58,936 research outputs found
Enforcing reputation constraints on business process workflows
The problem of trust in determining the flow of execution of business processes has been in the centre of research interst in the last decade as business processes become a de facto model of Internet-based commerce, particularly with the increasing popularity in Cloud computing. One of the main mea-sures of trust is reputation, where the quality of services as provided to their clients can be used as the main factor in calculating service and service provider reputation values. The work presented here contributes to the solving of this problem by defining a model for the calculation of service reputa-tion levels in a BPEL-based business workflow. These levels of reputation are then used to control the execution of the workflow based on service-level agreement constraints provided by the users of the workflow. The main contribution of the paper is to first present a formal meaning for BPEL processes, which is constrained by reputation requirements from the users, and then we demonstrate that these requirements can be enforced using a reference architecture with a case scenario from the domain of distributed map processing. Finally, the paper discusses the possible threats that can be launched on such an architecture
Where are your Manners? Sharing Best Community Practices in the Web 2.0
The Web 2.0 fosters the creation of communities by offering users a wide
array of social software tools. While the success of these tools is based on
their ability to support different interaction patterns among users by imposing
as few limitations as possible, the communities they support are not free of
rules (just think about the posting rules in a community forum or the editing
rules in a thematic wiki). In this paper we propose a framework for the sharing
of best community practices in the form of a (potentially rule-based)
annotation layer that can be integrated with existing Web 2.0 community tools
(with specific focus on wikis). This solution is characterized by minimal
intrusiveness and plays nicely within the open spirit of the Web 2.0 by
providing users with behavioral hints rather than by enforcing the strict
adherence to a set of rules.Comment: ACM symposium on Applied Computing, Honolulu : \'Etats-Unis
d'Am\'erique (2009
Semantic Web Technologies in Support of Service Oriented Architecture Governance
As Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) deployments gradually mature they also grow in size and complexity. The number of service providers, services, and service consumers increases, and so do the dependencies among these entities and the various artefacts that describe how services operate, or how they are meant to operate under specific conditions. Appropriate governance over the various phases and activities associated with the service lifecycle is therefore indispensable in order to prevent a SOA deployment from dissolving into an unmanageable infrastructure. The employment of Semantic Web technologies for describing and reasoning about service properties and governance requirements has the potential to greatly enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of SOA Governance solutions by increasing the levels of automation in a wide-range of tasks relating to service lifecycle management. The goal of the proposed research work is to investigate the application of Semantic Web technologies in the context of service lifecycle management, and propose a concrete theoretical and technological approach for supporting SOA Governance through the realisation of semantically-enhanced registry and repository solutions
Iowa Department of Public Safety Performance Report, FY2007
Agency Performance Repor
How Local Governments Structure Contracts with Private Firms: Economic Theory and Evidence on Solid Waste and Recycling Contracts
Solid waste management services are contracted out to private firms in many U.S. communities. Household waste collection, transport, and disposal are relatively straightforward services to define within the terms of a contract. The addition of recycling, however, significantly complicates matters. How should contracts be structured to provide incentives for recycling? Who should own key facilities, such as recyclable materials processing facilities? Should a separate contract for processing and sale of materials be used, or should these services be provided by government employees or purely private markets? These questions are addressed in this study using the principal-agent framework and the theory of incomplete contracts in economics. I explain stylized facts in the industry, including facts about asset ownership, and look in detail at contracts used in seven communities that have achieved high rates of waste diversion and recycling.incentive contracts, asset specificity, principal-agent models, waste collection, recycling
Indonesia's Forest Moratorium: Impacts and Next Steps
The authors identify opportunities for progress with the recently extended Indonesian forest moratorium, a policy aiming to protect an area the size of Japan from development
Enabling Social Applications via Decentralized Social Data Management
An unprecedented information wealth produced by online social networks,
further augmented by location/collocation data, is currently fragmented across
different proprietary services. Combined, it can accurately represent the
social world and enable novel socially-aware applications. We present
Prometheus, a socially-aware peer-to-peer service that collects social
information from multiple sources into a multigraph managed in a decentralized
fashion on user-contributed nodes, and exposes it through an interface
implementing non-trivial social inferences while complying with user-defined
access policies. Simulations and experiments on PlanetLab with emulated
application workloads show the system exhibits good end-to-end response time,
low communication overhead and resilience to malicious attacks.Comment: 27 pages, single ACM column, 9 figures, accepted in Special Issue of
Foundations of Social Computing, ACM Transactions on Internet Technolog
The determinants of Government environmental performance - an empirical analysis of Chinese townships
This paper explores the determinants of government environmental performance at the local level. Chinese township governments, the lowest level in the hierarchical government structure, were selected for this exercise. The performance indicators used in the analyses include the efforts of enforcing government environmental regulations and of providing environmental services to polluting enterprises. The performance determinants identified include environmental performance of upper-level governments, local development status, industrial employment, income of workers in polluting enterprises, local environmental quality, and public pressure for environmental quality improvement. A survey of 85 townships and interviews of 151 township government leaders were conducted in three provinces of China. The statistical results show that: a) The environmental performance of upper-level governments in China strongly and positively influences the environmental efforts of the township governments. b) Public pressure has created incentives for the township governments to improve their efforts in both enforcing environmental regulations and providing environmental services, while the environmental quality did not show significant impacts. c) Higher employment in industries tends to have a negative influence on the regulatory enforcement, but a positive influence on environmental service provision. d) A higher enforcement effort and a lower service provision are associated with higher wages the workers received from industries. This implies that the industries offering higher wages to the workers are subject to more stringent environmental enforcement but receive less environmental services. 5) Richer townships tend to have less regulatory enforcement but better environmental services.Banks&Banking Reform,Decentralization,National Governance,Environmental Economics&Policies,Municipal Financial Management,Environmental Economics&Policies,National Governance,Environmental Governance,Banks&Banking Reform,Municipal Financial Management
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