A need for an integrative security model for semantic stream reasoning systems

State-of-the-art security frameworks have been extensively addressing security issues for web resources, agents and services in the Semantic Web. The provision of Stream Reasoning as a new area spanning Semantic Web and Data Stream Management Systems has eventually opened up new challenges. Namely, their decentralized nature, the metadata descriptions, the number of users, agents, and services, make securing Stream Reasoning systems difficult to handle. Thus, there is an inherent need of developing new security models which will handle security and automate security mechanisms to a more autonomous system that supports complex and dynamic relationships between data, clients and service providers. We plan to validate our approach on a typical application of stream data, on Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In particular, WSNs for water quality monitoring will serve as a case study. The paper describes the initial findings and research plan for building a consistent security model for stream reasoning systems

A need for an integrative security model for semantic stream reasoning systems

State-of-the-art security frameworks have been extensively addressing security issues for web resources, agents and services in the Semantic Web. The provision of Stream Reasoning as a new area spanning Semantic Web and Data Stream Management Systems has eventually opened up new challenges. Namely, their decentralized nature, the metadata descriptions, the number of users, agents, and services, make securing Stream Reasoning systems difficult to handle. Thus, there is an inherent need of developing new security models which will handle security and automate security mechanisms to a more autonomous system that supports complex and dynamic relationships between data, clients and service providers. We plan to validate our approach on a typical application of stream data, on Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In particular, WSNs for water quality monitoring will serve as a case study. The paper describes the initial findings and research plan for building a consistent security model for stream reasoning systems

Enterprise Resource Bus and Views in Restful Web Services

Over the past few years RESTful Web Services (WSs) have gained immense popularity over the Web Service stack (WS*) to provide WS solutions. The WSs implemented using REST are lightweight and ideally suited for consumption for devices with limited processing capabilities like mobiles and tablets due to its dependence on HTTP. This enables the system architects to leverage the well-known capabilities of HTTP to develop their systems rapidly. However, this introduces the challenges of compromised security and unmanageable systems. This research presents a novel middleware architecture called Enterprise Resource Bus for Resource Oriented systems to tackle the issues of security, access control and resource management. The middleware architecture put forward in this research is focused on remedying these issues by abstracting the logic of access control and security to the concept of view resources to be managed in the middleware. This research draws inspiration from the middleware architecture implemented in SOA called Enterprise Service Bus. Since, the implementation of ERB is inspired from ESB we have emulated some functionalities of ESB and translated them to resource oriented architecture. In addition, this research also introduces the idea of views on resources inspired from the concept of virtual relations in relational databases to provide customized view resources based on user privilege/ role in the system to control access. The middleware architecture was tested for its overhead, scalability and security features as opposed to a REST Web Service without a middleware. It can be concluded from the evaluation results that with a small overhead a secure and highly manageable REST Web Services are achievable

Special issue: Development of service-based and agent-based computing systems

This special issue presents the best papers from theworkshops onService-OrientedComputing: Agents, Semantics and Engineering (SOCASE 2010) held in May 2010 in Toronto, Canada and the IEEE 2010 First International Workshop on Service-Oriented Computing and Multi-Agent Systems (SOCMAS 2010) held in July 2010 in Miami, Florida, USA. The goal of the workshops was to present the recent significant developments at the intersections of multi-agent systems, semantic technology, and service-oriented computing, and to promote crossfertilization of techniques. In particular, the workshops attempted to identify techniques from research on multi-agent systems and semantic technology that will have the greatest impact on automating serviceoriented application construction and management, focusing on critical challenges such as service quality assurance, reliability, and adaptability. The areas of service-oriented computing and Semantic Web services offer much of real interest to the multi-agent system community, including similarities in system architectures and provision processes, powerful tools, and the focus on many related issues including quality of service, security, and reliability. In addition, service-oriented computing and Semantic Web services offer various diverse application fields for both the concepts and methodologies of intelligent agent and multi-agent systems. Similarly, techniques developed in the multi-agent systems research community promise to have a strong impact on this fast growing technology. In particular, they enable services to be discovered and enacted across enterprise boundaries. If an organisation bases its success on services provided by others, then it must be able to trust that the services will perform as promised, whenever needed. Researchers in multi-agent systems have investigated such trust mechanisms

The DBCLS BioHackathon: standardization and interoperability for bioinformatics web services and workflows. The DBCLS BioHackathon Consortium*

Web services have become a key technology for bioinformatics, since life science databases are globally decentralized and the exponential increase in the amount of available data demands for efficient systems without the need to transfer entire databases for every step of an analysis. However, various incompatibilities among database resources and analysis services make it difficult to connect and integrate these into interoperable workflows. To resolve this situation, we invited domain specialists from web service providers, client software developers, Open Bio* projects, the BioMoby project and researchers of emerging areas where a standard exchange data format is not well established, for an intensive collaboration entitled the BioHackathon 2008. The meeting was hosted by the Database Center for Life Science (DBCLS) and Computational Biology Research Center (CBRC) and was held in Tokyo from February 11th to 15th, 2008. In this report we highlight the work accomplished and the common issues arisen from this event, including the standardization of data exchange formats and services in the emerging fields of glycoinformatics, biological interaction networks, text mining, and phyloinformatics. In addition, common shared object development based on BioSQL, as well as technical challenges in large data management, asynchronous services, and security are discussed. Consequently, we improved interoperability of web services in several fields, however, further cooperation among major database centers and continued collaborative efforts between service providers and software developers are still necessary for an effective advance in bioinformatics web service technologies

Advanced Knowledge Technologies at the Midterm: Tools and Methods for the Semantic Web

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.In a celebrated essay on the new electronic media, Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1962:Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. (McLuhan 1962, p.5, emphasis in original)Over forty years later, the seamless interplay that McLuhan demanded between our technologies is still barely visible. McLuhan’s predictions of the spread, and increased importance, of electronic media have of course been borne out, and the worlds of business, science and knowledge storage and transfer have been revolutionised. Yet the integration of electronic systems as open systems remains in its infancy.Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) aims to address this problem, to create a view of knowledge and its management across its lifecycle, to research and create the services and technologies that such unification will require. Half way through its sixyear span, the results are beginning to come through, and this paper will explore some of the services, technologies and methodologies that have been developed. We hope to give a sense in this paper of the potential for the next three years, to discuss the insights and lessons learnt in the first phase of the project, to articulate the challenges and issues that remain.The WWW provided the original context that made the AKT approach to knowledge management (KM) possible. AKT was initially proposed in 1999, it brought together an interdisciplinary consortium with the technological breadth and complementarity to create the conditions for a unified approach to knowledge across its lifecycle. The combination of this expertise, and the time and space afforded the consortium by the IRC structure, suggested the opportunity for a concerted effort to develop an approach to advanced knowledge technologies, based on the WWW as a basic infrastructure.The technological context of AKT altered for the better in the short period between the development of the proposal and the beginning of the project itself with the development of the semantic web (SW), which foresaw much more intelligent manipulation and querying of knowledge. The opportunities that the SW provided for e.g., more intelligent retrieval, put AKT in the centre of information technology innovation and knowledge management services; the AKT skill set would clearly be central for the exploitation of those opportunities.The SW, as an extension of the WWW, provides an interesting set of constraints to the knowledge management services AKT tries to provide. As a medium for the semantically-informed coordination of information, it has suggested a number of ways in which the objectives of AKT can be achieved, most obviously through the provision of knowledge management services delivered over the web as opposed to the creation and provision of technologies to manage knowledge.AKT is working on the assumption that many web services will be developed and provided for users. The KM problem in the near future will be one of deciding which services are needed and of coordinating them. Many of these services will be largely or entirely legacies of the WWW, and so the capabilities of the services will vary. As well as providing useful KM services in their own right, AKT will be aiming to exploit this opportunity, by reasoning over services, brokering between them, and providing essential meta-services for SW knowledge service management.Ontologies will be a crucial tool for the SW. The AKT consortium brings a lot of expertise on ontologies together, and ontologies were always going to be a key part of the strategy. All kinds of knowledge sharing and transfer activities will be mediated by ontologies, and ontology management will be an important enabling task. Different applications will need to cope with inconsistent ontologies, or with the problems that will follow the automatic creation of ontologies (e.g. merging of pre-existing ontologies to create a third). Ontology mapping, and the elimination of conflicts of reference, will be important tasks. All of these issues are discussed along with our proposed technologies.Similarly, specifications of tasks will be used for the deployment of knowledge services over the SW, but in general it cannot be expected that in the medium term there will be standards for task (or service) specifications. The brokering metaservices that are envisaged will have to deal with this heterogeneity.The emerging picture of the SW is one of great opportunity but it will not be a wellordered, certain or consistent environment. It will comprise many repositories of legacy data, outdated and inconsistent stores, and requirements for common understandings across divergent formalisms. There is clearly a role for standards to play to bring much of this context together; AKT is playing a significant role in these efforts. But standards take time to emerge, they take political power to enforce, and they have been known to stifle innovation (in the short term). AKT is keen to understand the balance between principled inference and statistical processing of web content. Logical inference on the Web is tough. Complex queries using traditional AI inference methods bring most distributed computer systems to their knees. Do we set up semantically well-behaved areas of the Web? Is any part of the Web in which semantic hygiene prevails interesting enough to reason in? These and many other questions need to be addressed if we are to provide effective knowledge technologies for our content on the web

Open access and social media: challenges and opportunities for information management

The availability of information that Internet brings, in particular, the World Wide Web, produced a huge impact in the way we collect and access information. This also impacts the strategies followed to organize and manage information. It is clear by now, that each individual, by its own and without adequate training is on trouble to manage its information, the information he or she needs and even to secure it. Recent developments provide a new context that wants to protect data from individuals and some sensitive information, putting a new focus not in the data possibilities but on the individual rights, such as the General Regulation for Data Protection (GRPD) implies, with real changes not easy to implement with current information systems and applications. But such issues related with the use of personal data are not restricted to GRPD. Also security issues, and information readiness or the quality and veracity of information are at stake – thus turns reference and information support as an important role for any information service. Additionally, we are in a fast, complex, and information sophisticated world. As so, open access and social media, two the trending phenomena when dealing with information management place a number of challenges but also opportunities for those who are responsible for manage information within organizations. Taking the case of higher education, the presentation discusses how libraries can be the hub where such challenges and opportunities may have a more transformative impact.N/

Open access and social media: challenges and opportunities for information management

The availability of information that Internet brings, in particular, the World Wide Web, produced a huge impact in the way we collect and access information. This also impacts the strategies followed to organize and manage information. It is clear by now, that each individual, by its own and without adequate training is on trouble to manage its information, the information he or she needs and even to secure it. Recent developments provide a new context that wants to protect data from individuals and some sensitive information, putting a new focus not in the data possibilities but on the individual rights, such as the General Regulation for Data Protection (GRPD) implies, with real changes not easy to implement with current information systems and applications. But such issues related with the use of personal data are not restricted to GRPD. Also security issues, and information readiness or the quality and veracity of information are at stake – thus turns reference and information support as an important role for any information service. Additionally, we are in a fast, complex, and information sophisticated world. As so, open access and social media, two the trending phenomena when dealing with information management place a number of challenges but also opportunities for those who are responsible for manage information within organizations. Taking the case of higher education, the presentation discusses how libraries can be the hub where such challenges and opportunities may have a more transformative impact.N/