DRIVER Technology Watch Report

This report is part of the Discovery Workpackage (WP4) and is the third report out of four deliverables. The objective of this report is to give an overview of the latest technical developments in the world of digital repositories, digital libraries and beyond, in order to serve as theoretical and practical input for the technical DRIVER developments, especially those focused on enhanced publications. This report consists of two main parts, one part focuses on interoperability standards for enhanced publications, the other part consists of three subchapters, which give a landscape picture of current and surfacing technologies and communities crucial to DRIVER. These three subchapters contain the GRID, CRIS and LTP communities and technologies. Every chapter contains a theoretical explanation, followed by case studies and the outcomes and opportunities for DRIVER in this field

Critical Infrastructure Protection Metrics and Tools Papers and Presentations

Contents: Dr. Hilda Blanco: Prioritizing Assets in Critical Infrastructure Systems; Christine Poptanich: Strategic Risk Analysis; Geoffrey S. French/Jin Kim: Threat-Based Approach to Risk Case Study: Strategic Homeland Infrastructure Risk Assessment (SHIRA); William L. McGill: Techniques for Adversary Threat Probability Assessment; Michael R. Powers: The Mathematics of Terrorism Risk Stefan Pickl: SOA Approach to the IT-based Protection of CIP; Richard John: Probabilistic Project Management for a Terrorist Planning a Dirty Bomb Attack on a Major US Port; LCDR Brady Downs: Maritime Security Risk Analysis Model (MSRAM); Chel Stromgren: Terrorism Risk Assessment and Management (TRAM); Steve Lieberman: Convergence of CIP and COOP in Banking and Finance; Harry Mayer: Assessing the Healthcare and Public Health Sector with Model Based Risk Analysis; Robert Powell: How Much and On What? Defending and Deterring Strategic Attackers; Ted G. Lewis: Why Do Networks Cascade

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Hybrid Cloud Workload Monitoring as a Service

Cloud computing and cloud-based hosting has become embedded in our daily lives. It is imperative for cloud providers to make sure all services used by both enterprises and consumers have high availability and elasticity to prevent any downtime, which impacts negatively for any business. To ensure cloud infrastructures are working reliably, cloud monitoring becomes an essential need for both businesses, the provider and the consumer. This thesis project reports on the need of efficient scalable monitoring, enumerating the necessary types of metrics of interest to be collected. Current understanding of various architectures designed to collect, store and process monitoring data to provide useful insight is surveyed. The pros and cons of each architecture and when such architecture should be used, based on deployment style and strategy, is also reported in the survey. Finally, the essential characteristics of a cloud monitoring system, primarily the features they host to operationalize an efficient monitoring framework, are provided as part of this review. While its apparent that embedded and decentralized architectures are the current favorite in the industry, service-oriented architectures are gaining traction. This project aims to build a light-weight, scalable, embedded monitoring tool which collects metrics at different layers of the cloud stack and aims at achieving correlation in resource-consumption between layers. Future research can be conducted on efficient machine learning models used on the monitoring data to predict resource usage spikes pre-emptively

From Social Data Mining to Forecasting Socio-Economic Crisis

Socio-economic data mining has a great potential in terms of gaining a better understanding of problems that our economy and society are facing, such as financial instability, shortages of resources, or conflicts. Without large-scale data mining, progress in these areas seems hard or impossible. Therefore, a suitable, distributed data mining infrastructure and research centers should be built in Europe. It also appears appropriate to build a network of Crisis Observatories. They can be imagined as laboratories devoted to the gathering and processing of enormous volumes of data on both natural systems such as the Earth and its ecosystem, as well as on human techno-socio-economic systems, so as to gain early warnings of impending events. Reality mining provides the chance to adapt more quickly and more accurately to changing situations. Further opportunities arise by individually customized services, which however should be provided in a privacy-respecting way. This requires the development of novel ICT (such as a self- organizing Web), but most likely new legal regulations and suitable institutions as well. As long as such regulations are lacking on a world-wide scale, it is in the public interest that scientists explore what can be done with the huge data available. Big data do have the potential to change or even threaten democratic societies. The same applies to sudden and large-scale failures of ICT systems. Therefore, dealing with data must be done with a large degree of responsibility and care. Self-interests of individuals, companies or institutions have limits, where the public interest is affected, and public interest is not a sufficient justification to violate human rights of individuals. Privacy is a high good, as confidentiality is, and damaging it would have serious side effects for society.Comment: 65 pages, 1 figure, Visioneer White Paper, see http://www.visioneer.ethz.c

The use of TRAO to manage evolution risks in e-government

The need to develop and provide more efficient ways of providing Electronic Government Services to key stakeholders in government has brought about varying degrees of evolution in government. This evolution is seen in different ways like the merging of government departments, the merging of assets or its components with legacy assets etc. This has involved the incorporation of several practices that are geared towards the elimination of processes that are repetitive and manual while attempting to progressively encourage the interaction that exists between the different stakeholders. However, some of these practices have further complicated processes in government thus creating avenues for vulnerabilities which if exploited expose government and government assets to risks and threats. Focusing on ways to manage the issues accompanied with evolution can better prepare governments for manging the associated vulnerabilities, risks and threats. The basis of a conceptual framework is provided to establish the relationships that exist between the E-Government, asset and security domains. Thus, this thesis presents a design research project used in the management of evolution-related risks. The first part of the project focusses on the development of a generic ontology known as TRAO and a scenario ontology TRAOSc made up of different hypothetical scenarios. The resulting efficiency of the development of these ontologies have facilitated the development of an intelligent tool TRAOSearch that supports high-level semantically enriched queries. Results from the use of a case study prove that there are existing evolution-related issues which governments may not be fully prepared for. Furthermore, an ontological approach in the management of evolution-related risks showed that government stakeholders were interested in the use of intelligent processes that could improve government effectiveness while analysing the risks associated with doing this. Of more importance to this research was the ability to make inferences from the ontology on existing complex relationships that exist in the form of dependencies and interdependencies between Stakeholders and Assets. Thus, this thesis presents contributions in the aspect of advancing stakeholders understanding on the types of relationships that exist in government and the effect these relationships may have on service provisioning. Another novel contribution can be seen in the correction of the ambiguity associated with the terms Service, IT Service and E-Government. Furthermore, the feedback obtained from the use of an ontology-based tool during the evaluation phase of the project provides insights on whether governments must always be at par with technological evolution

ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks: a literature review

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation is a complex and vibrant process, one that involves a combination of technological and organizational interactions. Often an ERP implementation project is the single largest IT project that an organization has ever launched and requires a mutual fit of system and organization. Also the concept of an ERP implementation supporting business processes across many different departments is not a generic, rigid and uniform concept and depends on variety of factors. As a result, the issues addressing the ERP implementation process have been one of the major concerns in industry. Therefore ERP implementation receives attention from practitioners and scholars and both, business as well as academic literature is abundant and not always very conclusive or coherent. However, research on ERP systems so far has been mainly focused on diffusion, use and impact issues. Less attention has been given to the methods used during the configuration and the implementation of ERP systems, even though they are commonly used in practice, they still remain largely unexplored and undocumented in Information Systems research. So, the academic relevance of this research is the contribution to the existing body of scientific knowledge. An annotated brief literature review is done in order to evaluate the current state of the existing academic literature. The purpose is to present a systematic overview of relevant ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks as a desire for achieving a better taxonomy of ERP implementation methodologies. This paper is useful to researchers who are interested in ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Results will serve as an input for a classification of the existing ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Also, this paper aims also at the professional ERP community involved in the process of ERP implementation by promoting a better understanding of ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks, its variety and history

IS Agility Research: An Assessment and Future Directions

In this paper, we briefly describe IS agility related research in four established IS research areas: IT infrastructure, IS development, IS organization, and IS personnel. We present a systematic literature review of articles published in leading scientific IS journals during the years 1990-2013. The main contribution of the paper is in the summary of research methods and results of agility related research in the four research streams. Our analysis will provide researchers with a foundation of prior research when designing future studies. Additionally, the paper raises concerns that the dominance of two research streams (i.e., flexible IT infrastructures and agile IS development methods), may overshadow the role of IS personnel characteristics and IS organisation design in agility studies. Future IS agility research could also benefit from studies adopting a broader theoretical perspective to integrate concepts and findings across all four research streams