Management of collaborative BIM data by the Federatinon of Distributed Models

The architecture engineering and construction sector is currently undergoing a significant period of change and modernization. In the United Kingdom in particular this is driven by the government’s objective of reducing the cost of construction projects. This is to be achieved by requiring all publicly funded projects to utilize fully collaborative building information modeling by 2016. A common goal in increasing building information model (BIM) adoption by the industry is the movement toward the realization of a BIM as either a single data model or a series of tightly coupled federated models. However, there are key obstacles to be overcome, including uncertainty over data ownership, concerns relating to the security/privacy of data, and reluctance to “outsource” data storage. This paper proposes a framework that is able to provide a solution for managing collaboration in the architecture engineering and construction (AEC) sector. The solution presented in this paper provides an overlay that automatically federates and governs distributed BIM data. The use of this overlay provides an integrated BIM model that is physically distributed across the stakeholders in a construction project. The key research question addressed by this paper is whether such an overlay can, by providing dynamic federation and governance of BIM data, overcome some key obstacles to BIM adoption, including questions over data ownership, the security/privacy of data, and reluctance to share data. More specifically, this paper provides the following contributions: (1) presentation of a vision for the implementation and governance of a federated distributed BIM data model; (2) description of the BIM process and governance model that underpins the approach; (3) provision of a validation case study using real construction data from a U.K. highways project, demonstrating that both the federated BIM overlay and the process and governance model are fit for purpose. - See more at: http://ascelibrary.org/doi/full/10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-5487.0000657#sthash.jIj574Lh.dpu

BlogForever D3.2: Interoperability Prospects

This report evaluates the interoperability prospects of the BlogForever platform. Therefore, existing interoperability models are reviewed, a Delphi study to identify crucial aspects for the interoperability of web archives and digital libraries is conducted, technical interoperability standards and protocols are reviewed regarding their relevance for BlogForever, a simple approach to consider interoperability in specific usage scenarios is proposed, and a tangible approach to develop a succession plan that would allow a reliable transfer of content from the current digital archive to other digital repositories is presented

The State of the Electronic Identity Market: Technologies, Infrastructure, Services and Policies

Authenticating onto systems, connecting to mobile networks and providing identity data to access services is common ground for most EU citizens, however what is disruptive is that digital technologies fundamentally alter and upset the ways identity is managed, by people, companies and governments. Technological progress in cryptography, identity systems design, smart card design and mobile phone authentication have been developed as a convenient and reliable answer to the need for authentication. Yet, these advances ar enot sufficient to satisfy the needs across people's many spheres of activity: work, leisure, health, social activities nor have they been used to enable cross-border service implementation in the Single Digital Market, or to ensure trust in cross border eCommerce. The study findings assert that the potentially great added value of eID technologies in enabling the Digital Economy has not yet been fulfilled, and fresh efforts are needed to build identification and authentication systems that people can live with, trust and use. The study finds that usability, minimum disclosure and portability, essential features of future systems, are at the margin of the market and cross-country, cross-sector eID systems for business and public service are only in their infancy. This report joins up the dots, and provides significant exploratory evidence of the potential of eID for the Single Digital Market. A clear understanding of this market is crucial for policy action on identification and authentication, eSignature and interoperability.JRC.DDG.J.4-Information Societ

Infrastructural Sovereignty over Agreement and Transaction Data (‘Metadata’) in an Open Network-Model for Multilateral Sharing of Sensitive Data

Organizations are becoming ever more aware that their data is a valuable asset requiring protection against mis-use. Therefore, being in control over the usage conditions (i.e. data sovereignty) is a prerequisite for sharing sensitive data in (increasingly complex) supply chains. Maintaining sovereignty applies to both the primary shared data and to the ‘metadata’ stemming from the data sharing support processes. However, maintaining sovereignty over this metadata creates an area of tension. Data providers must balance operational efficiency through outsourcing the data sharing support processes and the associated metadata to external, trusted, organizations against the added risk of transferring control over the metadata. At the same time, lock-in by community providers and major integration efforts due to multiple data sharing relationships need to be avoided. To address these issues, this paper elaborates an open network-model approach for maintaining sovereignty over metadata

Introducing SeamlessAccess.org: Delivering a Simpler, Privacy-Preserving Access Experience

Managing access to subscribed services in an era of abundance is a major challenge for libraries. Users have come to expect a seamless, personalized experience on their mobile devices, but traditional approaches to access management force librarians to choose between the anonymous ease of onsite IP authentication or the access friction experienced by users authenticating across multiple resources with Single Sign-On. Building on the work of the RA21 initiative, a recent NISO Recommended Practice on Improved Access to Institutionally Provided Information Resources charts a way forward. It will enable libraries to provide seamless, privacy-preserving and one-click access to its subscribed content from any device, any location, and from any starting point in the research process. The implementation of these recommendations will be led by SeamlessAccess.org, starting with a beta phase implementation in the fall of 2019. But how is user and data privacy protected? How is access simplified? How will numerous library use case scenarios be accommodated, and will current accessibility standards be implemented and supported? This paper discusses how these concerns are being addressed by a consortium of industry partners including librarians, access providers, publishers, and standards organizations. It also discusses how the coalition will manage this service for publishers and libraries while continuing to improve this user experience, provide governance on data policy and privacy issues, and maintain core web services specific to this initiative

A Review of Blockchain Technology Based Techniques to Preserve Privacy and to Secure for Electronic Health Records

Research has been done to broaden the block chain’s use cases outside of finance since Bitcoin introduced it. One sector where block chain is anticipated to have a big influence is healthcare. Researchers and practitioners in health informatics constantly struggle to keep up with the advancement of this field's new but quickly expanding body of research. This paper provides a thorough analysis of recent studies looking into the application of block chain based technology within the healthcare sector. Electronic health records (EHRs) are becoming a crucial tool for health care practitioners in achieving these objectives and providing high-quality treatment. Technology and regulatory barriers, such as concerns about results and privacy issues, make it difficult to use these technologies. Despite the fact that a variety of efforts have been introduced to focus on the specific privacy and security needs of future applications with functional parameters, there is still a need for research into the application, security and privacy complexities, and requirements of block chain based healthcare applications, as well as possible security threats and countermeasures. The primary objective of this article is to determine how to safeguard electronic health records (EHRs) using block chain technology in healthcare applications. It discusses contemporary HyperLedgerfabrics techniques, Interplanar file storage systems with block chain capabilities, privacy preservation techniques for EHRs, and recommender systems

Secure Management of Personal Health Records by Applying Attribute-Based Encryption

The confidentiality of personal health records is a major problem when patients use commercial Web-based systems to store their health data. Traditional access control mechanisms, such as Role-Based Access Control, have several limitations with respect to enforcing access control policies and ensuring data confidentiality. In particular, the data has to be stored on a central server locked by the access control mechanism, and the data owner loses control on the data from the moment when the data is sent to the requester. Therefore, these mechanisms do not fulfil the requirements of data outsourcing scenarios where the third party storing the data should not have access to the plain data, and it is not trusted to enforce access control policies. In this paper, we describe a new approach which enables secure storage and controlled sharing of patient’s health records in the aforementioned scenarios. A new variant of a ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption scheme is proposed to enforce patient/organizational access control policies such that everyone can download the encrypted data but only authorized users from the social domain (e.g. family, friends, or fellow patients) or authorized users from the professional\ud domain (e.g. doctors or nurses) are allowed to decrypt it