Plataforma e-Government para as assembleias nacionais dos PALOP

Mestrado em Engenharia de Computadores e TelemáticaThis document and the developed work lie on the perception that the World is always changing. Internet has taken a major role in one's daily routine and is the vehicle to spread the most quantity of information, that mankind as ever witnessed. Regions of the World such as Europe and the Americas, have great ease in exchanging information between the citizens and their governments, but this reality does not re ect in every continent, and Africa is one that still presents insu ciencies regarding this matter. To ful l some of the needs of African countries, in which regards E-Government services communication, the United Nations developed the African I-Parliaments Project, which developed the Bungeni Parliamentary System. This system aims to help automatize the legislative process of African Parliaments. By analysing the system and developing tools, the work described in this document tries to get the Bungeni Parliamentary System to be implemented in the Lusophone Africa, therefore allowing ease of legislation access and creation, through the Internet, helping in the building of government to citizens transparency.Este documento e trabalho desenvolvido, assentam na perce c~ao que o Mundo est a em constante mudan ca. A Internet, hoje em dia, desempenha um papel enorme na vida quotidiana e e a forma mais r apida de ve cular informa c~ao que a Humanidade j a presenciou. Regi~oes do Mundo como a Europa e Am erica, t^em grande facilidade em efetuar transi c~oes de informa c~ao entre os seus cidad~aos e governos, atrav es da Internet, (servi cos de EGoverment). Por em, esta realidade n~ao e re ectida em todas os continentes e Africa e um dos que ainda apresenta muitas insu ci^encias. Para colmatar algumas necessidades, no que respeita a comunica c~ao por servi cos de EGovernment, as Na c~oes Unidas criaram o projecto \African I-Parliaments", que desenvolveu o Sistema Parlamentar Bungeni. Este sistema parlamentar, tem como nalidade automatizar o processo legislativo dos Pa ses Africanos. Analisando o sistema Bungeni e desenvolvendo ferramentas, o trabalho descrito neste documento, tenta criar condi c~oes para a implementa c~ao deste sistema nas Assembleias Nacionais dos PALOP (Pa ses Africanos de L ngua O cial Portuguesa), facilitando assim o acesso a legisla c~ao e seu processo de cria c~ao atrav es da Internet, ajudando na cria c~ao de transpar^encia entre governos e cidad~aos

Practical Use of O-MI/O-DF messaging standards in mobile application for IoT. Creating an open system for smart EV charging.

During the last decades the Internet has become ubiquitously available in most places of the world, which has made it possible also to implement the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. In this paradigm Internet connects devices with each other and with their users allowing the development of digital services and applications that increase the comfort level of everyday human life. Many domains are interested to exploit the IoT ecosystem, especially public administrations starting \textit{Smart City} initiatives all over the world. Cities are becoming smart in many way: smart mobility, smart buildings, smart environment and so on. However, the problem of noninteroperability in IoT exists that hinders the seamless communication between all kinds of IoT devices. Different domain specific IoT applications use different messaging standards offered by different providers. These messaging standards do not comply with each other. The Open Group published two domain-independent standards O-MI and O-DF aiming to solve this interoperability problem. In this thesis we want to describe the practical use of O-MI/O-DF standards in a mobile application for the smart city context, in particular for the Smart Mobility domain, electric vehicle (EV) charging use case. First, the overview of IoT domain and its ecosystem with attention to noninteroperability problem is made. Then the description of six messaging standards including Open Group's standards O-MI and O-DF are provided. Then the requirements for IoT messaging protocol are outlined and the comparison of all these messaging standards are made showing that the domain independent standards O-MI/O-DF are the most suitable for IoT. After that smart city context and its requirements are described for the implementation part of the thesis. In the next chapter the implementation of a mobile application using O-MI/O-DF messaging standards are described with the details of the application architecture, structure of messages and overview of the back-end part of the service

A Domain Specific Language for Digital Forensics and Incident Response Analysis

One of the longstanding conceptual problems in digital forensics is the dichotomy between the need for verifiable and reproducible forensic investigations, and the lack of practical mechanisms to accomplish them. With nearly four decades of professional digital forensic practice, investigator notes are still the primary source of reproducibility information, and much of it is tied to the functions of specific, often proprietary, tools. The lack of a formal means of specification for digital forensic operations results in three major problems. Specifically, there is a critical lack of: a) standardized and automated means to scientifically verify accuracy of digital forensic tools; b) methods to reliably reproduce forensic computations (their results); and c) framework for inter-operability among forensic tools. Additionally, there is no standardized means for communicating software requirements between users, researchers and developers, resulting in a mismatch in expectations. Combined with the exponential growth in data volume and complexity of applications and systems to be investigated, all of these concerns result in major case backlogs and inherently reduce the reliability of the digital forensic analyses. This work proposes a new approach to the specification of forensic computations, such that the above concerns can be addressed on a scientific basis with a new domain specific language (DSL) called nugget. DSLs are specialized languages that aim to address the concerns of particular domains by providing practical abstractions. Successful DSLs, such as SQL, can transform an application domain by providing a standardized way for users to communicate what they need without specifying how the computation should be performed. This is the first effort to build a DSL for (digital) forensic computations with the following research goals: 1) provide an intuitive formal specification language that covers core types of forensic computations and common data types; 2) provide a mechanism to extend the language that can incorporate arbitrary computations; 3) provide a prototype execution environment that allows the fully automatic execution of the computation; 4) provide a complete, formal, and auditable log of computations that can be used to reproduce an investigation; 5) demonstrate cloud-ready processing that can match the growth in data volumes and complexity

Gamification as a Service: Conceptualization of a Generic Enterprise Gamification Platform

Gamification is a novel method to improve engagement, motivation, or participation in non-game contexts using game mechanics. To a large extent, gamification is a psychological- and design-oriented discipline, i.e., a lot of effort has to be spent already in the design phase of a gamification project. Subsequently, the design is implemented in information systems such as portals or enterprise resource planning applications. These systems act as mediators to transport a gameful design to its users. However, the efforts for the subsequent development and integration process are often underestimated. In fact, most conceptual gamification designs are never implemented due to the high development costs that arise from building the gamification solution from scratch, imprecise design or technical requirements, and communication conflicts between different stakeholders in the project. This thesis addresses these problems by systematically defining the phases and stakeholders of the overall gamification process. Furthermore, the thesis rigorously defines the conceptual requirements of gamification based on a broad literature review. The identified conceptual requirements are mapped to a domain-specific language, called the Gamification Modeling Language. Moreover, this thesis analyzes 29 existing gamification solutions that aim to decrease the implementation efforts of gamification. However, using the different language elements, it is shown that none of the existing solutions suffices all requirements. Therefore, a generic and reusable platform as runtime environment for gamification is proposed which fulfills all presented functional and non-functional requirements. As another benefit, it is shown how the Gamification Modeling Language can be automatically compiled into code for the gamification runtime environment and, thus, further reduces development efforts. Based on the developed artifacts and five real gamified applications from industry, it is shown that the efforts for the implementation of the gamification can be significantly reduced from several months or weeks to a few days. Since the technology is designed as a reusable service, future projects benefit continuously with regards to time and efforts

Application of overlay techniques to network monitoring

Measurement and monitoring are important for correct and efficient operation of a network, since these activities provide reliable information and accurate analysis for characterizing and troubleshooting a network’s performance. The focus of network measurement is to measure the volume and types of traffic on a particular network and to record the raw measurement results. The focus of network monitoring is to initiate measurement tasks, collect raw measurement results, and report aggregated outcomes. Network systems are continuously evolving: besides incremental change to accommodate new devices, more drastic changes occur to accommodate new applications, such as overlay-based content delivery networks. As a consequence, a network can experience significant increases in size and significant levels of long-range, coordinated, distributed activity; furthermore, heterogeneous network technologies, services and applications coexist and interact. Reliance upon traditional, point-to-point, ad hoc measurements to manage such networks is becoming increasingly tenuous. In particular, correlated, simultaneous 1-way measurements are needed, as is the ability to access measurement information stored throughout the network of interest. To address these new challenges, this dissertation proposes OverMon, a new paradigm for edge-to-edge network monitoring systems through the application of overlay techniques. Of particular interest, the problem of significant network overheads caused by normal overlay network techniques has been addressed by constructing overlay networks with topology awareness - the network topology information is derived from interior gateway protocol (IGP) traffic, i.e. OSPF traffic, thus eliminating all overlay maintenance network overhead. Through a prototype that uses overlays to initiate measurement tasks and to retrieve measurement results, systematic evaluation has been conducted to demonstrate the feasibility and functionality of OverMon. The measurement results show that OverMon achieves good performance in scalability, flexibility and extensibility, which are important in addressing the new challenges arising from network system evolution. This work, therefore, contributes an innovative approach of applying overly techniques to solve realistic network monitoring problems, and provides valuable first hand experience in building and evaluating such a distributed system