A Configurable Matchmaking Framework for Electronic Marketplaces

E-marketplaces constitute a major enabler of B2B and B2C e-commerce activities. This paper proposes a framework for one of the central activities of e-marketplaces: matchmaking of trading intentions lodged by market participants. The framework identifies a core set of concepts and functions that are common to all types of marketplaces and can serve as the basis for describing the distinct styles of matchmaking employed within various market mechanisms. A prototype implementation of the framework based on Web services technology is presented, illustrating its ability to be dynamically configured to meet specific market needs and its potential to serve as a foundation for more fully fledged e-marketplace frameworks

Modelling Contracts Using RuleML

This paper presents an approach for the specification and implementation of e-contracts for Web monitoring. This is done in the setting of RuleML. We argue that monitoring contract execution requires also a logical account of deontic concepts and of violations. Accordingly, RuleML is extended to cover these aspects

A Framework to Enable the Semantic Inferencing and Querying of Multimedia Content

Cultural institutions, broadcasting companies, academic, scientific and defence organisations are producing vast quantities of digital multimedia content. With this growth in audiovisual material comes the need for standardised representations encapsulating the rich semantic meaning required to enable the automatic filtering, machine processing, interpretation and assimilation of multimedia resources. Additionally generating high-level descriptions is difficult and manual creation is expensive although significant progress has been made in recent years on automatic segmentation and low-level feature recognition for multimedia. Within this paper we describe the application of semantic web technologies to enable the generation of high-level, domain-specific, semantic descriptions of multimedia content from low-level, automatically-extracted features. By applying the knowledge reasoning capabilities provided by ontologies and inferencing rules to large, multimedia data sets generated by scientific research communities, we hope to expedite solutions to the complex scientific problems they face

A formal method for rule analysis and validation in distributed data aggregation service

The usage of Cloud Serviced has increased rapidly in the last years. Data management systems, behind any Cloud Service, are a major concern when it comes to scalability, flexibility and reliability due to being implemented in a distributed way. A Distributed Data Aggregation Service relying on a storage system meets these demands and serves as a repository back-end for complex analysis and automatic mining of any type of data. In this paper we continue our previous work on data management in Cloud storage. We present a formal approach to express retrieval and aggregation rules with a compact, yet powerful tool called Rule Markup Language. Our extended solution proposes a standard form to schemes and uses the tool to match the rules to the XML form of the structured data in order to obtain the unstructured entries from BlobSeer data storage system. This allows the Distributed Data Aggregation Service (DDAS) to bypass several steps when processing a retrieval request. Our new architecture is more loosely-coupled with a separate module, the new tool, used fo

Representing Business Contracts in RuleML

This paper presents an approach for the specification and implementation of translating contracts from a human-oriented form into an executable representation for monitoring. This will be done in the setting of RuleML. The task of monitoring contract execution and performance requires a logical account of deontic and defeasible aspects of legal language; currently such aspects are not covered by RuleML; accordingly we show how to extend it to cover such notions. From its logical form, the contract will be thus transformed into a machine readable rule notation and eventually implemented as executable semantics via any mark-up languages depending on the client's preference, for contract monitoring purposes

Reforço da privacidade através do controlo da pegada digital

Dissertação de mestrado em Engenharia InformáticaAtualmente existe ainda uma relação assimétrica entre os utilizadores e os fornecedores de serviços disponibilizados pela internet. É prática comum, aquando da apresentação de um serviço, que o utilizador seja questionado sobre a aceitação, ou não, de um conjunto de políticas referentes ao uso de informação privada facultada ao fornecedor (por exemplo, a morada, o número de telefone, preferências, etc...). Geralmente os utilizadores aceitam a política com base na confiança que têm no fornecedor e/ou no contrato formal que lhes é apresentado. Os casos de violação de privacidade por parte de alguns fornecedores de serviços, vendendo ou facultando informação privada sobre os seus clientes a outros, são amplamente conhecidos e resultam em grande medida da falta de controlo que os utilizadores finais têm sobre a informação que entregam aos fornecedores. Este problema também tem grande impacto no ambiente empresarial. Quase toda a informação de uma organização é guardada em claro. Mesmo que esta seja guardada num local seguro, aqueles que conhecerem bem o sistema poderão ter indevidamente acesso a informação privada da organização. Além disto, se a organização for alvo de um ataque informático e o atacante conseguir aceder aos dados poderá consulta-los livremente. Neste trabalho propomos a implementação de um mecanismo que possibilite o envio de informações sem que o utilizador tenha necessidade de confiar no local onde as mesmas serão armazenadas, através da utilização do conceito de “sticky policies”. Através da utilização de técnicas criptográficas, é estabelecido um vínculo entre a informação cifrada e as políticas de acesso à informação. O sistema desenvolvido garante que, para um terceiro aceder às informações pessoais de um utilizador, terá que cumprir o conjunto de regras definidas pelo dono da informação. Visto que um utilizador autorizado a aceder às informações pode ter um comportamento incorreto, partilhando indevidamente as informações, propomos também adicionar mecanismos de auditoria dos acessos à informação gerida pelo sistema.Nowadays there is an asymmetrical relationship between users and service providers available over the internet. A common practice during service subscription is to ask users to accept a set of policies regarding use of private information (for example, address, telephone number, preferences, etc...). Generally users agree to the policy based on the confidence they have in the supplier and/or the formal contract that is presented to them. Cases of violation of privacy by some service providers, selling or providing private information about their customers to others, are widely known and result in large part from the lack of control that end users have over the information they deliver to suppliers. This issue also has great impact on business environment. Almost all the information of an organization is stored in clear. Even though it is stored in a safe place, those who know the system may have improper access to private information. In this work we propose the implementation of a mechanism for sending information without the user ever need to trust where they will be stored, using the concept of sticky policies. Through the use of cryptographic techniques, a link is established between the encrypted information and their access control policies. The system ensures that when a third party tries to access the information, has to fulfill the set of rules defined by the owner of the information. Since a user authorized to access the information may have an incorrect behavior, by improperly sharing information, we also propose to add auditing mechanisms to the information managed by the system

Estrutura de uma arquitetura para digital rights management: um plug-in para controle do uso de conteúdos digitais

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Tecnológico. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ciência da Computação

A Generic Approach to Supporting the Management of Computerised Clinical Guidelines and Protocols

Clinical guidelines or protocols (CGPs) are statements that are systematically developed for the purpose of guiding the clinician and the patient in making decisions about appropriate healthcare for specific clinical problems. Using CGPs is one of the most effective and proven ways to attaining improved quality, optimised resource utilisation, cost containment and reduced variation in healthcare practice. CGPs exist mainly as paper-based natural language statements, but are increasingly being computerised. Supporting computerised CGPs in a healthcare environment so that they are incorporated into the routine used daily by clinicians is complex and presents major information management challenges. This thesis contends that the management of computerised CGPs should incorporate their manipulation (operations and queries), in addition to their specification and execution, as part of a single unified management framework. The thesis applies modern advanced database technology to the task of managing computerised CGPs. The event-condition-action (ECA) rule paradigm is recognised to have a huge potential in supporting computerised CGPs. In this thesis, a unified generic framework, called SpEM and an approach, called MonCooS, were developed for enabling computerised CGPs, to be specified by using a specification language, called PLAN, which follows the ECA rule paradigm; executed by using a software mechanism based on the ECA mechanism within a modern database system, and manipulated by using a manipulation language, called TOPSQL. The MonCooS approach focuses on providing clinicians with assistance in monitoring and coordinating clinical interventions while leaving the reasoning task to domain experts. A proof-of-concepts system, TOPS, was developed to show that CGP management can be easily attained, within the SpEM framework, by using the MonCooS approach. TOPS is used to evaluate the framework and approach in a case study to manage a microalbuminuria protocol for diabetic patients. SpEM and MonCooS were found to be promising in supporting the full-scale management of information and knowledge for the computerised clinical protocol. Active capability within modern DBMS is still experiencing significant limitations in supporting some requirements of this application domain. These limitations lead to pointers for further improvements in database management system (DBMS) functionality for ECA rule support. The main contributions of this thesis are: a generic and unified framework for the management of CGPs; a general platform and an advanced software mechanism for the manipulation of information and knowledge in computerised CGPs; a requirement for further development of the active functionality within modern DBMS; and a case study for the computer-based management of microalbuminuria in diabetes patients

Modelado de interacciones sensibles al contexto mediante reglas en ambientes inteligentes

La Inteligencia Ambiental (AmI) propone la creación de entornos o ambientes inteligentes que se adapten a las necesidades, gustos e intereses de la gente que vive en ellos. Su principal objetivo es crear espacios constituidos por interfaces inteligentes e intuitivas integradas en objetos cotidianos con los que el usuario interacciona de forma natural y sin esfuerzo. Estas interfaces poseen capacidad para reconocer la presencia de diferentes usuarios, y modificar su comportamiento en función de la identidad de dicho usuario, sus necesidades y las características del contexto o entorno donde se encuentren. Dentro del campo de AmI, esta tesis se centra en el modelado de las interacciones que tienen lugar en este tipo de entornos. Para ello se hace necesario el estudio de un modelo, basado en una relación unívoca Tag-Objeto, en el que los objetos puedan tener asociadas más de una característica (en un único Tag), siendo el usuario el que decida con cuál de ellas interactúa a través de su terminal, teniendo en cuenta también los recursos disponibles en él y el historial de interacciones previas. Un entorno inteligente, además de contener objetos aumentados con Tag RFID, estará ubicado en una localización específica, es decir, en una zona geográfica bien definida. Esta característica hace posible otro tipo de interacciones, aquellas basadas en la localización. Así, un entorno o espacio inteligente no solamente proporcionará servicios al usuario cuando interaccione con alguno de los objetos que tiene definidos, sino que también es capaz de ofrecer otros servicios al usuario basándose simplemente en su localización. OBCAS propone una solución para el modelado de interacciones sensibles al contexto mediante reglas en ambientes inteligentes en la que las reglas no van a estar definidas de forma independiente, sino que van a formar parte del comportamiento de un conjunto de agentes. OBCAS está compuesto por un sistema multi-agente que tendrá un componente en el lado servidor y otro en el lado móvil. Todos los agentes que componen este sistema se comunican utilizando el protocolo FIPA y utilizando en el lenguaje de contenido el modelo ontológico definido en OBCAS-Ontology (Kernel). El kernel es una ontología cuya función es la representación e integración de los diferentes modelos (ontologías) y sus relaciones, de forma que representen a todos los elementos o artefactos que participan en la hipótesis para el modelado de escenarios y el desarrollo de aplicaciones NFC ubicuas y sensibles al contexto. Este sistema puede ser utilizado en cualquier aplicación en la que se realicen interacciones sensibles al contexto, y para verificar su eficacia se ha desarrollado AGATHA, un sistema de alarmas que monitoriza el cumplimiento de un conjunto de restricciones que están asociadas a ciertos usuarios. Esta aplicación ha demostrado la rapidez con la que el sistema es capaz de reaccionar y adaptarse al contexto del usuario, evitando por ejemplo que un agresor se acerque a una víctima o que un anciano se pierda.Ambient Intelligence (AmI) proposes the creation of smart environments able to adapt to the needs, tastes and interests of the people living in them. Its main objective is to create spaces constituted by intelligent and intuitive interfaces embedded in everyday objects with which the user interacts naturally and effortlessly. These interfaces have the capacity to recognize the presence of different users, and modify their behavior depending on the user's identity, needs and characteristics of the context or environment. Within the field of AmI, this thesis is focused on the modeling of the interactions that take place in these environments. In order to do so, it is necessary to study a model based on an univocal Tag-Object relationship, where objects can have associated more than one characteristic (to one tag), and the user decides which one to interact with through its terminal. The resources available in the terminal, and the history of previous interactions are also considered. A smart environment contains objects augmented with RFID Tag, and it is located in a specific location, i.e. a well-defined geographical area. This feature makes possible other interactions, those based on location. Hence, a space or smart environment not only provide intelligent services to the user when interacting with any of the objects that have been defined, but it is also able to provide the user with other services based simply on its location. OBCAS proposes a solution for modeling context-sensitive interactions in smart environments through rules, in which the rules will not be defined independently, but they will be part of the behavior of a set of agents. OBCAS comprises a multi-agent system that will have a component on the server side and another one on the mobile side. All agents making up the system use the FIPA protocol, and the ontological model OBCAS-Ontology (Kernel). The Kernel is an ontology whose function is the representation and integration of the different models (ontologies) and their relationships, so representing all the elements or artifacts involved in the scenario modeling and the development of ubiquitous and context-awareness NFC application. This system can be used in any application with context-aware interactions. In order to verify its efficacy has been developed AGATHA, an alarm system which monitors the performance of a set of constraints that are associated with certain users. This application has demonstrated the speed with which the system is able to react and adapt to the context of the user, e.g. preventing the approaching of an attacker to a victim