A framework for deriving semantic web services

Web service-based development represents an emerging approach for the development of distributed information systems. Web services have been mainly applied by software practitioners as a means to modularize system functionality that can be offered across a network (e.g., intranet and/or the Internet). Although web services have been predominantly developed as a technical solution for integrating software systems, there is a more business-oriented aspect that developers and enterprises need to deal with in order to benefit from the full potential of web services in an electronic market. This ‘ignored’ aspect is the representation of the semantics underlying the services themselves as well as the ‘things’ that the services manage. Currently languages like the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) provide the syntactic means to describe web services, but lack in providing a semantic underpinning. In order to harvest all the benefits of web services technology, a framework has been developed for deriving business semantics from syntactic descriptions of web services. The benefits of such a framework are two-fold. Firstly, the framework provides a way to gradually construct domain ontologies from previously defined technical services. Secondly, the framework enables the migration of syntactically defined web services toward semantic web services. The study follows a design research approach which (1) identifies the problem area and its relevance from an industrial case study and previous research, (2) develops the framework as a design artifact and (3) evaluates the application of the framework through a relevant scenario

Methodology for collaborative enterprise reference ontology building

Dissertation presented at Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia of Universidade Nova de Lisboa to obtain the Master degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer ScienceIn the actual competitive world, doing business globally has become critical to the survival of most enterprises. It is becoming each day more and more difficult for small enterprises to grow by operating alone in the market. Hence, most companies started feeling the need for joining collaborative environments becoming easier to manage their products and services, and where they can offer better products with low production costs. To achieve this, enterprises require the establishment of cooperation agreements among each other with the idea of expanding their business networks. Consequently there is a demand for intelligent solutions capable of reinforcing partnerships and collaborations between enterprises, organised groups or singular people. However, due to the worldwide diversity of communities, a high number of knowledge representation elements, such as ontologies, which are not semantically coincident, have appeared representing the same segment of reality. Even operating in the same domain, enterprises do not understand each other, making the communication among various systems parties more difficult and sometimes impracticable. This dissertation responds to the needs identified above, proposing a collaborative methodology for ontology building, enriched with qualitative information collection methods, to effectively improve the approach to elicit knowledge from business domain experts, towards interoperable intelligent systems. This methodology allows different individuals from enterprises or organisations working on the same field or area, to join a collaborative environment for building a common ontology specific to their ―Domain of Discourse‖. To accomplish this, several steps are taken including terms and definitions gathering, glossary and thesaurus building, and ontology mapping

Semantic Model Alignment for Business Process Integration

Business process models describe an enterprise’s way of conducting business and in this form the basis for shaping the organization and engineering the appropriate supporting or even enabling IT. Thereby, a major task in working with models is their analysis and comparison for the purpose of aligning them. As models can differ semantically not only concerning the modeling languages used, but even more so in the way in which the natural language for labeling the model elements has been applied, the correct identification of the intended meaning of a legacy model is a non-trivial task that thus far has only been solved by humans. In particular at the time of reorganizations, the set-up of B2B-collaborations or mergers and acquisitions the semantic analysis of models of different origin that need to be consolidated is a manual effort that is not only tedious and error-prone but also time consuming and costly and often even repetitive. For facilitating automation of this task by means of IT, in this thesis the new method of Semantic Model Alignment is presented. Its application enables to extract and formalize the semantics of models for relating them based on the modeling language used and determining similarities based on the natural language used in model element labels. The resulting alignment supports model-based semantic business process integration. The research conducted is based on a design-science oriented approach and the method developed has been created together with all its enabling artifacts. These results have been published as the research progressed and are presented here in this thesis based on a selection of peer reviewed publications comprehensively describing the various aspects

Security-Driven Software Evolution Using A Model Driven Approach

High security level must be guaranteed in applications in order to mitigate risks during the deployment of information systems in open network environments. However, a significant number of legacy systems remain in use which poses security risks to the enterprise’ assets due to the poor technologies used and lack of security concerns when they were in design. Software reengineering is a way out to improve their security levels in a systematic way. Model driven is an approach in which model as defined by its type directs the execution of the process. The aim of this research is to explore how model driven approach can facilitate the software reengineering driven by security demand. The research in this thesis involves the following three phases. Firstly, legacy system understanding is performed using reverse engineering techniques. Task of this phase is to reverse engineer legacy system into UML models, partition the legacy system into subsystems with the help of model slicing technique and detect existing security mechanisms to determine whether or not the provided security in the legacy system satisfies the user’s security objectives. Secondly, security requirements are elicited using risk analysis method. It is the process of analysing key aspects of the legacy systems in terms of security. A new risk assessment method, taking consideration of asset, threat and vulnerability, is proposed and used to elicit the security requirements which will generate the detailed security requirements in the specific format to direct the subsequent security enhancement. Finally, security enhancement for the system is performed using the proposed ontology based security pattern approach. It is the stage that security patterns derived from security expertise and fulfilling the elicited security requirements are selected and integrated in the legacy system models with the help of the proposed security ontology. The proposed approach is evaluated by the selected case study. Based on the analysis, conclusions are drawn and future research is discussed at the end of this thesis. The results show this thesis contributes an effective, reusable and suitable evolution approach for software security

Collaborative Solution Architecture for Developing a National Interoperability Framework in Romania

Interoperability framework is a set of standards and guidelines that describe how organizations have established or will establish to interact. The framework is not static, but one that adapts to the change of standards, administrative requirements and technology. It can be adapted to the socio - economic, political, cultural, linguistic, historical and geographical purposes and to a specific context or situation. The article aims to clarify the essential concepts necessary for outlining Romanian national interoperability framework and to propose collaborative solution architecture for its development, updating and maintaining.Interoperability Framework, National Interoperability Framework, European Interoperability Strategy, Collaborative Solution Architecture

An Approach to Transform Public Administration into SOA-based Organizations

Nowadays, Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) is widely spread in private organizations. However, when transferring this knowledge to Public Administration, it is realized that it has not been transformed in terms of its legal nature into organizations capable to operate under the SOA paradigm. This fact prevents public administration bodies from offering the efficient services they have been provided by different boards of governments. A high-level framework to perform this transformation is proposed. Taking it as starting point, an instance of a SOA Target Meta-Model can be obtained by means of an iterative and incremental process based on the analysis of imperatives and focused on the particular business context of each local public administration. This paper briefly presents a practical experience consisting in applying this process to a Spanish regional public administration.Junta de Andalucía TIC-578

Resources-Events-Agents Design Theory: A Revolutionary Approach to Enterprise System Design

Enterprise systems typically include constructs such as ledgers and journals with debit and credit entries as central pillars of the systems’ architecture due in part to accountants and auditors who demand those constructs. At best, structuring systems with such constructs as base objects results in the storing the same data at multiple levels of aggregation, which creates inefficiencies in the database. At worst, basing systems on such constructs destroys details that are unnecessary for accounting but that may facilitate decision making by other enterprise functional areas. McCarthy (1982) proposed the resources-events-agents (REA) framework as an alternative structure for a shared data environment more than thirty years ago, and scholars have further developed it such that it is now a robust design theory. Despite this legacy, the broad IS community has not widely researched REA. In this paper, we discuss REA’s genesis and primary constructs, provide a history of REA research, discuss REA’s impact on practice, and speculate as to what the future may hold for REA-based enterprise systems. We invite IS researchers to consider integrating REA constructs with other theories and various emerging technologies to help advance the future of information systems and business research

A framework for developing engineering design ontologies within the aerospace industry

This paper presents a framework for developing engineering design ontologies within the aerospace industry. The aim of this approach is to strengthen the modularity and reuse of engineering design ontologies to support knowledge management initiatives within the aerospace industry. Successful development and effective utilisation of engineering ontologies strongly depends on the method/framework used to develop them. Ensuring modularity in ontology design is essential for engineering design activities due to the complexity of knowledge that is required to be brought together to support the product design decision-making process. The proposed approach adopts best practices from previous ontology development methods, but focuses on encouraging modular architectural ontology design. The framework is comprised of three phases namely: (1) Ontology design and development; (2) Ontology validation and (3) Implementation of ontology structure. A qualitative research methodology is employed which is composed of four phases. The first phase defines the capture of knowledge required for the framework development, followed by the ontology framework development, iterative refinement of engineering ontologies and ontology validation through case studies and experts’ opinion. The ontology-based framework is applied in the combustor and casing aerospace engineering domain. The modular ontologies developed as a result of applying the framework and are used in a case study to restructure and improve the accessibility of information on a product design information-sharing platform. Additionally, domain experts within the aerospace industry validated the strengths, benefits and limitations of the framework. Due to the modular nature of the developed ontologies, they were also employed to support other project initiatives within the case study company such as role-based computing (RBC), IT modernisation activity and knowledge management implementation across the sponsoring organisation. The major benefit of this approach is in the reduction of man-hours required for maintaining engineering design ontologies. Furthermore, this approach strengthens reuse of ontology knowledge and encourages modularity in the design and development of engineering ontologies