Boosting D3FEND: Ontological Analysis and Recommendations

Formal Ontology is a discipline whose business is to develop formal theories about general aspects of reality such as identity, dependence, parthood, truthmaking, causality, etc. A foundational ontology is a specific consistent set of these ontological theories that support activities such as domain analysis, conceptual clarification, and meaning negotiation. A (well-founded) core ontology specifies, under a foundational ontology, the central concepts and relations of a given domain. Foundational and core ontologies can be seen as ontology engineering frameworks to systematically address the laborious task of building large (more specific) domain ontologies. However, both in research and industry, it is common that ontologies as computational artifacts are built without the aid of any framework of this kind, favoring the occurrence of numerous modeling mistakes and gaps. Through a case study, here we show an exemplar of such a case in the domain of cybersecurity by providing an ontological analysis of D3FEND, an OWL knowledge graph of cybersecurity countermeasure techniques proposed by the MITRE Corporation. Based on the Reference Ontology for Security Engineering (ROSE), a core ontology of the security domain founded in the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO), our investigation reveals a number of semantic deficiencies in D3FEND, including missing concepts, semantic overload of terms, and a systematic lack of constraints that renders that model under-specified. As a result of our ontological analysis, we propose several suggestions for the appropriate redesign of D3FEND to overcome those issues.</p

Incorporating Trust into Context-Aware Services

Enabling technologies concerning hardware, networking, and sensing have inspired the development of context-aware IT services. These adapt to the situation of the user, such that service provisioning is specific to his/her corresponding needs. We have seen successful applications of context-aware services in healthcare, well-being, and smart homes. It is, however, always a question what level of trust the users can place in the fulfillment of their needs by a certain IT-service. Trust has two major variants: policy-based, where a reputed institution provides guarantees about the service, and reputation-based, where other users of the service provide insight into the level of fulfillment of user needs. Services that are accessible to a small and known set of users typically use policy-based trust only. Services that have a wide community of users can use reputation-based trust, policy-based trust, or a combination. For both types of trust, however, context awareness poses a problem. Policy-based trust works within certain boundaries, outside of which no guarantees can be given about satisfying the user needs, and context awareness can push a service out of these boundaries. For reputation-based trust, the fact that users in a certain context were adequately served, does not mean that the same would happen when the service adapts to another user’s needs. In this paper we consider the incorporation of trust into context-aware services, by proposing an ontological conceptualization for user-system trust. Analyzing service usage data for context parameters combined with the ability to fulfill user needs can help in eliciting components for the ontology.</p

The many facets of trust

Trust is an attitude that an agent (the trustor) has toward an entity (the trustee), such that the trustor counts upon the trustee to act in a way that is benefi- cial w.r.t. to the trustor’s goals. The notion of trust is relevantly discussed both in in- formation science and philosophy. Unfortunately, we still lack a satisfying account for this concept. The goal of this article is to contribute to filling this gap. First, we take issue with some central tenets shared by the main philosophical accounts, such as that there is just one relation of trust, that this relation has three argument places, and that trust is reliance plus some extra factor. Second, we provide a novel account of trust, also discussing different levels of trust. According to the account we put forth here, the logical form of trust sentences is expressed by a four-place relation. Further, we distinguish and characterize four kinds of trust relations and their connections. We also argue that trust and reliance are different phenomena. Third, on the basis of the proposed account, we extend the Reference Ontology of Trust (ROT). We call the new version of ROT that includes this extension ”ROT 3.0”. Finally, we discuss the implications of the new ontological definitions in the applications we have done of the concept of trust in other works, also pointing out future applications made possible by these novel accounts of trust

FAIR digital twins for data-intensive research

Although all the technical components supporting fully orchestrated Digital Twins (DT) currently exist, what remains missing is a conceptual clarification and analysis of a more generalized concept of a DT that is made FAIR, that is, universally machine actionable. This methodological overview is a first step toward this clarification. We present a review of previously developed semantic artifacts and how they may be used to compose a higher-order data model referred to here as a FAIR Digital Twin (FDT). We propose an architectural design to compose, store and reuse FDTs supporting data intensive research, with emphasis on privacy by design and their use in GDPR compliant open science.Analytical BioScience

UFO: Unified Foundational Ontology

The Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) was developed over the last two decades by consistently putting together theories from areas such as formal ontology in philosophy, cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophical logics. It comprises a number of micro-theories addressing fundamental conceptual modeling notions, including entity types and relationship types. The aim of this paper is to summarize the current state of UFO, presenting a formalization of the ontology, along with the analysis of a number of cases to illustrate the application of UFO and facilitate its comparison with other foundational ontologies in this special issue. (The cases originate from the First FOUST Workshop – the Foundational Stance, an international forum dedicated to Foundational Ontology research.

Towards a reference ontology of trust

Trust is a key component of relationships in social life. It is commonly argued that trust is the \u201cglue\u201d that holds families, societies, organizations and companies together. In the literature trust is frequently considered as a strategic asset for organizations. Having a clear understanding of the notion of trust and its components is paramount to both trust assessment and trust management. Although much progress has been made to clarify the ontological nature of trust, the term remains overloaded and there is not yet a shared or prevailing, and conceptually clear notion of trust. In this paper we address this issue by means of an in-depth ontological analysis of the notion of trust, grounded in the Unified Foundational Ontology. As a result, we propose a concrete artifact, namely, the Reference Ontology for Trust, in which we characterize the general concept of trust and distinguish between two types of trust, namely, social trust and institution-based trust. We also represent the emergence of risk from trust relations. In addition, we make a comparative analysis of our Reference Ontology to other trust ontologies. To validate and demonstrate the contribution of our approach, we apply it to model two application examples