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

Community based mappings for the semantic web: MappingsTool

An extension of BioPortal, an open source ontology repository developed by the UNIVERSITY OF STANFORD, that facilitates the manipulation of mappings between ontologies. We provide a flexible web user interface that facilitate the workflow to create a mapping and the exploration of the relations between ontologies.Pera Mira, O. (2011). Community based mappings for the semantic web: MappingsTool. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/11159.Archivo delegad

Identifiers in e-Science platforms for the ecological sciences

In the emerging Web of Data, publishing stable and unique identifiers promises great potential in using the web as common platform to discover and enrich data in the ecologic sciences. With our collaborative e-Science platform “BEFdata”, we generated and published unique identifiers for the data repository of the Biodiversity – Ecosystem Functioning Research Unit of the German Research Foundation (BEF-China; DFG: FOR 891). We linked part of the identifiers to two external data providers, thus creating a virtual common platform including several ecological repositories. We used the Global Biodiversity Facility (GBIF) as well the International Plant Name Index (IPNI) to enrich the data from our own field observations. We conclude in discussing other potential providers for identifiers for the ecological research domain. We demonstrate the ease of making use of existing decentralized and unsupervised identifiers for a data repository, which opens new avenues to collaborative data discovery for learning, teaching, and research in ecology

Symbolic Execution for (Almost) Free: Hijacking an Existing Implementation to Perform Symbolic Execution

Symbolic execution of a language is traditionally achieved by replacing the language s interpreter with an entirely new interpreter. This may be an unnecessary burden, and it is tempting instead to try to use as much of the existing interpret infrastructure as possible, both for handling aspects of the computation that are not symbolic, and for propagating symbolic ones. This approach was used to implement Rubicon, a bounded verification system for Ruby on Rails web applications, in less than 1000 lines of Ruby code. Rubicon uses symbolic execution to derive verification conditions from Rails applications and an off-the-shelf solver to check them. Despite its small size, Rubicon has been used to find previously unknown bugs in open-source Rails applications. The key idea is to encode symbolic values and operations in a library written in the target language itself, overriding only a small part of the standard interpreter. We formalize this approach, showing that replacing a few key operators with symbolic versions in a standard interpreter gives the same effect as replacing the entire interpreter with a symbolic one

Core language for web applications

Trabalho apresentado no âmbito do Mestrado em Engenharia Informática, como requisito parcial para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia InformáticaWeb applications have a very high demand for rapid development and constant change. Several languages were created for this kind of applications, which are very flexible but many times trade the benefits of strongly-typed programming languages by untyped interpreted languages. With this kind of languages the interaction between different layers in a web application is usually developed using dialects and programming conventions with no real mechanical verifications between the client and server sides, and the SQL code within the application and the database. We present a typed core language for web applications that integrates the typing of the interface definition, business logic, and database manipulation representing these interactions at a high abstract level. Using only one language, typed and with its own instructions to define the interface and the interaction with the database, becomes possible to make static checks. Thereby, avoiding execution errors caused by the usual heterogeneity among web applications. We also describe the implementation of a prototype with a highly flexible programming environment for our language that allows the application development and publishing tasks to be done through a web interface, interacting directly with the application and without loosing the integrity checks. This kind of development relies on an agile development methodology. Therefore, the modifications made to the application are made active using the dynamic reconfiguration mechanism, avoiding the recompilation of the application and system restart

Callimachus DL: using semantics to enhance search and etrieval in a digital library.

Proceedings of: First World Summit on the Knowledge Society, (WSKS 2008), Athens, Greece, September 24-26, 2008Among the challenges of classifying, locating and accessing knowledge in Digital Libraries tackling with the huge amount of resources the Web provides, improving Digital Libraries by means of different strategies, particularly, using semantics remains a promising and interesting approach. In this paper, we present CallimachusDL, a semantics-based Digital Library which provides faceted search, enhanced access possibilities and a proof-of-concept implementation.Publicad

Mobile-cloud Cross Development (McX)

There is a multitude of Mobile Operating Systems (MOSs) with iOS, Android, Windows Phone and, BlackBerry leading the space. New players continue to enter the market. Without a de-facto leader in this space, it has become necessary for businesses & developers to target multiple devices & MOSs in order to establish a relevant presence within their target audience. Cross-platform Mobile Development Tools (XMTs) were born out of this need to reduce developer effort in creating mobile applications by providing “write once run anywhere” (WORA) functionality. However, most of these tools sacrifice performance, features or maintainability in order to provide WORA functionality. Furthermore, these tools only attempt to manage the user interface and related client-side functionality. Most mobile applications need to follow the same principals that guide development of non-mobile web or desktop apps. Typical apps are deployed using an n-tier, cloud-based strategy with substantial functionality delegated to cloud resources. Given the above, there are two parts of an application’s anatomy that don’t get much attention – the cloud middleware functionality, and the database/model management features. In this paper I address these problems through creation of a Mobile-cloud Cross Development (McX) tool-chain that includes a type-safe meta-programming language, an integrated cloud node and, an active compiler. In order to effectively understand the problem with the current state of the art, I use 3 of the leading XMTs alongside the developed McX tool-chain and compare the effectiveness of each. The paper further introduces the language; it’s grammar and semantic structure, and provides discussions on how this approach fits the future of cross-platform, cloud-integrated mobile application development along with the associated issues and areas for further research