Ponder: Realising enterprise viewpoint concepts

This paper introduces the Ponder language for speciing distributed object enterprise concepts. Ponder, is a declarative language, which permits the specification of policies in terms of obligations, permissions and prohibitions and provides the means for defining roles, relationships and their configurations in nested communities. Ponder provides a concrete representation of most of the concepts of the Enterprise Viewpoint. The design of the language incorporates lessons drawn from several years of research on policy for security and distributed systems management as well as policy conflict analysis. The various language constructs are presented through a scenario for the operation, administration and maintenance of a mobile telecommunication network

Security and management policy specification

Accepted versio

Access Control from an Intrusion Detection Perspective

Access control and intrusion detection are essential components for securing an organization's information assets. In practice, these components are used in isolation, while their fusion would contribute to increase the range and accuracy of both. One approach to accomplish this fusion is the combination of their security policies. This report pursues this approach by defining a comparison framework for policy specification languages and using this to survey the languages Ponder, LGI, SPL and PDL from the perspective of intrusion detection. We identified that, even if an access control language has the necessary ingredients for merging policies, it might not be appropriate due to mismatches in overlapping concepts

On compliance of business processes with business contracts

This paper addresses the problem of ensuring compliance of business processes, implemented within and across organisational boundaries, with the constraints stated in related business contracts. In order to deal with the complexity of this problem we propose two solutions that allow for a systematic and increasingly automated support for addressing two specific compliance issues. One solution provides a set of guidelines for progressively transforming contract conditions into business processes that are consistent with contract conditions thus avoiding violation of the rules in contract. Another solution compares rules in business contracts and rules in business processes to check for possible inconsistencies. Both approaches rely on a computer interpretable representation of contract conditions that embodies contract semantics. This semantics is described in terms of a logic based formalism allowing for the description of obligations, prohibitions, permissions and violations conditions in contracts. This semantics was based on an analysis of typical building blocks of many commercial, financial and government contracts. The study proved that our contract formalism provides a good foundation for describing key types of conditions in contracts, and has also given several insights into valuable transformation techniques and formalisms needed to establish better alignment between these two, traditionally separate areas of research and endeavour. The study also revealed a number of new areas of research, some of which we intend to address in near future

Contract representation for validation and run time monitoring

PhD ThesisOrganisations are increasingly using the Internet to offer their own services and to utilise the services of others. This naturally leads to resource sharing across organisational boundaries. Nevertheless, organisations will require their interactions with other organisations to be strictly controlled. In the paper-based world, business interactions, information exchange and sharing have been conducted under the control of contracts that the organisations sign. The world of electronic business needs to emulate electronic equivalents of the contract based business management practices. This thesis examines how a 'conventional' contract can be converted into its electronic equivalent and how it can be used for controlling business interactions taking place through computer messages. To implement a contract electronically, a conventional text contract needs to be described in a mathematically precise notation so that the description can be subjected to rigorous analysis and freed from the ambiguities that the original humanoriented text is likely to contain. Furthermore, a suitable run time infrastructure is required for monitoring the executable version of the contract. To address these issues, this thesis describes how standard conventional contracts can be converted into Finite State Machines (FSMs). It is illustrated how to map the rights and obligations extracted from the clauses of the contract into the states, transition and output functions, and input and output symbols of a FSM. The thesis then goes on to develop a list of correctness properties that a typical executable business contract should satisfy. A contract model should be validated against safety properties, which specify situations that the contract must not get into (such as deadlocks, unreachable states .... etc), and liveness properties, which detail qualities that would be desirable for the contract to contain (responsiveness, accessibility .... etc). The FSM description can then be subjected to model checking. This is demonstrated with the aid of examples using the Promela language and the Spin validator. Subsequently, the FSM representation can be used to ensure that the clauses stipulated in the contract are observed when the contract is executed. The requirements of a suitable run time infrastructure for monitoring contract compliance are discussed and a prototype middleware implementation is presented.UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)

Representing Organizational Structures in Enterprise Architecture: an Ontology-based Approach

Enterprise Architecture (EA) promotes the establishment of a holistic view of the structure and way of working of an organization. One of the aspects covered in EA is associated with the organizations active structure, which concerns who undertakes organizational activities. Several approaches have been proposed in order to provide a means for representing enterprise architecture, among which ARIS, RM-ODP, UPDM and ArchiMate. Despite the acceptance by the community, existing approaches focus on different purposes, have limitations on their conceptual scopes and some have no real world semantics well-defined. Besides modeling approaches, many ontology approaches have been proposed in order to describe the active structure domain, including the ontologies in the SUPER Project, TOVE, Enterprise Ontology and W3C Org Ontology. Although specified for semantic grounding and meaning negotiation, some of proposed approaches have specific purposes and limited coverage. In addition, some of them are not defined using formal languages and others are specified using languages without well-defined semantics. This work presents a well-founded reference ontology for the organizational domain. The organizational reference ontology presented covers the basic aspects discussed in the organizational literature, such as division of labor, social relations and classification of structuring units. Further, it also encompasses the organizational aspects defined in existing approaches, both modeling and ontology approaches. The resulting ontology is specified in OntoUML and extends the social concepts of UFO-C

Use of Logic to describe Enhanced Communications Services

New functionality is added to telecommunications systems in the form of features or services. However, this is a very provider-centric approach, not giving much control to the user. We consider a logic that allows the user to express preferences as to how they wish calls to be handled. This logic is encapsulated in a user-friendly policy description language. The transferability of a policy description language (Ponder) developed for system management and access control is discussed

Contract representation for validation and run time monitoring

Organisations are increasingly using the Internet to offer their own services and to utilise the services of others. This naturally leads to resource sharing across organisational boundaries. Nevertheless, organisations will require their interactions with other organisations to be strictly controlled. In the paper-based world, business interactions, information exchange and sharing have been conducted under the control of contracts that the organisations sign. The world of electronic business needs to emulate electronic equivalents of the contract based business management practices. This thesis examines how a 'conventional' contract can be converted into its electronic equivalent and how it can be used for controlling business interactions taking place through computer messages. To implement a contract electronically, a conventional text contract needs to be described in a mathematically precise notation so that the description can be subjected to rigorous analysis and freed from the ambiguities that the original humanoriented text is likely to contain. Furthermore, a suitable run time infrastructure is required for monitoring the executable version of the contract. To address these issues, this thesis describes how standard conventional contracts can be converted into Finite State Machines (FSMs). It is illustrated how to map the rights and obligations extracted from the clauses of the contract into the states, transition and output functions, and input and output symbols of a FSM. The thesis then goes on to develop a list of correctness properties that a typical executable business contract should satisfy. A contract model should be validated against safety properties, which specify situations that the contract must not get into (such as deadlocks, unreachable states ... etc), and liveness properties, which detail qualities that would be desirable for the contract to contain (responsiveness, accessibility ... etc). The FSM description can then be subjected to model checking. This is demonstrated with the aid of examples using the Promela language and the Spin validator. Subsequently, the FSM representation can be used to ensure that the clauses stipulated in the contract are observed when the contract is executed. The requirements of a suitable run time infrastructure for monitoring contract compliance are discussed and a prototype middleware implementation is presented.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceEngineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)GBUnited Kingdo

The Last Chapter of the Vietnam War: Normalization, Nongovernmental Actors and the Politics of Human Rights, 1975-1995

This dissertation dispels two myths about the Vietnam War. The first is that U.S. involvement in Indochina ended abruptly in April 1975 and the second is that the only exception to complete disengagement was the effort to secure a “full accounting” of missing American servicemen. This project demonstrates that the United States remained actively involved in Vietnam and Southeast Asia as a whole, in large part to address refugee issues. I am particularly interested in the policymaking process, and this project is the first to examine U.S. policies regarding missing American soldiers, boat and land people, Amerasians, and reeducation camp detainees in a single study and to place these issues in the context of U.S.-Vietnamese diplomacy. By shifting our focus to the postwar period and to refuge issues, “The Last Chapter of the Vietnam War” challenges the way we understand the Vietnam War and warfare itself

FLACOS’08 Workshop proceedings

The 2nd Workshop on Formal Languages and Analysis of Contract-Oriented Software (FLACOS’08) is held in Malta. The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners working on language-based solutions to contract-oriented software development. The workshop is partially funded by the Nordunet3 project “COSoDIS” (Contract-Oriented Software Development for Internet Services) and it attracted 25 participants. The program consists of 4 regular papers and 10 invited participant presentations