Strategies for Risk Facing in Work Environments

Risk management in work environments requires the introduction of mechanisms able to identify the causes and the indications, which precede accidents in order to avoid them whenever this is possible. Most of the accidents are announced by risk events, which may be identified and managed before their evolution into accidents through preventive strategies. We propose to address risks by proposing risk management strategies where the risk is explicitly defined and revealing and protection devices generate risk events managed through conditions and set of actions

Policies and Security Aspects For Distributed Scientific Laboratories

Abstract Web Services and the Grid allow distributed research teams to form dynamic, multi-institutional virtual organizations sharing high performance computing resources, large scale data sets and instruments for solving computationally intensive scientific applications, thereby forming Virtual Laboratories. This paper aims at exploring security issues of such distributed scientific laboratories and tries to extend security mechanisms by defining a general approach in which a security policy is used both to provide and regulate access to scientific services. In particular, we consider how security policies specified in XACML and WS-Policy can support the requirements of secure data and resource sharing in a scientific experiment. A framework is given where security policies are stated by the different participants in the experiment, providing a Policy Management system. A prototype implementation of the proposed framework is presented

A framework for benchmarking public websites in the labour sector

A framework related to how to be nchmark public websites in the labour sector is proposed using a pproaches coming from eGovernment. A methodological approach to benchmark these sites is presented consisting of a set of indicators to be applied step-by-st ep to labour websites to evaluate their usage and effectiveness. The paper shows how this approach, although general enough, does not work for some cases. These cases are illustrated for two information systems offering Public Employment Services, namely the information system of Lombardy – Italy (Borsa Lavoro Lombardia) and the information system of Catalonia – Spain (Servei d’Ocupació de Catalunya). The paper tries to find out the motivations of success and of failure of these two cases, which relate to very similar soci al, economic, and territorial situations and yet evolved into very different syst ems with diverse stories and a different final result in usage and success. In fact, while Borsa Lavoro Lombardia is currently non-operative, SOC (https://gia.oficinadetreball.cat/) is fully operative and widely used with a network of employment services offered by private agencies as well.Peer Reviewe

A Semantic-Rich Approach to IoT Using the Generalized World Entities Paradigm

In this chapter, we present an overview of our proposed Generalized World Entities (GWEs) paradigm, to be used to add a semantic/conceptual dimension to IoT/WoT (Internet of Things/Web of Things) procedures. GWEs offer a unified way to model seamlessly, at the conceptual level, both the digital counterparts of elementary entities, such as physical objects, humans, robots and low-level events, and the semantic representations of higher levels of abstraction. These higher levels correspond to structured situations/behaviors implying mutual relationships among simpler entities. The GWEs approach is both a theoretical and a practical framework that can give a significant contribution to solve some important IoT/WoT problems, such as interoperability and uniform IoT controls. Thanks to a unique ontology-based representation language, the chapter shows the possibility of bridging the semantic gap between the recognition of entities at the sensor level and their representation at the conceptual level

Sharing Semantic Knowledge for Autonomous Robots: Cooperation for Social Robotic Systems

In social robotic systems, robots interact with humans to collaborate for different tasks. In this paper we consider industrial scenarios, where a shop floor can be reconfigured and specific tasks can be assigned to robots that operate as assistants to human operators. We propose to use a Knowledge Representation approach to describe the human-robot interaction. In particular, the conceptual framework based on the GeneralizedWorld Entities paradigm is adopted to capture both the physical entities of the system and events, situations, behaviours as well as the relationships among them. The paper applies the methodologies to some real case studies of the Kleeman manufacturer to automated bending machine procedures and intra-shop floor transportation with automated guided vehicles

Analysis of an Inventory of Information Systems in the Public Administration

Deals with the problem of building an inventory of information systems for public administration, with reference to an ongoing project in Italy. We describe the investigation techniques that have been defined for collecting information and the techniques that have been developed for a systematic analysis of the large set of conceptual schemas resulting from the investigation. These schemas describe the data used by the public administration work processes. In particular, we describe the conceptual schema of the inventory, which is the basis for discussing the investigation methodology, the choice of the investigation units, the data collection and merging, and the access to information. Then, we present the schema analysis techniques which have been developed to semi-automatically analyse the large set of conceptual schemas resulting from the investigation. In particular, we illustrate indexing techniques for identifying representative descriptors of schemas and similarity techniques to compare schemas for their classification into families. Finally, a tool that has been developed to support the storage, analysis and classification of schemas is described, and experimental results are discusse