On Properties of Policy-Based Specifications

The advent of large-scale, complex computing systems has dramatically increased the difficulties of securing accesses to systems' resources. To ensure confidentiality and integrity, the exploitation of access control mechanisms has thus become a crucial issue in the design of modern computing systems. Among the different access control approaches proposed in the last decades, the policy-based one permits to capture, by resorting to the concept of attribute, all systems' security-relevant information and to be, at the same time, sufficiently flexible and expressive to represent the other approaches. In this paper, we move a step further to understand the effectiveness of policy-based specifications by studying how they permit to enforce traditional security properties. To support system designers in developing and maintaining policy-based specifications, we formalise also some relevant properties regarding the structure of policies. By means of a case study from the banking domain, we present real instances of such properties and outline an approach towards their automatised verification.Comment: In Proceedings WWV 2015, arXiv:1508.0338

Introducing fuzzy trust for managing belief conflict over semantic web data

Interpreting Semantic Web Data by different human experts can end up in scenarios, where each expert comes up with different and conflicting ideas what a concept can mean and how they relate to other concepts. Software agents that operate on the Semantic Web have to deal with similar scenarios where the interpretation of Semantic Web data that describes the heterogeneous sources becomes contradicting. One such application area of the Semantic Web is ontology mapping where different similarities have to be combined into a more reliable and coherent view, which might easily become unreliable if the conflicting beliefs in similarities are not managed effectively between the different agents. In this paper we propose a solution for managing this conflict by introducing trust between the mapping agents based on the fuzzy voting model

Having Lost for Fear of Losing: Culture, Individual Interests and the Negative Spiral of the Italian Case

Horizon Research Publishing CorporationThe present contribution stands as a wider sociological reflection of some empirical evidence resulting from a national research project entitled "Federalism, Local Autonomy and Quality of Democracy". In an attempt to understand the reasons for the substantial halt of the federal reform process in Italy, analysis of content of 60 interviews given by privileged witnesses of the administrative and local political system emphasized some cultural traits which played a seminal role. Above all, it has been detect the persistence of a ruling-classes political culture geared toward a "private" or group-oriented dimension of interest more than in accordance with public and collective aims, which creates a network of relationships between politics, society and the economy. This network is oriented to the defence of what has been achieved thanks to familistic (or neo-feudalist) mechanisms of interaction. By looking at the picture that emerges within a wider constructivist theoretical framework, it is possible to understand the Italian lack of engagement towards the bandwagon formed by countries that have managed to gain an advantage through the phenomena of globalization in terms of growth, competitiveness, development and democratization of decision-making processes in their political systems (by implementing, for example, inclusive decision-making practices supported by the use of new technologies of information and communication). The aim of the contribution is therefore a reflection on the Italian identity and political culture and their weight in shifting the impact of globalization from a potential added value for both national and local development to the virtual present loss of competitiveness of the whole system

An Analysis of Service Ontologies

Services are increasingly shaping the world’s economic activity. Service provision and consumption have been profiting from advances in ICT, but the decentralization and heterogeneity of the involved service entities still pose engineering challenges. One of these challenges is to achieve semantic interoperability among these autonomous entities. Semantic web technology aims at addressing this challenge on a large scale, and has matured over the last years. This is evident from the various efforts reported in the literature in which service knowledge is represented in terms of ontologies developed either in individual research projects or in standardization bodies. This paper aims at analyzing the most relevant service ontologies available today for their suitability to cope with the service semantic interoperability challenge. We take the vision of the Internet of Services (IoS) as our motivation to identify the requirements for service ontologies. We adopt a formal approach to ontology design and evaluation in our analysis. We start by defining informal competency questions derived from a motivating scenario, and we identify relevant concepts and properties in service ontologies that match the formal ontological representation of these questions. We analyze the service ontologies with our concepts and questions, so that each ontology is positioned and evaluated according to its utility. The gaps we identify as the result of our analysis provide an indication of open challenges and future work

Terrorism as Ritual Process and Cultural Trauma: a Performative Analysis of ISIS\u2019s Attacks in Europe

Sociological reflection on Islamist terrorism focussed itself almost exclusively on the religious aspect of radicalisation of Islam, spending little efforts to widen the analytic perspective to the effects of ISIS actions on the (re)definition of the identity and the collective memory of the targeted nation. This article will offer a different point of view, providing a cultural sociological reading of Paris Attacks, aimed at understanding its performative aspects. We will approach Paris Attacks as an example of social drama (Turner, 1982) and will focus on the ritual efforts spent by France to manage, repair and define the cultural trauma (Alexander et al., 2004) deriving from the attacks. Data will consist of a performative analysis of ISIS\u2019s strategy in Europe and of the counter-terrorist demonstration held in Paris on the 9th of January 2015; and of a frame analysis of the speech pronounced by Francois Hollande on November 16th 2015, after the Paris attacks, and of all the articles published on the main French newspapers during the first week after the events. In the conclusions, we will discuss how those events help to conceive a new kind of cultural trauma that is typical of the age of weak events and of distrust in public institutions