A trust based methodology for web service selection

In this paper, we propose a methodology for addressing trust in Semantic Web Services (SWS) - based applications. The aim is to enhance the capability-driven selection provided by current SWS frameworks with the introduction of trust-based selection criteria. We present an ontology - Web Services Trust Ontology (WSTO) - that models the context of a trust-based interaction and enables the participants to describe semantically their trust requirements and guarantees. WSTO makes use of WSMO as reference ontology for representing Web Services and embodies the problem of finding the most "trusted" Web service as a classification problem. To test our methodology, we implemented a specific module within IRS-III - a WSMO-based SWS broker - and deployed a prototype application based on a use case scenario

The Web Engineering Security (WES) methodology

The World Wide Web has had a significant impact on basic operational economical components in global information rich civilizations. This impact is forcing organizations to provide justification for security from a business case perspective and to focus on security from a web application development environment perspective. This increased focus on security was the basis of a business case discussion and led to the acquisition of empirical evidence gathered from a high level Web survey and more detailed industry surveys to analyse security in the Web application development environment. Along with this information, a collection of evidence from relevant literature was also gathered. Individual aspects of the data gathered in the previously mentioned activities contributed to the proposal of the Essential Elements (EE) and the Security Criteria for Web Application Development (SCWAD). The Essential Elements present the idea that there are essential, basic organizational elements that need to be identified, defined and addressed before examining security aspects of a Web Engineering Development process. The Security Criteria for Web Application Development identifies criteria that need to be addressed by a secure Web Engineering process. Both the EE and SCWAD are presented in detail along with relevant justification of these two elements to Web Engineering. SCWAD is utilized as a framework to evaluate the security of a representative selection of recognized software engineering processes used in Web Engineering application development. The software engineering processes appraised by SCWAD include: the Waterfall Model, the Unified Software Development Process (USD), Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM) and eXtreme Programming (XP). SCWAD is also used to assess existing security methodologies which are comprised of the Orion Strategy; Survivable / Viable IS approaches; Comprehensive Lightweight Application Security Process (CLASP) and Microsoft’s Trust Worthy Computing Security Development Lifecycle. The synthesis of information provided by both the EE and SCWAD were used to develop the Web Engineering Security (WES) methodology. WES is a proactive, flexible, process neutral security methodology with customizable components that is based on empirical evidence and used to explicitly integrate security throughout an organization’s chosen application development process. In order to evaluate the practical application of the EE, SCWAD and the WES methodology, two case studies were conducted during the course of this research. The first case study describes the application of both the EE and SCWAD to the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery’s Online Photo Library (HOPL) Internet application project. The second case study presents the commercial implementation of the WES methodology within a Global Fortune 500 financial service sector organization. The assessment of the WES methodology within the organization consisted of an initial survey establishing current security practices, a follow-up survey after changes were implemented and an overall analysis of the security conditions assigned to projects throughout the life of the case study

Non-functional Property based service selection: A survey and classification of approaches

In recent years there has been much effort dedicated to developing approaches for service selection based on non-functional properties. It is clear that much progress has been made, and by considering the individual approaches there is some overlap in functionality, but obviously also some divergence. In this paper we contribute a classification of approaches, that is, we define a number of criteria which allow to differentiate approaches. We use this classification to provide a comparison of existing approaches and in that sense provide a survey of the state of the art of the field. Finally we make some suggestions as to where the research in this area might be heading and which new challenges need to be addressed

A methodology for automatic derivation of cloud marketplace and cloud intelligence

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.From a consumer’s perspective, a cloud services marketplace is essential for cloud services discovery, selection, and composition. In practice, there are some private cloud services marketplaces, such as the Microsoft Azure marketplace, which are available for consumers belonging to a given vendor only. Nowadays, with the increase in the number of cloud services advertisements, and the adoption of cloud services, the cloud services consumer-base has grown and is projected to expand significantly over time. This increase defines the need for cloud services marketplace to enable effective interaction with cloud services users. A considerable amount of research has conducted in the area of cloud service selection and composition; however, the majority of this research is focused on developing algorithms (such as matching algorithms) and assumes the availability of cloud service information. Furthermore, little attention was given to the efficient discovery of cloud services over the World Wide Web (WWW). According to our literature, no research addresses the need for cloud services marketplace. Hence, this thesis proposes to provide an automatic derivation of cloud marketplace. The design of this marketplace includes a combination of the following modules: 1) cloud services harvesting module; 2) knowledge base for cloud service module; 3) cloud service trust derived intelligence module. The cloud services harvesting method is designed for harvesting cloud services advertisements from the web and building cloud services dataset. Such a dataset could be used by potential consumers for cloud services discovery and could be useful for future research in cloud selection, composition and recommender systems. Also, the developed cloud services repository could act as a knowledge source for constructing a standard ontology for cloud services. The knowledge base for cloud service module is designed for producing a solution toward cloud services marketplace to organise, publish and retrieve cloud services advertisements. This method involves semantically categories cloud services advertisements grounded on harvested web data to solve the issue of various cloud services advertisements. Also, this method includes the construction of the first commercial cloud services ontology-based repository for cloud services marketing. This repository contains service metadata that can be used to store service advertisements information which annotating to the domain-specific ontology concepts toward retrieving service advertisements more efficiently. The cloud services trust derived cloud Intelligence Module is designed to automatically analyzing the sentiment of cloud reviews to provide the potential consumers with real quality of service (Quality of Experience) information when making the buying decision. Also, building cloud reviews classifier to automatically classify the reviews: positive, neutral or negative using supervised machine learning algorithms. The result of this thesis will be an intelligent methodology for an automated derivation of the cloud marketplace: cloud services harvester, cloud services knowledge base, and Quality of Experience of cloud services. This methodology will be useful to the potential consumers, cloud providers, and the research community, as it will provide easy access to cloud services advertisements information

A Framework for Trusted Services

An existing challenge when selecting services to be used in a service- based system is to be able to distinguish between good and bad services. In this paper we present a trust-based service selection framework. The framework uses a trust model that calculates the level of trust a user may have with a service based on past experience of the user with the service and feedback about the service received from other users. The model takes into account different levels of trust among users, different relationships between users, and different levels of importance that a user may have for certain quality aspects of a service. A prototype tool has been implemented to illustrate and evaluate the work. The trust model has been evaluated in terms of its capacity to adjust itself due to changes in user ratings and its robustness

Cultural aspects of multi-channel customer management: A UK case study

Channel management is one CRM systems component much influenced by the behaviour of customers in relation to its implementation and use. The consumers’ behaviours, preferences, perceptions and expectations are crucial for the implementation and use of channel management. Customers’ contact with the organization’s multi-channels can occur at several touch points throughout the customer lifecycle. Customers’ behaviours may be differentiated according to the individual or micro level, but it might also differ at an ecological or macro level of analysis (Ramaseshan et al., 2006). In this paper the authors have conducted a case study in the UK to analyze customers’ behaviours at a macro level and customers channel choices, through out the customer lifecycle. The authors have used a Structurational Analysis model (Ali and Brooks, 2008) to identify the cultural factors (Ali, et al. 2008a) that influence multi-channel customer management in the UK

Users' trust in information resources in the Web environment: a status report

This study has three aims; to provide an overview of the ways in which trust is either assessed or asserted in relation to the use and provision of resources in the Web environment for research and learning; to assess what solutions might be worth further investigation and whether establishing ways to assert trust in academic information resources could assist the development of information literacy; to help increase understanding of how perceptions of trust influence the behaviour of information users

The OCarePlatform : a context-aware system to support independent living

Background: Currently, healthcare services, such as institutional care facilities, are burdened with an increasing number of elderly people and individuals with chronic illnesses and a decreasing number of competent caregivers. Objectives: To relieve the burden on healthcare services, independent living at home could be facilitated, by offering individuals and their (in)formal caregivers support in their daily care and needs. With the rise of pervasive healthcare, new information technology solutions can assist elderly people ("residents") and their caregivers to allow residents to live independently for as long as possible. Methods: To this end, the OCarePlatform system was designed. This semantic, data-driven and cloud based back-end system facilitates independent living by offering information and knowledge-based services to the resident and his/her (in)formal caregivers. Data and context information are gathered to realize context-aware and personalized services and to support residents in meeting their daily needs. This body of data, originating from heterogeneous data and information sources, is sent to personalized services, where is fused, thus creating an overview of the resident's current situation. Results: The architecture of the OCarePlatform is proposed, which is based on a service-oriented approach, together with its different components and their interactions. The implementation details are presented, together with a running example. A scalability and performance study of the OCarePlatform was performed. The results indicate that the OCarePlatform is able to support a realistic working environment and respond to a trigger in less than 5 seconds. The system is highly dependent on the allocated memory. Conclusion: The data-driven character of the OCarePlatform facilitates easy plug-in of new functionality, enabling the design of personalized, context-aware services. The OCarePlatform leads to better support for elderly people and individuals with chronic illnesses, who live independently. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved