Easier : An Approach to Automatically Generate Active Ontologies for Intelligent Assistants

Intelligent assistants are ubiquitous and will grow in importance. Apple\u27s well-known assistant Siri uses Active Ontologies to process user input and to model the provided functionalities. Supporting new features requires extending the ontologies or even building new ones. The question is no longer "How to build an intelligent assistant?" but "How to do it efficiently?" We propose EASIER, an approach to automate building and extending Active Ontologies. EASIER identifies new services automatically and classifies unseen service providers with a clustering-based approach. It proposes ontology elements for new service categories and service providers respectively to ease ontology building. We evaluate EASIER with 292 form-based web services and two different clustering algorithms from Weka, DBScan and spectral clustering. DBScan achieves a F1 score of 51% in a ten-fold cross validation but is outperformed by spectral clustering, which achieves a F1 score of even 70%

Economic Implications of Deeper Asian Integration

The Asian countries are once again focused on options for large, comprehensive regional integration schemes. In this paper we explore the implications of such broad-based regional trade initiatives in Asia, highlighting the bridging of the East and South Asian economies. We place emphasis on the alternative prospects for insider and outsider countries. We work with a global general equilibrium model of the world economy, benchmarked to a projected 2017 sets of trade and production patterns. We also work with gravity-model based estimates of trade costs linked to infrastructure, and of barriers to trade in services. Taking these estimates, along with tariffs, into our CGE model, we examine regionally narrow and broad agreements, all centered on extending the reach of ASEAN to include free trade agreements with combinations of the northeast Asian economies (PRC, Japan, Korea) and also the South Asian economies. We focus on a stylized FTA that includes goods, services, and some aspects of trade cost reduction through trade facilitation and related infrastructure improvements. What matters most for East Asia is that China, Japan, and Korea be brought into any scheme for deeper regional integration. This matter alone drives most of the income and trade effects in the East Asia region across all of our scenarios. The inclusion of the South Asian economies in a broader regional agreement sees gains for the East Asian and South Asian economies. Most of the East Asian gains follow directly from Indian participation. The other South Asian players thus stand to benefit if India looks East and they are a part of the program, and to lose if they are not. Interestingly, we find that with the widest of agreements, the insiders benefit substantively in terms of trade and income while the aggregate impact on outside countries is negligible. Broadly speaking, a pan-Asian regional agreement would appear to cover enough countries, with a great enough diversity in production and incomes, to actually allow for regional gains without substantive third-country losses. However, realizing such potential requires overcoming a proven regional tendency to circumscribe trade concessions with rules of origin, NTBs, and exclusion lists. The more likely outcome, a spider web of bilateral agreements, carries with it the prospect of significant outsider costs (i.e. losses) both within and outside the region.regionalism, Asia FTAs, ASEAN, preferential trade, gravity model of services trade, trade costs and infrastructure

Determinants of user adoption of egovernment services: the case of Greek local government

Various theories and models exist on new technology and eGovernment adoption and explain the phenomenon. eGovernment acceptance though depends on various factors that differentiate among different groups, particularly regarding expectations, cultural variations, the level of use and interaction, commitment to the eGovernment initiatives. Furthermore, in Greece, there are third parties (Citizen Service Centres-CSCs) that operate and play a significant role in the eGovernment context. Nevertheless, their roles in eGovernment acceptance have to be investigated, in addition to other factors. Hence, further research is needed. The ultimate aim of this Research Project is to contribute to the understanding of the user’s intention drivers or barriers for e-services usage at the local government level that has not been sufficiently explored. It succeeds it, by extending the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 2 (UTAUT2) model and proposing a validation research framework. The enhanced model incorporates ‘trust in the Internet’ and ‘trust in the government’ and the roles of CSCs in the Greek eGovernment, by using ‘Habit of going to CSCs’ and ‘Trust in the CSCs’ factors. Τhe model is empirically tested, using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). The data (843 participants) came from two cities’ citizens, in Greece. First, the model is being refined by conducting exploratory factor analysis, followed by confirmatory factor analysis and finally the hypothesised structural model is assessed. Ten out of the fifteen hypotheses (relationships and interrelationships among the factors) were confirmed. The findings revealed ‘trust in the Internet’, ‘trust in the government’, and ‘performance expectancy’ to be the primary drivers of behavioural intention to use e-services. Also ‘habit of going to CSCs’ is negatively related to behavioural intention to use e-services. Findings contribute to theory by understanding the drivers of eGovernment adoption in Greece. At the practical level, the research provides guidelines and recommendations that will help eGovernment policy decision makers and web designers in better planning and implementing eGovernment policies and strategies to increase e-services take-up. Furthermore, the questionnaire will be freely available for government organisations in Greece, along with simple directions and recommendations to assess their initiatives

Extending OWL-S for the Composition of Web Services Generated With a Legacy Application Wrapper

Despite numerous efforts by various developers, web service composition is still a difficult problem to tackle. Lot of progressive research has been made on the development of suitable standards. These researches help to alleviate and overcome some of the web services composition issues. However, the legacy application wrappers generate nonstandard WSDL which hinder the progress. Indeed, in addition to their lack of semantics, WSDLs have sometimes different shapes because they are adapted to circumvent some technical implementation aspect. In this paper, we propose a method for the semi automatic composition of web services in the context of the NeuroLOG project. In this project the reuse of processing tools relies on a legacy application wrapper called jGASW. The paper describes the extensions to OWL-S in order to introduce and enable the composition of web services generated using the jGASW wrapper and also to implement consistency checks regarding these services.Comment: ICIW 2012, The Seventh International Conference on Internet and Web Applications and Services, Stuttgart : Germany (2012

A Semantic Grid Oriented to E-Tourism

With increasing complexity of tourism business models and tasks, there is a clear need of the next generation e-Tourism infrastructure to support flexible automation, integration, computation, storage, and collaboration. Currently several enabling technologies such as semantic Web, Web service, agent and grid computing have been applied in the different e-Tourism applications, however there is no a unified framework to be able to integrate all of them. So this paper presents a promising e-Tourism framework based on emerging semantic grid, in which a number of key design issues are discussed including architecture, ontologies structure, semantic reconciliation, service and resource discovery, role based authorization and intelligent agent. The paper finally provides the implementation of the framework.Comment: 12 PAGES, 7 Figure

Penetration testing model for mobile cloud computing applications / Ahmad Salah Mahmoud Al-Ahmad

Mobile cloud computing (MCC) technology possess features mitigating mobile limitations and enhancing cloud services. MCC application penetration testing issues are complex and unique which make the testing difficult for junior penetration testers. It is complex as MCC applications have three intersecting vulnerability domains, namely mobile, web, and cloud. The offloading process adds uniqueness and complexity to the MCC application penetration testing in terms of generating, selecting and executing test cases. To solve these issues, this thesis constructs a model for MCC application penetration testing that reduces the complexity, tackles the uniqueness and assists junior testers in conducting penetration tests on MCC applications more effectively and efficiently. The main objectives of this thesis are to discover the issues in conducting penetration testing on MCC applications and to construct and evaluate MCC application penetration testing model. Design science research methodology is applied with four phases: (i) Theoretical framework construction phase (ii) Model construction phase entails designing the components and processes of MCC application penetration to reduce the complexity and address offloading; (iii) Model implementation phase implements the components and processes of the model into model guidelines and integrated tool called PT2-MCC. This tool manages the repositories, generates and selects test cases, and implements the mobile agent component; (iv) Model evaluation phase applies case study approach and uses an evaluation framework to evaluate the model against selected testing quality and performance attributes. In model evaluation phase, a junior penetration tester conducted two case studies on two MCC applications built by extending two open source native mobile applications

Discovery and Selection of Certified Web Services Through Registry-Based Testing and Verification

Reliability and trust are fundamental prerequisites for the establishment of functional relationships among peers in a Collaborative Networked Organisation (CNO), especially in the context of Virtual Enterprises where economic benefits can be directly at stake. This paper presents a novel approach towards effective service discovery and selection that is no longer based on informal, ambiguous and potentially unreliable service descriptions, but on formal specifications that can be used to verify and certify the actual Web service implementations. We propose the use of Stream X-machines (SXMs) as a powerful modelling formalism for constructing the behavioural specification of a Web service, for performing verification through the generation of exhaustive test cases, and for performing validation through animation or model checking during service selection