Policy and Contract Management for Semantic Web Services

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.This paper summarizes our efforts to develop capabilities for policy and contract management for Semantic Web Services applications. KAoS services and tools allow for the specification, management, analyzes, disclosure and enforcement of policies represented in OWL. We discuss three current Semantic Web Services applications as examples of the kinds of roles that a policy management framework can play: as an authorization service in grid computing environments, as a distributed policy specification and enforcement capability for a semantic matchmaker, and as a verification tool for services composition and contract management

Security and Privacy Issues of Big Data

This chapter revises the most important aspects in how computing infrastructures should be configured and intelligently managed to fulfill the most notably security aspects required by Big Data applications. One of them is privacy. It is a pertinent aspect to be addressed because users share more and more personal data and content through their devices and computers to social networks and public clouds. So, a secure framework to social networks is a very hot topic research. This last topic is addressed in one of the two sections of the current chapter with case studies. In addition, the traditional mechanisms to support security such as firewalls and demilitarized zones are not suitable to be applied in computing systems to support Big Data. SDN is an emergent management solution that could become a convenient mechanism to implement security in Big Data systems, as we show through a second case study at the end of the chapter. This also discusses current relevant work and identifies open issues.Comment: In book Handbook of Research on Trends and Future Directions in Big Data and Web Intelligence, IGI Global, 201

Towards a flexible service integration through separation of business rules

Driven by dynamic market demands, enterprises are continuously exploring collaborations with others to add value to their services and seize new market opportunities. Achieving enterprise collaboration is facilitated by Enterprise Application Integration and Business-to-Business approaches that employ architectural paradigms like Service Oriented Architecture and incorporate technological advancements in networking and computing. However, flexibility remains a major challenge related to enterprise collaboration. How can changes in demands and opportunities be reflected in collaboration solutions with minimum time and effort and with maximum reuse of existing applications? This paper proposes an approach towards a more flexible integration of enterprise applications in the context of service mediation. We achieve this by combining goal-based, model-driven and serviceoriented approaches. In particular, we pay special attention to the separation of business rules from the business process of the integration solution. Specifying the requirements as goal models, we separate those parts which are more likely to evolve over time in terms of business rules. These business rules are then made executable by exposing them as Web services and incorporating them into the design of the business process.\ud Thus, should the business rules change, the business process remains unaffected. Finally, this paper also provides an evaluation of the flexibility of our solution in relation to the current work in business process flexibility research

Multilevel Contracts for Trusted Components

This article contributes to the design and the verification of trusted components and services. The contracts are declined at several levels to cover then different facets, such as component consistency, compatibility or correctness. The article introduces multilevel contracts and a design+verification process for handling and analysing these contracts in component models. The approach is implemented with the COSTO platform that supports the Kmelia component model. A case study illustrates the overall approach.Comment: In Proceedings WCSI 2010, arXiv:1010.233

Intruder deducibility constraints with negation. Decidability and application to secured service compositions

The problem of finding a mediator to compose secured services has been reduced in our former work to the problem of solving deducibility constraints similar to those employed for cryptographic protocol analysis. We extend in this paper the mediator synthesis procedure by a construction for expressing that some data is not accessible to the mediator. Then we give a decision procedure for verifying that a mediator satisfying this non-disclosure policy can be effectively synthesized. This procedure has been implemented in CL-AtSe, our protocol analysis tool. The procedure extends constraint solving for cryptographic protocol analysis in a significative way as it is able to handle negative deducibility constraints without restriction. In particular it applies to all subterm convergent theories and therefore covers several interesting theories in formal security analysis including encryption, hashing, signature and pairing.Comment: (2012

Twelve Theses on Reactive Rules for the Web

Reactivity, the ability to detect and react to events, is an essential functionality in many information systems. In particular, Web systems such as online marketplaces, adaptive (e.g., recommender) systems, and Web services, react to events such as Web page updates or data posted to a server. This article investigates issues of relevance in designing high-level programming languages dedicated to reactivity on the Web. It presents twelve theses on features desirable for a language of reactive rules tuned to programming Web and Semantic Web applications