A Framework for XML-Based Workflow Interoperability - The AFRICA Project

With the advance of electronic business relationships over the internet, the linking of cross-organizational business processes in virtual supply chains and other scenarios is rapidly increasing. Existing standards for the interoperability of information systems on the business process level are being adapted to suit the needs of the Internet economy. Especially the use of XML as a domain-independent encoding standard for business documents has led to the development of business frameworks such as BizTalk or open/EDI, and interoperability mechanisms that support these standards are being developed. In this paper we describe an architecture for the support of cross-organizational workflows through XML messages. This architecture has been implemented and tested within the AFRICA project at the University of Muenster, Germany. While our work is based upon the emerging Wf-XML standard of the Workflow Management Coalition, it contains a number of significant enhancements that provide a secure, reliable management of global workflow processes

Systems integration with DLSI

Systems integration aims to provide a homogenous view to a system consisting of many heterogeneous systems. Systems integration can be achieved by many means out of which the middleware approach is the most popular. This is because middleware can be built around existing systems thereby reducing the amount of changes needed for the integration. Nowadays many middleware technologies are available to integrate heterogeneous systems. One can chose among them depending upon the requirements. But due to the many technologies available for Middleware, a muddle of middleware exists. To reduce this muddle and to integrate the systems already implemented using different middleware technologies, Web Services plays a key role. Web Services is an XML-based technology which uses known protocols to communicate between applications, thus making them platform and technology independent. Digital Library Service Integration (DLSI) provides a systematic approach in integrating the digital library collections and services. Amazon\u27s website www.amazon.com is integrated with DLSI such that users see the same web pages as they see when they are logged in normally, but these pages will be augmented with link anchors. Wrappers will parse the web pages to look for elements of interests like book title, author name, etc., and provide them with link anchors which will connect the user to the library at New Jersey Institute of Technology where he or she can search for books or request them through interlibrary loan. The thesis proposes a new architecture for the DLSI as a web service, which can provide this functionality

Multi-Media Mail in heterogeneous Networks

The MIME approach seems to be the most reasonable effort for allowing the sending and receiving of multimedia messages using standard Internet mail transport facilities. Providing new header fields, such as MIME-Version, Content-Type, and Content- Transfer-Encoding, it is now possible to include various kinds of information types, e.g. audio, images, richtext, or video, into a RFC 822-conformant mail. Making use of these headers, it is possible to fully describe an attached body part, so that a receiving mail user agent is able to display it without any loss of information. Additionally, the definition of the "multipart" and "message" content types allows the creation of hierarchical structured mails, e.g. a message containing two alternative parts of information, one that can be shown using a simple ASCII-terminal, the other to be displayed on a multimedia workstation. Allowing the definition of bilaterally defined content types and providing a standardized means of establishing new content types prevent MIME from being a one-way road and supply mechanisms to extend MIME for future use

SECURE, POLICY-BASED, MULTI-RECIPIENT DATA SHARING

In distributed systems users often need to share sensitive data with other users based on the latter's ability to satisfy various policies. In many cases the data owner may not even know the identities of the data recipients, but deems it crucial that they are legitimate; i.e., satisfy the policy. Enabling such data sharing over the Internet faces the challenge of (1) securely associating access policies with data and enforcing them, and (2) protecting data as it traverses untrusted proxies and intermediate repositories. Furthermore, it is desirable to achieve properties such as: (1) flexibility of access policies; (2) privacy of sensitive access policies; (3) minimal reliance on trusted third parties; and (4) efficiency of access policy enforcement. Often schemes enabling controlled data sharing need to trade one property for another. In this dissertation, we propose two complimentary policy-based data sharing schemes that achieve different subsets of the above desired properties. In the first part of this dissertation, we focus on CiphertextPolicy Attribute- Based Encryption (CP-ABE) schemes that specify and enforce access policies cryptographically and eliminate trusted mediators. We motivate the need for flexible attribute organization within user keys for efficient support of many practical applications. We then propose Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Set Based Encryption (CP-ASBE) which is the first CP-ABE scheme to (1) efficiently support naturally occurring compound attributes, (2) support multiple numerical assignments for a given attribute in a single key and (3) provide efficient key management. While the CP-ASBE scheme minimizes reliance on trusted mediators, it can support neither context-based policies nor policy privacy. In the second part of this dissertation, we propose Policy Based Encryption System (PBES), which employs mediated decryption and supports both context-based policies and policy privacy. Finally, we integrate the proposed schemes into practical applications (i.e., CP-ASBE scheme with Attribute-Based Messaging (ABM) and PBES scheme with a conditional data sharing application in the Power Grid) and demonstrate their usefulness in practice

A distributed solution to software reuse

Reuse can be applied to all stages of the software lifecycle to enhance quality and to shorten time of completion for a project. During the phases of design and implementation are some examples of where reuse can be applied, but one frequent obstruction to development is the building of and the identifying of desirable components. This can be costly in the short term but an organisation can gain the profits of applying this scheme if they are seeking long-term goals. Web services are a recent development in distributed computing. This thesis combines the two research areas to produce a distributed solution to software reuse that displays the advantages of distributed computing within a reuse system. This resulted in a web application with access to web services that allowed two different formats of component to be inserted into a reuse repository. These components were searchable by keywords and the results are adjustable by the popularity of a component’s extraction from the system and by user ratings of it; this improved the accuracy of the search. This work displays the accuracy, usability, and speed of this system when tested with five undergraduate and five postgraduate students

Deploying Web-based Visual Exploration Tools on the Grid

We discuss a web-based portal for the exploration, encapsulation, and dissemination of visualization results over the Grid. This portal integrates three components: an interface client for structured visualization exploration, a visualization web application to manage the generation and capture of the visualization results, and a centralized portal application server to access and manage grid resources. Our approach uses standard web technologies to make the system accessible with minimal user setup. We demonstrate the usefulness of the developed system using an example for Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) data visualization

Towards a model for ensuring optimal interoperability between the security systems of trading partners in a business-to-business e-commerce context

A vast range of controls/countermeasures exists for implementing security on information systems connected to the Internet. For the practitioner attempting to implement an integrated solution between trading partners operating across the Internet, this has serious implications in respect of interoperability between the security systems of the trading partners. The problem is exacerbated by the range of specification options within each control. This research is an attempt to find a set of relevant controls and specifications towards a framework for ensuring optimal interoperability between trading partners in this context. Since a policy-based, layered approach is advocated, which allows each trading partner to address localized risks independently, no exhaustive risk analysis is attempted. The focus is on infrastructure that is simultaneously optimally secure and provides optimal interoperability. It should also be scalable, allowing for additional security controls to be added whenever deemed necessary.ComputingM. Sc. (Information Systems