Incorporating the Digital Commons

The concept of ‘the commons’ has been used as a framework to understand resources shared by a community rather than a private entity, and it has also inspired social movements working against the enclosure of public goods and resources. One such resource is free (libre) and open source software (FLOSS). FLOSS emerged as an alternative to proprietary software in the 1980s. However, both the products and production processes of FLOSS have become incorporated into capitalist production. For example, Red Hat, Inc. is a large publicly traded company whose business model relies entirely on free software, and IBM, Intel, Cisco, Samsung, Google are some of the largest contributors to Linux, the open-source operating system. This book explores the ways in which FLOSS has been incorporated into digital capitalism. Just as the commons have been used as a motivational frame for radical social movements, it has also served the interests of free-marketeers, corporate libertarians, and states to expand their reach by dragging the shared resources of social life onto digital platforms so they can be integrated into the global capitalist system. The book concludes by asserting the need for a critical political economic understanding of the commons that foregrounds (digital) labour, class struggle, and uneven power distribution within the digital commons as well as between FLOSS communities and their corporate sponsors

Service-oriented architecture for device lifecycle support in industrial automation

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores Especialidade: Robótica e Manufactura IntegradaThis thesis addresses the device lifecycle support thematic in the scope of service oriented industrial automation domain. This domain is known for its plethora of heterogeneous equipment encompassing distinct functions, form factors, network interfaces, or I/O specifications supported by dissimilar software and hardware platforms. There is then an evident and crescent need to take every device into account and improve the agility performance during setup, control, management, monitoring and diagnosis phases. Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm is currently a widely endorsed approach for both business and enterprise systems integration. SOA concepts and technology are continuously spreading along the layers of the enterprise organization envisioning a unified interoperability solution. SOA promotes discoverability, loose coupling, abstraction, autonomy and composition of services relying on open web standards – features that can provide an important contribution to the industrial automation domain. The present work seized industrial automation device level requirements, constraints and needs to determine how and where can SOA be employed to solve some of the existent difficulties. Supported by these outcomes, a reference architecture shaped by distributed, adaptive and composable modules is proposed. This architecture will assist and ease the role of systems integrators during reengineering-related interventions throughout system lifecycle. In a converging direction, the present work also proposes a serviceoriented device model to support previous architecture vision and goals by including embedded added-value in terms of service-oriented peer-to-peer discovery and identification, configuration, management, as well as agile customization of device resources. In this context, the implementation and validation work proved not simply the feasibility and fitness of the proposed solution to two distinct test-benches but also its relevance to the expanding domain of SOA applications to support device lifecycle in the industrial automation domain

iSemServ : a framework for engineering intelligent semantic services

The need for modern enterprises and Web users to simply and rapidly develop and deliver platform-independent services to be accessed over the Web by the global community is growing. This is self-evident, when one considers the omnipresence of electronic services (e-services) on the Web. Accordingly, the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is commonly considered as one of the de facto standards for the provisioning of heterogeneous business functionalities on the Web. As the basis for SOA, Web Services (WS) are commonly preferred, particularly because of their ability to facilitate the integration of heterogeneous systems. However, WS only focus on syntactic descriptions when describing the functional and behavioural aspects of services. This makes it a challenge for services to be automatically discovered, selected, composed, invoked, and executed – without any human intervention. Consequently, Semantic Web Services (SWS) are emerging to deal with such a challenge. SWS represent the convergence of Semantic Web (SW) and WS concepts, in order to enable Web services that can be automatically processed and understood by machines operating with limited or no user intervention. At present, research efforts within the SWS domain are mainly concentrated on semantic services automation aspects, such as discovery, matching, selection, composition, invocation, and execution. Moreover, extensive research has been conducted on the conceptual models and formal languages used in constructing semantic services. However, in terms of the engineering of semantic services, a number of challenges are still prevalent, as demonstrated by the lack of development and use of semantic services in real-world settings. The lack of development and use could be attributed to a number of challenges, such as complex semantic services enabling technologies, leading to a steep learning curve for service developers; lack of unified service platforms for guiding and supporting simple and rapid engineering of semantic services, and the limited integration of semantic technologies with mature service-oriented technologies. vi In addition, a combination of isolated software tools is normally used to engineer semantic services. This could, however, lead to undesirable consequences, such as prolonged service development times, high service development costs, lack of services re-use, and the lack of semantics interoperability, reliability, and re-usability. Furthermore, available software platforms do not support the creation of semantic services that are intelligent beyond the application of semantic descriptions, as envisaged for the next generation of services, where the connection of knowledge is of core importance. In addressing some of the challenges highlighted, this research study adopted a qualitative research approach with the main focus on conceptual modelling. The main contribution of this study is thus a framework called iSemServ to simplify and accelerate the process of engineering intelligent semantic services. The framework has been modelled and developed, based on the principles of simplicity, rapidity, and intelligence. The key contributions of the proposed framework are: (1) An end-to-end and unified approach of engineering intelligent semantic services, thereby enabling service engineers to use one platform to realize all the modules comprising such services; (2) proposal of a model-driven approach that enables the average and expert service engineers to focus on developing intelligent semantic services in a structured, extensible, and platform-independent manner. Thereby increasing developers’ productivity and minimizing development and maintenance costs; (3) complexity hiding through the exploitation of template and rule-based automatic code generators, supporting different service architectural styles and semantic models; and (4) intelligence wrapping of services at message and knowledge levels, for the purposes of automatically processing semantic service requests, responses and reasoning over domain ontologies and semantic descriptions by keeping user intervention at a minimum. The framework was designed by following a model-driven approach and implemented using the Eclipse platform. It was evaluated using practical use case scenarios, comparative analysis, and performance and scalability experiments. In conclusion, the iSemServ framework is considered appropriate for dealing with the complexities and restrictions involved in engineering intelligent semantic services, especially because the amount of time required to generate intelligent semantic vii services using the proposed framework is smaller compared with the time that the service engineer would need to manually generate all the different artefacts comprising an intelligent semantic service. Keywords: Intelligent semantic services, Web services, Ontologies, Intelligent agents, Service engineering, Model-driven techniques, iSemServ framework.ComputingD. Phil. (Computer science

Towards a contract-based interoperation model

Web Services-based solutions for interoperating processes are considered to be one of the most promising technologies for achieving truly interoperable functioning in open environments. In the last three years, the specification in particular of agreements between resource / service providers and consumers, as well as protocols for their negotiation have been proposed as a possible solution for managing the resulting computing systems. In this report, the state of the art in the area of contract-based web service applications is closely studied, identifying current limitations and possibilities. On the basis of this analysis, a general model for contract specification, negotiation, agreement, execution and management is introduced. Such a model has broad applicability both in electronic business integration and distributed knowledge management systems for decision support. Initial work presented here was completed in September 2005 and is published here as background for the European Commission funded project IST CONTRACT http://www.ist-contract.org/.Postprint (published version

Plug-and-Participate for Limited Devices in the Field of Industrial Automation

Ausgangspunkt und gleichzeitig Motivation dieser Arbeit ist die heutige Marktsituation: Starke Kundenbedürfnisse nach individuellen Gütern stehen oftmals eher auf Massenproduktion ausgerichteten Planungs- und Automatisierungssystemen gegenüber - die Befriedigung individueller Kundenbedürfnisse setzt aber Flexibilität und Anpassungsfähigkeit voraus. Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es daher, einen Beitrag zu leisten, der es Unternehmen ermöglichen soll, auf diese individuellen Bedürfnisse flexibel reagieren zu können. Hierbei kann es im Rahmen der Dissertation natürlich nicht um eine Revolutionierung der gesamten Automatisierungs- und Planungslandschaft gehen; vielmehr ist die Lösung, die der Autor der Arbeit präsentiert, ein integraler Bestandteil eines Automatisierungskonzeptes, das im Rahmen des PABADIS Projektes entwickelt wurde: Während PABADIS das gesamte Spektrum von Planung und Maschineninfrastruktur zum Inhalt hat, bezieht sich der Kern dieser Arbeit weitestgehend auf den letztgenannten Punkt - Maschineninfrastruktur. Ziel war es, generische Maschinenfunktionalität in einem Netzwerk anzubieten, durch das Fertigungsaufträge selbstständig navigieren. Als Lösung präsentiert diese Dissertation ein Plug-and-Participate basiertes Konzept, welches beliebige Automatisierungsfunktionen in einer spontanen Gemeinschaft bereitstellt. Basis ist ein generisches Interface, in dem die generellen Anforderungen solcher ad-hoc Infrastrukturen aggregiert sind. Die Implementierung dieses Interfaces in der PABADIS Referenzimplementierung sowie die Gegenüberstellung der Systemanforderungen und Systemvoraussetzungen zeigte, das klassische Plug-and-Participate Technologien wie Jini und UPnP aufgrund ihrer Anforderungen nicht geeignet sind - Automatisierungsgeräte stellen oftmals nur eingeschränkte Ressourcen bereit. Daher wurde als zweites Ergebnis neben dem Plug-and-Participate basierten Automatisierungskonzept eine Plug-and-Participate Technologie entwickelt - Pini - die den Gegebenheiten der Automatisierungswelt gerecht wird und schließlich eine Anwendung von PABADIS auf heutigen Automatisierungsanlagen erlaubt. Grundlegende Konzepte von Pini, die dies ermöglichen, sind die gesamte Grundarchitektur auf Basis eines verteilten Lookup Service, die Art und Weise der Dienstrepräsentation sowie die effiziente Nutzung der angebotenen Dienste. Mit Pini und darauf aufbauenden Konzepten wie PLAP ist es nun insbesondere möglich, Automatisierungssysteme wie PABADIS auf heutigen Anlagen zu realisieren. Das wiederum ist ein Schritt in Richtung Kundenorientierung - solche Systeme sind mit Hinblick auf Flexibilität und Anpassungsfähigkeit gestaltet worden, um Kundenbedürfnissen effizient gerecht zu werden