Audit Techniques for Service Oriented Architecture Applications

The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach enables the development of flexible distributed applications. Auditing such applications implies several specific challenges related to interoperability, performance and security. The service oriented architecture model is described and the advantages of this approach are analyzed. We also highlight several quality attributes and potential risks in SOA applications that an architect should be aware when designing a distributed system. Key risk factors are identified and a model for risk evaluation is introduced. The top reasons for auditing SOA applications are presented as well as the most important standards. The steps for a successful audit process are given and discussed.Service Oriented Architecture, Audit, Quality Attributes, Interoperability, Performance, Security

Sorting Through and Sorting Out: The State of Content Sharing in the E-Learning

On 22-24 September 2002, a group of 22 education and information technology specialists gathered on the campus of the University of California at Irvine (UCI), for a symposium on the state of educational "content sharing." (See participant list.) The meeting was sponsored by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Education Program and the UCI Distance Learning Center. This paper summarizes the themes that emerged from that gathering. Most papers can be characterized as collaborative, but this one is particularly deserving of that adjective. The presentation here is an attempt to synthesize the ideas of all the participants, expressed in numerous conversational and written exchanges pre-, during and post-meeting. While every effort has been made to present the range of views, surely not all participants would agree with the emphases and interpretations herein.This report includes a hyper-linked bibliography and footnotes for additional web-based material on e-learning topics. Links are provided for the reader's convenience only, and represent neither an endorsement nor a guarantee of the accuracy of the content of the associated sites. Comments and questions about this document are welcomed, however, and should be directed to the author or the meeting sponsors

Design Considerations for Low Power Internet Protocols

Over the past 10 years, low-power wireless networks have transitioned to supporting IPv6 connectivity through 6LoWPAN, a set of standards which specify how to aggressively compress IPv6 packets over low-power wireless links such as 802.15.4. We find that different low-power IPv6 stacks are unable to communicate using 6LoWPAN, and therefore IP, due to design tradeoffs between code size and energy efficiency. We argue that applying traditional protocol design principles to low-power networks is responsible for these failures, in part because receivers must accommodate a wide range of senders. Based on these findings, we propose three design principles for Internet protocols on low-power networks. These principles are based around the importance of providing flexible tradeoffs between code size and energy efficiency. We apply these principles to 6LoWPAN and show that the resulting design of the protocol provides developers a wide range of tradeoff points while allowing implementations with different choices to seamlessly communicate

Integrating heterogeneous distributed COTS discrete-event simulation packages: An emerging standards-based approach

This paper reports on the progress made toward the emergence of standards to support the integration of heterogeneous discrete-event simulations (DESs) created in specialist support tools called commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) discrete-event simulation packages (CSPs). The general standard for heterogeneous integration in this area has been developed from research in distributed simulation and is the IEEE 1516 standard The High Level Architecture (HLA). However, the specific needs of heterogeneous CSP integration require that the HLA is augmented by additional complementary standards. These are the suite of CSP interoperability (CSPI) standards being developed under the Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization (SISO-http://www.sisostds.org) by the CSPI Product Development Group (CSPI-PDG). The suite consists of several interoperability reference models (IRMs) that outline different integration needs of CSPI, interoperability frameworks (IFs) that define the HLA-based solution to each IRM, appropriate data exchange representations to specify the data exchanged in an IF, and benchmarks termed CSP emulators (CSPEs). This paper contributes to the development of the Type I IF that is intended to represent the HLA-based solution to the problem outlined by the Type I IRM (asynchronous entity passing) by developing the entity transfer specification (ETS) data exchange representation. The use of the ETS in an illustrative case study implemented using a prototype CSPE is shown. This case study also allows us to highlight the importance of event granularity and lookahead in the performance and development of the Type I IF, and to discuss possible methods to automate the capture of appropriate values of lookahead

Theory and Practice of Data Citation

Citations are the cornerstone of knowledge propagation and the primary means of assessing the quality of research, as well as directing investments in science. Science is increasingly becoming "data-intensive", where large volumes of data are collected and analyzed to discover complex patterns through simulations and experiments, and most scientific reference works have been replaced by online curated datasets. Yet, given a dataset, there is no quantitative, consistent and established way of knowing how it has been used over time, who contributed to its curation, what results have been yielded or what value it has. The development of a theory and practice of data citation is fundamental for considering data as first-class research objects with the same relevance and centrality of traditional scientific products. Many works in recent years have discussed data citation from different viewpoints: illustrating why data citation is needed, defining the principles and outlining recommendations for data citation systems, and providing computational methods for addressing specific issues of data citation. The current panorama is many-faceted and an overall view that brings together diverse aspects of this topic is still missing. Therefore, this paper aims to describe the lay of the land for data citation, both from the theoretical (the why and what) and the practical (the how) angle.Comment: 24 pages, 2 tables, pre-print accepted in Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), 201