Observation Centric Sensor Data Model

Management of sensor data requires metadata to understand the semantics of observations. While e-science researchers have high demands on metadata, they are selective in entering metadata. The claim in this paper is to focus on the essentials, i.e., the actual observations being described by location, time, owner, instrument, and measurement. The applicability of this approach is demonstrated in two very different case studies

PaaSword: A Data Privacy and Context-aware Security Framework for Developing Secure Cloud Applications - Technical and Scientific Contributions

Most industries worldwide have entered a period of reaping the benefits and opportunities cloud offers. At the same time, many efforts are made to address engineering challenges for the secure development of cloud systems and software.With the majority of software engineering projects today relying on the cloud, the task to structure end-to-end secure-by-design cloud systems becomes challenging but at the same time mandatory. The PaaSword project has been commissioned to address security and data privacy in a holistic way by proposing a context-aware security-by-design framework to support software developers in constructing secure applications for the cloud. This chapter presents an overview of the PaaSword project results, including the scientific achievements as well as the description of the technical solution. The benefits offered by the framework are validated through two pilot implementations and conclusions are drawn based on the future research challenges which are discussed in a research agenda

Binary Relation Database BIRD: Issues of Representation and Implementation

This thesis presents a study of two issues, integrity and homogeneity of information representation, within the area of databases. Treatments of these issues were studied within the standard and semantic database models, leading to the proposal of a new model, the Binary Relation Database, BIRD. The BIRD model uses the binary relationship as the basis for the representation of all database data and meta-data. The inadequacy of integrity definition faculties within current database technology areelaborated in this thesis and were taken into account in the BIRD system. The effects of inhomogeneity of database data and meta-data in current databases are described and the benefits of the homogeneity of information representation in BIRD demonstrated. BIRD was implemented as a prototype database system; using Modula-2, - the implementation and subsequent evaluation of the system are included in this thesis. A simple user menu driven user interface to BIRD was constructed, - the user may manipulate information at any conceptual level in the system in a homogeneous manner. The user is free to manipulate information from any conceptual level at anytime; - BIRD ensures that the database is returned to a consistent state before the next operation may take place. The new model proposed in this thesis fulfilled its objectives, - suggestions for further and implementation oriented work are presented at the end of the thesis