Privacy-Preserving Reengineering of Model-View-Controller Application Architectures Using Linked Data

When a legacy system’s software architecture cannot be redesigned, implementing additional privacy requirements is often complex, unreliable and costly to maintain. This paper presents a privacy-by-design approach to reengineer web applications as linked data-enabled and implement access control and privacy preservation properties. The method is based on the knowledge of the application architecture, which for the Web of data is commonly designed on the basis of a model-view-controller pattern. Whereas wrapping techniques commonly used to link data of web applications duplicate the security source code, the new approach allows for the controlled disclosure of an application’s data, while preserving non-functional properties such as privacy preservation. The solution has been implemented and compared with existing linked data frameworks in terms of reliability, maintainability and complexity

Trustful ad hoc cross-organizational data exchanges based on the Hyperledger Fabric framework

Organizations share data in a cross-organizational context when they have the goal to derive additional knowledge by aggregating different data sources. The collaborations considered in this article are short-lived and ad hoc, that is, they should be set up in a few minutes at most (e.g., in emergency scenarios). The data sources are located in different domains and are not publicly accessible. When a collaboration is finished, it is however unclear which exchanges happened. This could lead to possible disputes when dishonest organizations are present. The receipt of requests/responses could be falsely denied or their content could be point of discussion. In order to prevent such disputes afterwards, a logging mechanism is needed which generates a replicated irrefutable proof of which exchanges have happened during a single collaboration. Distributed database solutions can be taken from third parties to store the generated logs, but it can be difficult to find a party which is trusted by all participating organizations. Permissioned blockchains provide a solution for this as each organization can act as a consensus participant. Although the consensus mechanism of the permissioned blockchain Hyperledger Fabric (versions 1.0-1.4) is not fully decentralized, which clashes with the fundamental principle of blockchain, the framework is used in this article as an enabler to set up a distributed database, and a proposal for a logging mechanism is presented which does not require the third party to be fully trusted. A proof of concept is implemented which can be used to experiment with different data exchange setups. It makes use of generic web APIs and behaves according to a Markov chain in order to create a fully automated data exchange scenario where the participants explore their APIs dynamically. The resulting mechanism allows a data-delivering organization to detect missing logs and to take action, for example, (temporarily) suspend collaboration. Furthermore, each organization is incentivized to follow the steps of the logging mechanism as it may lose access to data of others, otherwise. The created proof of concept is scaled to 10 organizations, which autonomously exchange different data types for 10 min, and evaluation results are presented accordingly

Context Aware Computing for The Internet of Things: A Survey

As we are moving towards the Internet of Things (IoT), the number of sensors deployed around the world is growing at a rapid pace. Market research has shown a significant growth of sensor deployments over the past decade and has predicted a significant increment of the growth rate in the future. These sensors continuously generate enormous amounts of data. However, in order to add value to raw sensor data we need to understand it. Collection, modelling, reasoning, and distribution of context in relation to sensor data plays critical role in this challenge. Context-aware computing has proven to be successful in understanding sensor data. In this paper, we survey context awareness from an IoT perspective. We present the necessary background by introducing the IoT paradigm and context-aware fundamentals at the beginning. Then we provide an in-depth analysis of context life cycle. We evaluate a subset of projects (50) which represent the majority of research and commercial solutions proposed in the field of context-aware computing conducted over the last decade (2001-2011) based on our own taxonomy. Finally, based on our evaluation, we highlight the lessons to be learnt from the past and some possible directions for future research. The survey addresses a broad range of techniques, methods, models, functionalities, systems, applications, and middleware solutions related to context awareness and IoT. Our goal is not only to analyse, compare and consolidate past research work but also to appreciate their findings and discuss their applicability towards the IoT.Comment: IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials Journal, 201

Adaptive Digital Resource Modeling as Service Provider and Consumer

International audienceThe increase in the production of heterogeneous and multi-source digital data over last years raises several issues regarding their management and use. Hence, users can face some difficulties in selecting the adequate digital resources and combining them to reach their objectives in a given activity. In this paper, we focus on digital resources design and management in order to enhance their retrieval, interoperability, adaptation and collaboration within an adaptive system. In practical terms, our work consists in a new method for digital resource design and management capable of enhancing their usability. It relies on RESTful web service-based methodology and platform thinking approach. We have implemented our method in an interactive and adaptive PLE to assist researchers in using and managing their digital resources, called PRISE for PeRsonal Interactive research Smart Environment. We have also undertaken some experiments with PRISE platform in our laboratory. The result showed that modeling digital resources with RESTful and platform thinking concept enhances digital resource usability in terms of retrieving, interoperability, adaptation and collaboration

Identity Resolution across Different Social Networks using Similarity Analysis

Today the Social Networking Sites have become very popular and are used by most of the people. This is because the Social Networking sites are playing different roles in different fields and facilitating the needs of its users from time to time. The most common purpose why people join in to these websites is to get connected with people and sharing information. An individual may be signed in on more than one Social Networking Site so identifying the same individual on different Social Networking sites is a task. To accomplish this task the proposed system uses the Similarity Analysis method on the available information details

Web Data Extraction, Applications and Techniques: A Survey

Web Data Extraction is an important problem that has been studied by means of different scientific tools and in a broad range of applications. Many approaches to extracting data from the Web have been designed to solve specific problems and operate in ad-hoc domains. Other approaches, instead, heavily reuse techniques and algorithms developed in the field of Information Extraction. This survey aims at providing a structured and comprehensive overview of the literature in the field of Web Data Extraction. We provided a simple classification framework in which existing Web Data Extraction applications are grouped into two main classes, namely applications at the Enterprise level and at the Social Web level. At the Enterprise level, Web Data Extraction techniques emerge as a key tool to perform data analysis in Business and Competitive Intelligence systems as well as for business process re-engineering. At the Social Web level, Web Data Extraction techniques allow to gather a large amount of structured data continuously generated and disseminated by Web 2.0, Social Media and Online Social Network users and this offers unprecedented opportunities to analyze human behavior at a very large scale. We discuss also the potential of cross-fertilization, i.e., on the possibility of re-using Web Data Extraction techniques originally designed to work in a given domain, in other domains.Comment: Knowledge-based System

Integration of Web APIs and Linked Data Using SPARQL Micro-Services - Application to Biodiversity Use Cases

International audienceIn recent years, Web APIs have become a de facto standard for exchanging machine-readable data on the Web. Despite this success, however, they often fail in making resource descriptions interoperable due to the fact that they rely on proprietary vocabularies that lack formal semantics.The Linked Data principles similarly seek the massive publication of data on the Web, yet with the specific goal of ensuring semantic interoperability.Given their complementary goals, it is commonly admitted that cross-fertilization could stem from the automatic combination of Linked Data and Web APIs. Towards this goal, in this paper we leverage the micro-service architectural principles to define a SPARQL Micro-Service architecture, aimed at querying Web APIs using SPARQL. A SPARQL micro-service is a lightweight SPARQL endpoint that provides access to a small, resource-centric, virtual graph. In this context, we argue that full SPARQL Query expressiveness can be supported efficiently without jeopardizing servers availability.Furthermore, we demonstrate how this architecture can be used to dynamically assign dereferenceable URIs to Web API resources that do not have URIs beforehand, thus literally “bringing” Web APIs into the Web of Data. We believe that the emergence of an ecosystem of SPARQL micro-services published by independent providers would enable Linked Data-based applications to easily glean pieces of data from a wealth of distributed, scalable, and reliable services. We describe a working prototype implementation and we finally illustrate the use of SPARQL micro-services in the context of two real-life use cases related to the biodiversity domain, developed in collaboration with the French National Museum of Natural History

SL: a "quick and dirty" but working intermediate language for SVP systems

The CSA group at the University of Amsterdam has developed SVP, a framework to manage and program many-core and hardware multithreaded processors. In this article, we introduce the intermediate language SL, a common vehicle to program SVP platforms. SL is designed as an extension to the standard C language (ISO C99/C11). It includes primitive constructs to bulk create threads, bulk synchronize on termination of threads, and communicate using word-sized dataflow channels between threads. It is intended for use as target language for higher-level parallelizing compilers. SL is a research vehicle; as of this writing, it is the only interface language to program a main SVP platform, the new Microgrid chip architecture. This article provides an overview of the language, to complement a detailed specification available separately.Comment: 22 pages, 3 figures, 18 listings, 1 tabl