Linked Research on the Decentralised Web

This thesis is about research communication in the context of the Web. I analyse literature which reveals how researchers are making use of Web technologies for knowledge dissemination, as well as how individuals are disempowered by the centralisation of certain systems, such as academic publishing platforms and social media. I share my findings on the feasibility of a decentralised and interoperable information space where researchers can control their identifiers whilst fulfilling the core functions of scientific communication: registration, awareness, certification, and archiving. The contemporary research communication paradigm operates under a diverse set of sociotechnical constraints, which influence how units of research information and personal data are created and exchanged. Economic forces and non-interoperable system designs mean that researcher identifiers and research contributions are largely shaped and controlled by third-party entities; participation requires the use of proprietary systems. From a technical standpoint, this thesis takes a deep look at semantic structure of research artifacts, and how they can be stored, linked and shared in a way that is controlled by individual researchers, or delegated to trusted parties. Further, I find that the ecosystem was lacking a technical Web standard able to fulfill the awareness function of research communication. Thus, I contribute a new communication protocol, Linked Data Notifications (published as a W3C Recommendation) which enables decentralised notifications on the Web, and provide implementations pertinent to the academic publishing use case. So far we have seen decentralised notifications applied in research dissemination or collaboration scenarios, as well as for archival activities and scientific experiments. Another core contribution of this work is a Web standards-based implementation of a clientside tool, dokieli, for decentralised article publishing, annotations and social interactions. dokieli can be used to fulfill the scholarly functions of registration, awareness, certification, and archiving, all in a decentralised manner, returning control of research contributions and discourse to individual researchers. The overarching conclusion of the thesis is that Web technologies can be used to create a fully functioning ecosystem for research communication. Using the framework of Web architecture, and loosely coupling the four functions, an accessible and inclusive ecosystem can be realised whereby users are able to use and switch between interoperable applications without interfering with existing data. Technical solutions alone do not suffice of course, so this thesis also takes into account the need for a change in the traditional mode of thinking amongst scholars, and presents the Linked Research initiative as an ongoing effort toward researcher autonomy in a social system, and universal access to human- and machine-readable information. Outcomes of this outreach work so far include an increase in the number of individuals self-hosting their research artifacts, workshops publishing accessible proceedings on the Web, in-the-wild experiments with open and public peer-review, and semantic graphs of contributions to conference proceedings and journals (the Linked Open Research Cloud). Some of the future challenges include: addressing the social implications of decentralised Web publishing, as well as the design of ethically grounded interoperable mechanisms; cultivating privacy aware information spaces; personal or community-controlled on-demand archiving services; and further design of decentralised applications that are aware of the core functions of scientific communication

Adding Privacy Protection to Policy Based Authorisation Systems

An authorisation system determines who is authorised to do what i.e. it assigns privileges to users and provides a decision on whether someone is allowed to perform a requested action on a resource. A traditional authorisation decision system, which is simply called authorisation system or system in the rest of the thesis, provides the decision based on a policy which is usually written by the system administrator. Such a traditional authorisation system is not sufficient to protect privacy of personal data, since users (the data subjects) are usually given a take it or leave it choice to accept the controlling organisation’s policy. Privacy is the ability of the owners or subjects of personal data to control the flow of data about themselves, according to their own preferences. This thesis describes the design of an authorisation system that will provide privacy for personal data by including sticky authorisation policies from the issuers and data subjects, to supplement the authorisation policy of the controlling organisation. As personal data moves from controlling system to controlling system, the sticky policies travel with the data. A number of data protection laws and regulations have been formulated to protect the privacy of individuals. The rights and prohibitions provided by the law need to be enforced by the authorisation system. Hence, the designed authorisation system also includes the authorisation rules from the legislation. This thesis describes the conversion of rules from the EU Data Protection Directive into machine executable rules. Due to the nature of the legislative rules, not all of them could be converted into deterministic machine executable rules, as in several cases human intervention or human judgement is required. This is catered for by allowing the machine rules to be configurable. Since the system includes independent policies from various authorities (law, issuer, data subject and controller) conflicts may arise among the decisions provided by them. Consequently, this thesis describes a dynamic, automated conflict resolution mechanism. Different conflict resolution algorithms are chosen based on the request contexts. As the EU Data Protection Directive allows processing of personal data based on contracts, we designed and implemented a component, Contract Validation Service (ConVS) that can validate an XML based digital contract to allow processing of personal data based on a contract. The authorisation system has been implemented as a web service and the performance of the system is measured, by first deploying it in a single computer and then in a cloud server. Finally the validity of the design and implementation are tested against a number of use cases based on scenarios involving accessing medical data in a health service provider’s system and accessing personal data such as CVs and degree certificates in an employment service provider’s system. The machine computed authorisation decisions are compared to the theoretical decisions to ensure that the system returns the correct decisions

Ubiquitous Semantic Applications

As Semantic Web technology evolves many open areas emerge, which attract more research focus. In addition to quickly expanding Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud, various embeddable metadata formats (e.g. RDFa, microdata) are becoming more common. Corporations are already using existing Web of Data to create new technologies that were not possible before. Watson by IBM an artificial intelligence computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language can be a great example. On the other hand, ubiquitous devices that have a large number of sensors and integrated devices are becoming increasingly powerful and fully featured computing platforms in our pockets and homes. For many people smartphones and tablet computers have already replaced traditional computers as their window to the Internet and to the Web. Hence, the management and presentation of information that is useful to a user is a main requirement for today’s smartphones. And it is becoming extremely important to provide access to the emerging Web of Data from the ubiquitous devices. In this thesis we investigate how ubiquitous devices can interact with the Semantic Web. We discovered that there are five different approaches for bringing the Semantic Web to ubiquitous devices. We have outlined and discussed in detail existing challenges in implementing this approaches in section 1.2. We have described a conceptual framework for ubiquitous semantic applications in chapter 4. We distinguish three client approaches for accessing semantic data using ubiquitous devices depending on how much of the semantic data processing is performed on the device itself (thin, hybrid and fat clients). These are discussed in chapter 5 along with the solution to every related challenge. Two provider approaches (fat and hybrid) can be distinguished for exposing data from ubiquitous devices on the Semantic Web. These are discussed in chapter 6 along with the solution to every related challenge. We conclude our work with a discussion on each of the contributions of the thesis and propose future work for each of the discussed approach in chapter 7

Facets of Work: Enriching the Description, Analysis, Design, and Evaluation of Systems in Organizations

This conceptual contribution introduces the idea of “facets of work” and explains how it can be applied to challenges in today’s IS discipline. The notion of facets of work emerged from earlier attempts to bring more knowledge and richer, more evocative ideas to systems analysis and design (SA&D). Focusing on facets of work when initially discussing requirements could provide guidance without jumping prematurely to details, precision, and formal notation needed for producing testable software. This paper defines facet of work, identifies underlying assumptions and criteria, and uses three examples to illustrate how 18 facets of work can illuminate different aspects of situations that are amenable to discussion as systems. Potential applications of facets of work include supporting SA&D, supporting empirical research, visualizing multiple aspects of digitalization, and identifying some of the knowledge in a body of knowledge for IS. Six lengthy tables in the Appendix identify concepts associated with each facet, evaluation criteria, design trade-offs, sub-facets, and other details that are potentially useful as the basis of tools, methods, and future research