A feature-based approach to web services e-contract establishment

Orientadores: Maria Beatriz Felgar de Toledo, Itana Maria de Souza GimenesTese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de ComputaçãoResumo: Contratos eletrônicos descrevem processos de negócio interorganizacionais em termos de fornecimento e consumo de serviços eletrônicos (atualmente serviços Web). O estabelecimento de contratos eletrônicos em um determinado domínio de negócios normalmente envolve um conjunto de pontos comuns e pontos de variação bem definidos. Essas propriedades não são completamente exploradas pelas abordagens existentes para o estabelecimento de contratos eletrônicos. Modelos de características têm sido amplamente usados para capturar e gerenciar pontos comuns e variabilidades em famílias de produtos no contexto de linha de produto de software. Esta tese apresenta uma abordagem baseada em modelos de características para ser aplicada no estabelecimento de contratos eletrônicos para serviços Web. Seu objetivo é melhorar a estruturação e o reuso de informação em contratos eletrônicos, incluindo atributos de qualidade de serviço. Características são usadas para representar possíveis elementos de contratos eletrônicos para serviços Web com o objetivo de orientar a criação de instâncias de molde de contrato eletrônico e atuar, portanto, como um gerenciador de espaço de configuração. A abordagem proposta usa as linguagens WS-BPEL e WS-Agreement para especificar, respectivamente, processos de negócio e atributos de qualidade de serviço. Para oferecer apoio automatizado à abordagem proposta, um conjunto de ferramentas, chamado FeatureContract, foi desenvolvido como parte deste trabalho. Para demonstrar aplicabilidade da abordagem, foi realizado um estudo de caso dentro do contexto de sistemas para telecomunicaçõesAbstract: Electronic contracts describe inter-organizational business processes in terms of supply and consumption of electronic services (commonly Web services). The establishment of electronic contracts in a particular business domain usually involves a set of well-defined common and variation points. These properties are not fully exploited by the existing electronic contract establishment approaches. Feature modeling is a software engineering technique that has been widely used for capturing and managing commonalities and variabilities of product families in the context of software product line. This thesis presents a feature-based approach to be applied in the establishment of Web services electronic contracts. The approach aims at improving the structure and reuse of information in electronic contracts, including quality of service attributes. Features are used to represent possible elements in Web services electronic contracts in order to drive contract template instantiation and act, therefore, as a configuration space manager. The proposed approach uses WS-BPEL and WS-Agreement languages to specify business processes and quality of service attributes respectively. To provide automatic support for the proposed approach, a toolkit, named FeatureContract, was developed as part of this work. Aiming at demonstrating the approach applicability, a case study was carried within the telecommunication systems contextDoutoradoSistemas de InformaçãoDoutor em Ciência da Computaçã

WORKAROUNDS IN RETAIL WORK SYSTEMS: PREVENT, REDESIGN, ADOPT OR IGNORE?

We conducted a case study in a Dutch supermarket chain in order to explore the emergence of workarounds in the retail environment. We studied what types of workarounds occur during the use of retail information systems and how manager can handle the identified workarounds once they become aware of them. The data was acquired qualitatively through interviews, observations, and document analysis, and validated by means of an online survey. After identifying and classifying 29 workarounds, a conceptual framework was developed that links workaround features to workaround categories and then to certain actions as response to them, namely prevent, redesign, adopt and ignore. This study contributes to existing research by categorizing workarounds in an unexplored domain and developing a conceptual framework of workaround categories and re-sponses. We were able to identify patterns of relationships between types of workarounds, some of them similar to those found for other industries and others that appear to be specific to retail work systems, probably due to the inherent characteristics of retail work systems

Institutional Violence Complaints in Argentina: A Privacy Study

Argentina is a federal republic located in South America. Despite Argentina’s redemocratization in 1983, conditions favoring human rights abuses still persist. Institutional violence refers to structured practices of human rights violation by state officials belonging to public institutions. In this paper, we outline and discuss privacy issues in institutional violence complaints in Argentina. To this aim, we defined a BPMN process model for registering victims’ complaints in a database, and proposed an approach to investigate the privacy of such process from a threat modeling perspective. With the approach, we identified privacy threats of information disclosure and content unawareness, and defined privacy requirements and controls needed to mitigate these threats

X-processes: Discovering more accurate business process models with a genetic algorithms method

Although process model discovery has been extensively investigated over the past two decades, existing discovery methods are still not considered fully satisfactory. One problem is the difficulty of discovering accurate process models, achievable with both high recall (or fitness) and high precision, particularly for real-world event logs. This paper introduces a process discovery method, namely X-Processes, based on genetic algorithms, which aims to optimize accuracy through the F-Score calculated between recall and precision. Although genetic algorithms have been used to discover process models, such methods also have limitations as do other non-genetic algorithms-based methods. Experimental results for 12 real-world event logs show the accuracy of the process models discovered by X-Processes is higher than those of six other state-of-the-art discovery methods, including one also based on genetic algorithms. Besides accuracy, X-Processes delivers sound process models. Although its execution time is longer than the other compared discovery methods, X-Processes emerges as a solution when the need for a highly accurate process model outweighs the hunger for agility

A Literature Survey on Smart Toy-related Children\u27s Privacy Risks

Smart toys have become popular as technological solutions offer a better experience for children. However, the technology used increases the risks to children\u27s privacy, which does not seem to have become a real concern for toy makers. Most researchers in this domain are vague in defining their motivations due to lack of an expert survey to support them. We conducted a literature survey to find papers on smart toy-related children\u27s privacy risks and mitigation solutions. We analyzed 26 papers using a taxonomy for privacy principles and preserving techniques adapted from the IoT context. Our analysis shows that some types of risks received more attention, especially (a) confidentiality, (b) use, retention and disclosure limitation, (c) authorization, (d) consent and choice, (e) openness, transparency and notice and (f) authentication. As for solutions, few were effectively presented; the vast majority related to data restriction -- (a) access control and (b) cryptographic

Inter-organizational negotiation of web-services

The web service technology allows organizations to interact through business processes. \ud However, organizations involved in cooperative business processes have different interests \ud and points of view. A negotiation allows them to discuss their interests and requirements in \ud order to reach an acceptable agreement. We propose an integrated web service negotiation \ud process that takes into account human interaction and the use of different negotiation \ud protocols. It focuses on the application of feature modelling to describe the negotiated \ud services. Our contributions include: (i) the definition of a negotiation process; (ii) the \ud definition of a conceptual model to support the negotiation of web services; (iii) reuse of \ud artefacts generated throughout the negotiation process; (iv) coverage of critical elements in \ud the negotiation of electronic contracts, such as role, properties of electronic services and \ud contract models; and (v) exploration of the process in different application scenario

CONTRATOS ELETRÔNICOS ESTENDIDOS COM ACORDOS EM NÍVEL DE NEGÓCIOS VISANDO APOIAR O ALINHAMENTO ESTRATÉGICO ENTRE NEGÓCIO E TI

Through electronic contracts, using partner organizations, it is possible to outsource electronic services to be composed into business processes and set Service Level Agreements (SLA), which do not ensure per se the strategic alignment between the IT department and business areas of the involved organizations. This paper presents a pre-existent approach for e-contract settlement which was extended in order to encompass a Business Level Agreement (BLA), which is used to align the organization's goals and objectives. This extended approach aims at making it possible to ensure that technical services under the IT responsibility do not cause negative impacts on the execution of business processes requested by the business areas of the organizations. In this paper, we briefly present the approach used as the grounds for the proposed extension as well as an analysis of its pros and cons, based on examples of artifacts produced using the extended approach.Por meio de contratos eletrônicos é possível subcontratar serviços eletrônicos de organizações parceiras, a serem compostos em processos de negócio, e definir acordos de qualidade em nível de serviço, o que não garante necessariamente o alinhamento estratégico entre as áreas de TI e as áreas de negócio de cada organização envolvida. Este artigo apresenta uma abordagem preexistente de estabelecimento de contratos eletrônicos que foi estendida para incluir o tratamento de acordos de qualidade em nível de negócio, os quais são usados para alinhar metas e objetivos de uma organização. O objetivo desta extensão é facilitar que serviços técnicos de responsabilidade de TI não causem impactos negativos durante a realização dos processos de negócio necessários para as áreas de negócio das organizações. Neste artigo, é apresentada a extensão proposta, assim como a abordagem base usada, além de uma análise dos benefícios e limitações tendo como base exemplos de artefatos produzidos com o uso da abordagem estendida

Decision Making in Public Administration Supported by Knowledge Discovery: A Case Study in Project Management

In this paper, we report a case study carried out in order to analyze the potential of applying knowledge discovery as a strategy to support decision making in public administration. The discovery of knowledge was implemented by using a binary classifier to predict the success of failure concerning cost and deadline plans. The prediction was made analyzing descriptive data of the plans. The dataset was obtained from a project management system that was built based on the practices of the PMBOK guide. The strategies used in this case study, the difficulties faced during the classifier modeling process and the results are discussed herein

Perceived Innovativeness and Privacy Risk of Smart Toys in Brazil and Argentina

A smart toy, such as Hello Barbie, is a device consisting of a physical toy component that connects to a computing system with online services through networking to enhance the functionality of a traditional toy. Whilst these are new educational and entertaining values of smart toys, experts in western countries such as U.S. and Germany have warned consumers of the data security and privacy issues of these toys. In this preliminary research study, we particularly studied Brazilian and Argentinian consumers’ perceived innovativeness, risks and benefits of smart toys and their purchase intention toward such toys. Results indicate that Brazilian consumers have better perception and evaluation of the toy and thus higher purchase intention than Argentinian consumers do. Such difference may be explained by the cultural differences be-tween the two countries, such as relatively low vs. high uncertainty avoidance