On the emergent Semantic Web and overlooked issues

The emergent Semantic Web, despite being in its infancy, has already received a lotof attention from academia and industry. This resulted in an abundance of prototype systems and discussion most of which are centred around the underlying infrastructure. However, when we critically review the work done to date we realise that there is little discussion with respect to the vision of the Semantic Web. In particular, there is an observed dearth of discussion on how to deliver knowledge sharing in an environment such as the Semantic Web in effective and efficient manners. There are a lot of overlooked issues, associated with agents and trust to hidden assumptions made with respect to knowledge representation and robust reasoning in a distributed environment. These issues could potentially hinder further development if not considered at the early stages of designing Semantic Web systems. In this perspectives paper, we aim to help engineers and practitioners of the Semantic Web by raising awareness of these issues

A Policy Specification Language for Composite Services

Creating complex systems by combining smaller component services is one of the fundamental concepts in Service Oriented Architecture. Service compositions are built by combining loosely coupled services that are, usually, offered and operated by different service providers. While this approach offers several benefits, it makes the implementation and representation of the security requirements difficult. This paper reviews several requirement specification languages and analyses their suitability for composite services. A set of requirements is identified and a comparison between different specification languages is presented along with some conclusion on the suitability of each language in expressing security requirements for composite services

Accreditation for transnational research access to official micro-data in Europe

Accreditation is a central element of the framework for research access to micro-data that currently is understood to be a barrier for transnational access. To better understand the nature and causes of the problem, and to devise potential solutions, we have mapped current arrangements across European countries. We identify similarities and differences as well as areas for improvement. Our key results are encouraging: almost all European countries do provide research access to their micro-data, and most of them allow non-national European researchers to access their data, though under varying conditions. However, some obstacles remain, and some of them require negotiation and coordination at policy-making levels. To overcome existing barriers, we propose some potential options for the future and concrete steps towards improvement, which if explored from now on, could substantially improve access while still ensuring safe and lawful conditions, and reducing the administrative financial burden of data providers

Facilitated advocacy: supporting farmers to have a voice in policy making and the development of service provision

Listening to people, especially those who are poor, and involving them in policy making and decisions about service delivery processes are logical steps in building better services and improving policies aimed at poverty alleviation. This case describes a facilitated advocacy that helped to negotiate and support a role for poor people who farm and fish, to contribute recommendations for changes in services and policies that impact on their lives. The national Government of India’s Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying and the Indian Council for Agricultural Research, both in the capital Delhi, have been linking with farmers and fishers and state government officials in the eastern states of Jharkhand, Orissa and West Bengal, in partnership with the STREAM Initiative of the intergovernmental Network of Aquaculture Centers in Asia Pacific and with the support of the UK Government Department for International Development, Natural resources Systems Program supporting farmers to have a voice(13 p.

Let the Computer Say NO! The Neglected Potential of Policy Definition Languages for Data Sovereignty

During interaction with today’s internet services and platform ecosystems, consumer data is often harvested and shared without their consent; that is, consumers seized to be the sovereigns of their own data with the proliferation of the internet. Due to the rapid and abundant nature of interactions in today’s platform ecosystems, manual consent management is impractical. To support development of semi-automated solutions for reestablishing data sovereignty, we investigate the use of policy definition languages as machine-readable and enforceable mechanisms for fostering data sovereignty. We conducted a realist literature review of the capabilities of policy definition languages developed for pertinent application scenarios (e.g., for access control in cloud computing). We consolidate extant literature into a framework of the chances and challenges of leveraging policy definition languages as central building blocks for data sovereignty in platform ecosystems

An Analysis of Service Ontologies

Services are increasingly shaping the world’s economic activity. Service provision and consumption have been profiting from advances in ICT, but the decentralization and heterogeneity of the involved service entities still pose engineering challenges. One of these challenges is to achieve semantic interoperability among these autonomous entities. Semantic web technology aims at addressing this challenge on a large scale, and has matured over the last years. This is evident from the various efforts reported in the literature in which service knowledge is represented in terms of ontologies developed either in individual research projects or in standardization bodies. This paper aims at analyzing the most relevant service ontologies available today for their suitability to cope with the service semantic interoperability challenge. We take the vision of the Internet of Services (IoS) as our motivation to identify the requirements for service ontologies. We adopt a formal approach to ontology design and evaluation in our analysis. We start by defining informal competency questions derived from a motivating scenario, and we identify relevant concepts and properties in service ontologies that match the formal ontological representation of these questions. We analyze the service ontologies with our concepts and questions, so that each ontology is positioned and evaluated according to its utility. The gaps we identify as the result of our analysis provide an indication of open challenges and future work

Web services for rural areas-Security challenges in development and use

Web services (WS) are the modern response of traders and online service providers to satisfying the increasing needs and demands of the digital communities. WS formation and operation is based on a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. Security is of paramount importance to WS and the ability to measure and evaluate the level of security available is key to establishing and continuing to develop the level of trust based on reputation developed by the provider of the WS. The greatest challenge in offering secure WS is to groups of people where the level of expertise of the user is low and the need for transparency of the service provision quite high, such as the case with services offered primarily to people in rural areas. Providers of such services face many challenges in balancing the requirements for performance, interoperability, and security against the cost of implementing secure systems and running profitable operations through low income generating WS. A review of services offered, of the users and the challenges in building online trust among providers and users are discussed for the case of rural areas in the United Kingdom. © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved