Semantic-based policy engineering for autonomic systems

This paper presents some important directions in the use of ontology-based semantics in achieving the vision of Autonomic Communications. We examine the requirements of Autonomic Communication with a focus on the demanding needs of ubiquitous computing environments, with an emphasis on the requirements shared with Autonomic Computing. We observe that ontologies provide a strong mechanism for addressing the heterogeneity in user task requirements, managed resources, services and context. We then present two complimentary approaches that exploit ontology-based knowledge in support of autonomic communications: service-oriented models for policy engineering and dynamic semantic queries using content-based networks. The paper concludes with a discussion of the major research challenges such approaches raise

An active, ontology-driven network service for Internet collaboration

Web portals have emerged as an important means of collaboration on the WWW, and the integration of ontologies promises to make them more accurate in how they serve users’ collaboration and information location requirements. However, web portals are essentially a centralised architecture resulting in difficulties supporting seamless roaming between portals and collaboration between groups supported on different portals. This paper proposes an alternative approach to collaboration over the web using ontologies that is de-centralised and exploits content-based networking. We argue that this approach promises a user-centric, timely, secure and location-independent mechanism, which is potentially more scaleable and universal than existing centralised portals

Indymedia.ie: a critical space for social movements in Ireland

“Hegemony” – the way popular consent to power and economic structures is organised – is an alien word to many people, seemingly coming from a different world to the familiar trivialities of Middle Ireland. But the complacent idea of Gay Byrne’s Late Late Show as the nation’s living room is a perfect example of hegemony at work: the state broadcaster offering a cosy, semi-official version of “national community”. Its liberal version appears in comments about how “it was a breakthrough” when something appeared on the Late Late: not grasping that “issues” make the mainstream media as a result, not a cause, of social movements struggling against the official state of affairs

Policy based management for Internet communities

Policy Based Management (PBM) is a research topic that has been driven by the tremendous complexity inherent in the administration and management of present-day networking and telecommunications systems and services. The increasingly diverse organisational forms of modern industry represent a significant component of this complexity. Internet communities offer extreme examples of organisational diversity, since they often lack any central authority and many subsections operate with almost complete autonomy. This paper argues that PBM systems offer great potential in this domain due to the complexity of management arrangements. However, since these communities lack any single trusted administrative hierarchy, a centralised solution to policy engineering and management is not possible. This paper proposes an approach to modelling communities for PBM systems. This approach focuses on the concept of communities within a hierarchy of authority as the fundamental unit of organisational analysis. As such, the model reflects the distribution of authority in the real-world community, the resulting policies reflect the community's operational needs and contracts between the various groups and individuals that make up the community. Policy conflicts are used to identify organisational conflicts that must be resolved. In order to illustrate and validate these concepts, the paper presents a conceptual architecture and case study based on the secure management of an open publishing network. 1