An active, ontology-driven network service for Internet collaboration

Web portals have emerged as an important means of collaboration on the WWW, and the integration of ontologies promises to make them more accurate in how they serve users’ collaboration and information location requirements. However, web portals are essentially a centralised architecture resulting in difficulties supporting seamless roaming between portals and collaboration between groups supported on different portals. This paper proposes an alternative approach to collaboration over the web using ontologies that is de-centralised and exploits content-based networking. We argue that this approach promises a user-centric, timely, secure and location-independent mechanism, which is potentially more scaleable and universal than existing centralised portals

Business integration models in the context of web services.

E-commerce development and applications have been bringing the Internet to business and marketing and reforming our current business styles and processes. The rapid development of the Web, in particular, the introduction of the semantic web and web service technologies, enables business processes, modeling and management to enter an entirely new stage. Traditional web based business data and transactions can now be analyzed, extracted and modeled to discover new business rules and to form new business strategies, let alone mining the business data in order to classify customers or products. In this paper, we investigate and analyze the business integration models in the context of web services using a micro-payment system because a micro-payment system is considered to be a service intensive activity, where many payment tasks involve different forms of services, such as payment method selection for buyers, security support software, product price comparison, etc. We will use the micro-payment case to discuss and illustrate how the web services approaches support and transform the business process and integration model.

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

Link Before You Share: Managing Privacy Policies through Blockchain

With the advent of numerous online content providers, utilities and applications, each with their own specific version of privacy policies and its associated overhead, it is becoming increasingly difficult for concerned users to manage and track the confidential information that they share with the providers. Users consent to providers to gather and share their Personally Identifiable Information (PII). We have developed a novel framework to automatically track details about how a users' PII data is stored, used and shared by the provider. We have integrated our Data Privacy ontology with the properties of blockchain, to develop an automated access control and audit mechanism that enforces users' data privacy policies when sharing their data across third parties. We have also validated this framework by implementing a working system LinkShare. In this paper, we describe our framework on detail along with the LinkShare system. Our approach can be adopted by Big Data users to automatically apply their privacy policy on data operations and track the flow of that data across various stakeholders.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, Published in: 4th International Workshop on Privacy and Security of Big Data (PSBD 2017) in conjunction with 2017 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData 2017) December 14, 2017, Boston, MA, US

Business roles and negotiation models for Web service based provision

The emergence of XML as the lingua franca for communication among applications over the Web, the recent advances in service oriented computing and in web service architectures and the applicability of these technologies in the area of eCommerce necessitates the conceptualisation of business roles and negotiation models for web service based provision. According to the web service paradigm it is envisaged that services will be provided to customers based on dynamic web service composition. This places additional requirements to SLA negotiation in comparison to the traditional service provision paradigm where negotiation for service was performed with a single service provider system. This paper addresses the research challenges with regard to SLA negotiation for web service based provision and outlines business roles and a negotiation model for establishing SLAs with multiple web service providers in order to offer combined web service functionality to match user needs

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges