaptive Usage Control (CA-UCON) model which extends the traditional UCON model to enable adaptation to environmental changes in the aim of preserving continuity of access. Indeed, when the authorisation and obligations requirements are fulfilled by the subject and object, and the conditions requirements fail due to changes in the environmental or the system context, our proposed model CA-UCON triggers specific actions in order to adapt to the new situation, so as to ensure continuity of usage. We then propose an architecture of CA-UCON model, presenting its various components. In this model, we integrated the adaptation decision with usage decision architecture, the comprehensive definition of each components and reveals the functions performed by each components in the architecture are presented. We also propose a novel computational model of our CA-UCON architecture. This model is formally specified as a finite state machine. It demonstrates how the access request of the subject is handled in CA-UCON model, including detail with regards to revoking of access and actions undertaken due to context changes. The extension of the original UCON architecture can be understood from this model. The formal specification of the CA-UCON is presented utilising the Calculus of Context-aware Ambients (CCA). This mathematical notation is considered suitable for modelling mobile and context-aware systems and has been preferred over alternatives for the following reasons: (i) Mobility and Context awareness are primitive constructs in CCA; (ii) A system's properties can be formally analysed; (iii) Most importantly, CCA specifications are executable allowing early validation of system properties and accelerated development of prototypes. For evaluation of CA-UCON model, a real-world case study of a ubiquitous learning (u-learning) system is selected. We propose a CA-UCON model for the u-learning system. This model is then formalised in CCA and the resultant specification is executed and analysed using an execution environment of CCA. Finally, we investigate the enforcement approaches for CA-UCON model. We present the CA-UCON reference monitor architecture with its components. We then proceed to demonstrate three types of enforcement architectures of the CA-UCON model: centralised architecture, distributed architecture and hybrid architecture. These are discussed in detail, including the analysis of their merits and drawbacks

Ontologies for context-aware applications

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200