ICEIS 2005 Abstracts

Home
Call For Papers
Doctoral Consortium
Program Committee
Keynote Lectures
Tutorials
Special Sessions
Workshops

Paper Submission
Paper Templates
Reviewers Only
Registration

Conference Program
Local Information
Accommodation
Social Events

Organizing Committee
Sponsors
Journals
Hall of Fame
Links

Organized by:

INSTICC

Co-organized by:

ARCHITECTURE FOR A SME-READY ERP-SOLUTION BASED ON WEB-SERVICES AND PEER-TO-PEER-NETWORKS

Jorge Marx Gómez and Claus Rautenstrauch

Although the requirements of small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) for enterprise resource planning systems (ERP) are very similar to those of big corporations, there is still a lack of solutions for SMEs, because the roll-out as well as the maintanance is very expensive. It has become clear that EDP branch solutions, application service providing and stripped-down software versions do not offer satisfying solutions. For solving these problems we propose an architecture for a distributed ERP-system based on web-services and peer-to-peer-network technology whose roll-out and maintanance is better affordable for SMEs than traditional systems.

USING CORRESPONDENCE ASSERTIONS TO SPECIFY THE SEMANTICS OF VIEWS IN AN OBJECT-RELATIONAL DATA WAREHOUSE

Valéria Magalhães Pequeno and Joaquim Nunes Aparício

An information integration system provides a uniform query interface for collecting of distributed and heterogeneous, possibly autonomous, information sources, giving users the illusion that they interrogate a centralized and homogeneous information system. One approach that has been used for integrating data from multiple databases consists in creating integrated views \cite{BLN86,ZHK96,GM97,CEMW01}, which allows for queries to be made against them. In this paper we propose the use of correspondence assertions to formally specify the relationship between the integrated view schema and the source database schemas. In this way, correspondence assertions are used to assert that the semantic of some schema's components are related to the semantic of some components of another schema. Our formalism has the advantages of proving a better understanding of the semantic of integrated view, and of helping to automate some aspects of data integration.

THE DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF DATABASE INTERFACE FOR LOGIC LANGUAGE BASED MOBILE AGENT SYSTEM

JingBo Ni, Xining Li and Lei Song

Mobile Agent system creates a new way for sharing distributed resources and providing multi-located services. With the idea of moving calculation towards resources, generally it occupies less network traffics than the traditional Client/Server model and achieves more flexibilities than the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) architecture. In order to endow agents with the ability of accessing remote data resources, in this paper we discuss the design strategies of Database Interface between a logic programming language (such as Prolog) based Mobile Agent system and a remote DBMS. Multi-threading Database Connection Management architecture is introduced especially for heavy-duty database operations. Moreover three levels of Physical Database Connection assignment (predicate level, agent level and module level) are presented and compared. Different strategies for temporarily holding the database searching results are also given in the paper, where the Result Memory Pool can be built locally, remotely or both. At last two compatible methods are adopted for releasing system resources charged during database operations manually and automatically.

UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEMS OF ENTERPRISE SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATIONS: BEYOND CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS

Sue Newell, Gary David, Traci Logan, Linda Edelman and Jay Cooprider

Many companies continue to implement Enterprise Systems (ES) in order to take advantage of the integrating potential of having a single common system across the organization that can replace a multitude of independent legacy systems. While increasingly popular, research continues to show that such systems are difficult to implement successfully. A number of studies have identified the critical success factors for such implementations. However, in practice, it is often difficult to ensure that these critical factors are in place and are maintained in place across the lifespan of the implementation project. In this paper we identify the socio-political and cultural issues that explain why this is difficult and suggest some meta-level processes (induction, informality and improvisation) that can help to offset the problems with maintaining the critical success factors.

A FORMAL DEFINITION FOR OBJECT-RELATIONAL DATABASE METRICS

Aline Baroni, Coral Calero, Mario Piattini and Fernando Brito e Abreu

Relational databases are the most important in the database world and are evolving to object-relational databases in order to allow the possibility of working with new and complex data and applications. One widely accepted mechanism for assuring the quality of an object-relational database is the use of metrics formally and empirically validated. Also it is important to formalize the metrics for having a better understanding of their definitions. Metrics formalization assures the reliable repetition of their computation and facilitates the automation of metrics collection. In this paper we present the formalization of a set of metrics defined for object-relational databases described using SQL:2003. For doing the formalization we have produced the ontology of the SQL:2003 as a framework for representing the SQL schema definitions. The ontology has been represented using UML and the definition of the metrics has been done using OCL (Object-Constraint Language) which is part of the UML 2.0 standard.

MAPPING TEMPORAL DATA WAREHOUSE CONCEPTS

Ahmed Hezzah and A. Min Tjoa

SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW) today is a suitable and viable option for enterprise data warehousing and one of the few data warehouse products that offer an integrated user interface for administering and monitoring data. In previous works we introduced design and modeling techniques for representing time and temporal information in enterprise data warehouses and discussed generic problems linked to the design and implementation of the Time dimension, which have to be considered for global business processes, such as handling different time zones and representing holidays and daylight saving time (DST). This paper investigates supporting the global exchange of time-dependent business information by mapping those temporal data warehouse concepts to SAP BW components, such as InfoCubes and master data tables.

QUANTITATIVE EVALUATION OF ENTERPRISE INTEGRATION PATTERNS

Tariq Al-Naeem, Feras Dabous, Fethi Rabhi and Boualem Benatallah

The implementation of e-business applications is becoming a widespread practice among competitive organizations. The primary advantage of these applications is in supporting the core organizational Business Processes (BPs) that may span different departments, sometimes organizations. We refer to such applications as Business Process-Intensive applications (BPIAs) where they implement the organization's strategic BPs. A cornerstone activity in implementing BPIA is the architectural design task, which embodies many architectural design decisions, e.g. functionality exposure, access method, new functionality implementation, etc. What makes this task quite complex is the presence of several design approaches that vary considerably in their consequences on various quality attributes. In addition, since BPIAs often embody BPs that are scattered among different departments and organizations, it is natural that more than one stakeholder will be involved in the design process with different, often conflicting, quality goals. To aid in the design process, this paper discusses a number of alternative architectural patterns that can be reused during the architectural design of BPIA. It also proposes a systematic method for selecting among these patterns according to their satisfaction to the quality preferences desired by different stakeholders. To support making informed decisions, we leveraged rigorous Multiple-Attribute Decision Making (MADM) methods, particularly the AHP method. We validate the applicability of this approach using a real capital markets system from the domain of e-finance.

DWG2XML: GENERATING XML NESTED TREE STRUCTURE FROM DIRECTED WEIGHTED GRAPH

Kate Y. Yang, Anthony Lo, Tansel Özyer and Reda Alhajj

The overall XML file length is one of the critical factors when we need to transfer a large amount of data from relational database into XML. Especially in the nested tree structure of XML file, redundant data in the XML file can add more cost on database access, network traffic and XML query processing. Most previous automated relational to XML conversion research efforts use directed graphs to present relations in the database and nested trees in the XML structure. However, they all ignore that different combinations of tree structures in a graph can have a big impact on the XML data file size. This paper addresses this nested structure data file size problem. It proposes a module that can find the most convenient tree structure for the automated relational to XML conversion process. It provides a plan generator algorithm to list all the possible tree structures in a given directed weighted graph. Also it analyzes the data size of each plan and shows the convenient tree structure to the user. It can finally create the targeted XML documents for the user.

SIMULTANEOUS QUERYING OF XML AND RELATIONAL CONTEXTS

Madani Kenab and Tayeb Ould Braham

The presentation of the results of relational queries is flat. The prime objective of this work is to query an XML view of relational data in order to have nesting results of data implemented in the form of flat data. The second objective is to combine, in query results, structured data of a relational database and semi-structured data of an XML database. A FLWR expression (For Let Where Return) of the XQuery language can be nested at various levels in another FLWR expression. In our work, we especially are interested in the nesting of a FLWR expression in the Return clause of another FLWR expression in order to imbricate data in the result. In this paper, we will describe all necessary stages in order to carry out these two objectives.

SECURE CONCURRENCY CONTROL ALGORITHM FOR MULTILEVEL SECURE DISTRIBUTED DATABASE SYSTEMS

Navdeep Kaur, Rajwinder Singh and Hardeep Kaur sidhu

Majority of the research in multilevel secure database management systems (MLS/DBMS) focuses primarily on centralized database systems. However, with the demand for higher performance and higher availability, database systems have moved from centralized to distributed architectures, and the research in multilevel secure distributed database management systems (MLS/DDBMS) is gaining more and more prominence. Concurrency control is an integral part of database systems. Secure concurrency control algorithms [18], [29], [15], [17] proposed in literature achieve correctness and security at the cost of declined performance of high security level transactions. These algorithms infringe the fairness in processing transactions at different security levels. Though the performance of different concurrency control algorithms have been explored extensively for centralized multilevel secure database management systems [11], [31] but to the best of author’s knowledge the relative performance of transactions at different security levels using different secure concurrency control algorithm for MLS/DDBMS has not been reported yet. To fill this gap, this paper presents a detailed simulation model of a distributed database system and investigates the performance price paid for maintaining security with concurrency control in a distributed database system. The paper investigates the relative performance of transactions at different security levels.

ON THE TREE INCLUSION AND QUERY EVALUATION IN DOCUMENT DATABASES

Yangjun Chen and Yibin Chen

In this paper, a method to evaluate queries in document databases is proposed. The main idea of this method is a new top-down algorithm for tree-inclusion. In fact, a path-oriented query can be considered as a pattern tree while an XML document can be considered as a target tree. To evaluate a query S against a document T, we will check whether S is included in T. For a query S, our algorithm needs O(|T|Þ|leaves(S)|) time and no extra space to check the containment of S in document T, where |T| stands for the number of nodes in T and leaves(S) for the leaf nodes of S. Especially, the signature technique can be integrated into a top-down tree inclusion to cut off useless subtree checkings as early as possible.

SCENARIO-BASED EVALUATION OF ENTERPRISE - A TOP-DOWN APPROACH FOR CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER DECISION MAKING

Mårten Simonsson, Åsa Lindström, Pontus Johnson, Lars Nordström, John Grundbäck and Olof Wijnbladh

As the primary stakeholder for the Enterprise Architecture, the Chief Information Officer (CIO) is responsible for the evolution of the enterprise IT system. An important part of the CIO role is therefore to make decisions about strategic and complex IT matters. This paper presents a cost effective and scenario-based approach for providing the CIO with an accurate basis for decision making. Scenarios are analyzed and compared against each other by using a number of problem-specific easily measured system properties identified in literature. In order to test the usefulness of the approach, a case study has been carried out. One CIO needed guidance on how to assign functionality and data within four overlapping systems. The results are quantifiable and can be presented graphically, thus providing a cost-efficient and easily understood basis for decision making. The study shows that the scenario-based approach can make complex Enterprise Architecture decisions understandable for CIOs and other business-orientated stakeholders.

NONPARAMETRIC ANALYSIS OF SOFTWARE RELIABILITY: REVEALING THE NATURE OF SOFTWARE FAILURE DATASERIES

Andreas S. Andreou and Constantinos Leonidou

Software reliability is directly related to the number and time of occurrence of software failures. Thus, if we were able to reveal and characterize the behavior of the evolution of actual software failures over time then we could possibly build more accurate models for estimating and predicting software reliability. This paper focuses on the study of the nature of empirical software failure data via a nonparametric statistical framework. Six different time-series data expressing times between successive software failures were investigated and a random behavior was detected with evidences favoring a pink noise explanation.

A PRACTICAL IMPLEMENTATION OF TRANSPARENT ENCRYPTION AND SEPARATION OF DUTIES IN ENTERPRISE DATABASES - PROTECTION AGAINST EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL ATTACKS ON DATABASES

Ulf Mattsson

Security is becoming one of the most urgent challenges in database research and industry, and there has also been increasing interest in the problem of building accurate data mining models over aggregate data, while protecting privacy at the level of individual records. Instead of building walls around servers or hard drives, a protective layer of encryption is provided around specific sensitive data items or objects. This prevents outside attacks as well as infiltration from within the server itself. This also allows the security administrator to define which data stored in databases are sensitive and thereby focusing the protection only on the sensitive data, which in turn minimizes the delays or burdens on the system that may occur from other bulk encryption methods. Encryption can provide strong security for data at rest, but developing a database encryption strategy must take many factors into consideration. We present column-level database encryption as the only solution that is capable of protecting against external and internal threats, and at the same time meeting all regulatory requirements. We use the key concepts of security dictionary, type transparent cryptography and propose solutions on how to transparently store and search encrypted database fields. Different stored data encryption strategies are outlined, so you can decide the best practice for each situation, and each individual field in your database, to handle different security and operating requirements. Application code and database schemas are sensitive to changes in the data type and data length. the paper presents a policy driven solution that allows transparent data level encryption that does not change the data field type or length.

BENCHMARKING AN XML MEDIATOR

Florin Dragan and Georges Gardarin

In the recent years, XML has become the universal interchange format. Many investigations have been made on storing, querying and integrating XML with existing applications. Many XML-based commercial DBMSs have appeared lately. This paper reports on the analysis of an XML mediator federating several existing XML DBMSs. We measure their storage and querying capabilities directly through their Java API and indirectly through the XLive mediation tool. For this purpose we have created a simple benchmark consisting in a set of queries and a variable test database. The main scope is to reveal the weaknesses and the strengths of the implemented indexing and federating techniques. We analyze two commercial native XML DBMS and an open-source relational to XML mapping middleware. We first pass directly the queries to the DBMSs and second we go through the XLive XML mediator. Results suggest that text XML is not the best format to exchange data between a mediator and a wrapper, and also shows some possible improvements of XQuery support in mediation architectures.

THE HYBRID DIGITAL TREE: A NEW INDEXING TECHNIQUE FOR LARGE STRING DATABASES

Qiang Xue, Sakti Pramanik, Gang Qian and Qiang Zhu

There is an increasing demand for efficient indexing techniques to support queries on large string databases. In this paper, a hybrid RAM/disk-based index structure, called the Hybrid Digital tree (HD-tree), is proposed. The HD-tree keeps internal nodes in the RAM to minimize the number of disk I/Os, while maintaining leaf nodes on the disk to maximize the capability of the tree for indexing large databases. Experimental results using real data have shown that the HD-tree outperformed the Prefix B-tree for prefix and substring searches. In particular, for distinctive random queries in the experiments, the average number of disk I/Os was reduced by a factor of two to three, while the running time was reduced in an order of magnitude.

JDSI: A SOFTWARE INTEGRATION STYLE FOR INTEGRATING MS-WINDOWS SOFTWARE APPLICATIONS IN A JAVA-BASED DISTRIBUTED SYSTEM

Jim-Min Lin, Zeng-Wei Hong and Guo-Ming Fang

Developing software systems by integrating the existing applications/systems over the network is becoming mature and practical. Microsoft Windows operating systems today support a huge number of software applications. It may accelerate the construction of components, if these commercial software applications could be transformed to software components. This paper proposes an architectural style to support a 3-phases process for migrating MS-Windows applications towards a distributed system using Java technologies. This style is aimed to provide a solution with clear documentation and sufficient information that is helpful to a software developer for rapidly integration of MS-windows applications. In final, an example parking lot management system that assembles two MS-Windows applications was developed in this work to demonstrate the usage of this style.

TOWARDS PROCESS-AWARE ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE ENVIRONMENTS

Bela Mutschler, Johannes Bumiller and Manfred Reichert

To stay competitive at the market companies must tightly interlink their software systems with their business processes. While the business process paradigm has been widely accepted in practice, the majority of current software applications is still not yet implemented in a process-oriented way. But even if, process logic is “hard-wired” in the application code leading to inflexible and rigid software systems that do not reflect business needs. In such a scenario quick adaptation of the software systems to changed business processes is almost impossible. Therefore, many software systems are already out of date at the time they are introduced into practice, and they generate high maintenance costs in the following. Due to this unsatisfactory business process support a software system’s return on investment is often low. By contrast technologies which enable the realization of process-aware enterprise environments will significantly contribute to improve the added value of IT to a company’s business. In this paper we characterize process-ware enterprise environments. Additionally we identify promising technologies that particularly enable process-awareness and leading to lower development and maintenance costs as well as higher benefits. We present a conceptual framework, which describes process-ware enterprise environments, and discuss relevant topics.

A FRAMEWORK FOR ERP INTEGRATION

Delvin Grant and Qiang Tu

A conceptual framework for better understanding of ERP integration issues is proposed based on existing literature. Its implications for practice and future research are discussed.

CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS IN ERP PROJECTS: CASE STUDIES IN TWO INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATIONS IN THE NETHERLANDS

Jos J.M. Trienekens, Wouter Kuijpers and Ruud Hendriks

Over the past decade many organizations are increasingly concerned with the implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. Implementation can be considered to be a process of organizational change influenced by different factors of type organizational, technological and human. This paper reports on critical success factors (CSFs) in two actual ERP implementation projects in industry. Critical success factors are being recognized and used in these projects and serve as a reference base for monitoring and controling the implementation projects. The paper identifies both (dis)advantages of CSFs and shortcomings of ERP implementation project management.

USING CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS FOR ASSESSING CRITICAL ACTIVITIES IN ERP IMPLEMENTATION WITHIN SMES

Paolo Faverio, Donatella Sciuto and Giacomo Buonanno

Aim of this research is the investigation and analysis of the critical success factors (CSF) in the implementation of ERP systems within SMEs. Papers in the ERP research field have focused on successes and failures of implementing systems into large organizations. Within the highly differentiated set of computer based systems available, the ERP systems represent the most common solution adopted by large companies to pursue their strategies. On the contrary, until now small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have shown little interest in ERP systems due to the lack of internal competence and resources that characterize those companies. Nevertheless, now that ERP vendors’ offer shows a noteworthy adjustment to SMEs organizational and business characteristics it seems of a certain interest to study and deeply analyze the reasons that can inhibit or foster ERP adoption within SMEs. This approach cannot leave out of consideration the analysis of the Critical Success Factors (CSFs) in ERP implementation: despite their wide outline in the most qualified literature, very seldom these research efforts have been addressed to SMEs. This paper aims at proposing a methodology to support the small medium entrepreneur in identifying the critical factors to be monitored along the whole ERP adoption process.

MUSICAL RETRIEVAL IN P2P NETWORKS UNDER THE WARPING DISTANCE

Ioannis Karydis, Alexandros Nanopoulos, Apostolos N. Papadopoulos and Yannis Manolopoulos

Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks present the advantages of increased size of the overall database offered by a the network nodes, fault-tolerance support to peer failure, and workload distribution. Music file storage and exchange has long abandoned the traditional centralised server-client approach for the advantages of P2P networks. In this paper, we examine the problem of searching for similar acoustic data over unstructured decentralised P2P networks. As distance measure, we utilise the time warping. We propose a novel algorithm, which efficiently retrieves similar audio data. The proposed algorithm takes advantage of the absence of overhead in unstructured P2P networks and minimises the required traffic for all operations with the use of an intelligent sampling scheme. Detailed experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed algorithm compared to an existing baseline algorithm.

A VIDEO DELIVERY METHOD USING AVAILABLE BANDWIDTH OF LINKS WITH BUFFERS AND DISKS

Hideaki Ito and Teruo Fukumura

Scheduling policies and methods are required to deliver videos through network structure since the videos are key contents, and they are continuous media, in order to design the networked multimedia systems. These systems allocate resources before video clips leave their servers for guaranteeing continuous play of the videos. The policies for achieving video delivery play an important role in sense of effective delivery. The method for utilizing the links is a momentous problem, since their capabilities are restricted, and extensions of their capabilities are a difficult issue. The policy shown in this paper is that available network bandwidth is used for delivering one video clip at once. The bandwidth of a link is exclusively used to deliver only one video clip. On the other hand, buffers and disks are established easier than the links. The policy treats these resources to deliver videos complementary in sense that these resources store the delivered video and that they are used for prevent link overflow. Moreover, some simulating results are shown. Then, the amount of buffer space is restricted, and disks are used for storing the video in temporal.

AN INTEGRATIVE FRAMEWORK TO ASSESS AND IMPROVE INFORMATION QUALITY MANAGEMENT IN ORGANIZATIONS

Ismael Caballero, Jesús Rodríguez and Mario Piattini

Information quality has become a decisive factor in organizations since it is the basis for the strategic decisions. So, many researching lines over the last decade have looked at specific data and information quality issues from different standpoints. Taking care about data and information quality goes beyond the definition of data quality dimensions, and today, there is still lack of an integrative framework, which can guide organizations in the assessment and improvement of data and information quality in a coordinated and global way. This paper tries to fulfil this gap by proposing a framework using the Information Management Process (IMP) concept. It consists of two main components: an Information Quality Management Model structured in Maturity Levels (CALDEA) and an Assessment and Improvement Methodology (EVAMECAL). The methodology allows the assessment of an IMP in terms of maturity levels given by CALDEA, which is used as guidance for improvements.

DYNAMIC DATABASE INTEGRATION IN A JDBC DRIVER

Terrence Mason and Ramon Lawrence

Current integration techniques are unsuitable for large-scale integrations involving numerous heterogeneous data sources. Existing methods either require the user to know the semantics of all data sources or they impose a static global view that is not tolerant of schema evolution. These assumptions are not valid in many environments. We present a different approach to integration based on annotation. The contribution is the elimination of the bottleneck of global view construction by moving the complicated task of identifying semantics to local annotators instead of global integrators. This allows the integration to be more automated, scaleable, and rapidly deployable. The algorithms are packaged in an embedded database engine contained in a JDBC driver capable of dynamically integrating data sources. Experimental results demonstrate that the Unity JDBC driver efficiently integrates data located in separate data sources with minimal overhead.

AN INTERNET ACCOUNTING SYSTEM: A LARGE SCALE SOFTWARE SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT USING MODEL DRIVEN ARCHITECTURE

Kenji Ohmori

Software development should be changed from a handcraft industry to industrialization like manufacturing to obtain high productivity. In knowledge creating industry of software development, engineers have to concentrate on core works. Peripheral works should be avoided as much as possible. Model driven architecture helps programmers work mainly in analysis and designing without considering much about implementation. Internet Accounting System, which is a standard model of enterprise systems have been developed with model driven architecture with high productivity.

ESTIMATING PATTERNS CONSEQUENCES FOR THE ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN OF E-BUSINESS APPLICATIONS

Feras T. Dabous, Fethi A. Rabhi, Hairong Yu and Tariq Al-Naeem

Quality requirements play an important role in the success of enterprise e-business applications that support the automation of essential Business Processes (BPs). The functionality of each application may correspond to specific parts of the functionalities in a number of quality-proven monolithic and heterogeneous legacy systems. We refer to the development of such applications as BP Automation. In previous work, we have identified a range of patterns that capture best practices for the architectural design of such applications with the presence of legacy functionality. In this paper, we present and discuss quantitative patterns' consequences models to systematically estimate a number of quality attributes mainly the development effort and maintenance effort. The estimations for these qualities and the preferences provided by the stakeholders would affect the nomination of the architectural approach. A real life case study in the domain of e-finance and in particular capital markets trading is used in this paper to validate these models.

BUILDING APPLICATIONS ABLE TO COPE WITH PROBLEMATIC DATA USING A DATAWARP APPROACH

Stephen Crouch, Peter Henderson and Robert John Walters

As Enterprise systems develop and become ever more interconnected, they have to work with and store ever increasing quantities of data. Inevitably some proportion of this data is incorrect or contains inconsistencies. In general, toady’s systems struggle to cope when they encounter such situations as their logic and operation is based on the implicit assumption that the data they use is consistent if not actually correct. The naïve solution is to strive to eliminate errors and inconsistencies from the data. However, it is clear that no matter how tough we make our procedures and mechanisms for data collection and maintenance activities, we cannot hope to eliminate them entirely. Instead, we need to build tolerance into our applications to permit them to operate notwithstanding shortcomings they may encounter in the data they use. In a series of experiments, we have shown that an application using our “DataWarp” approach to data enjoys a real advantage in one specific environment. This paper describes applying the approach more widely.

A FRAMEWORK FOR PARALLEL QUERY PROCESSING ON GRID-BASED ARCHITECTURE

Khin Mar Soe, Than Nwe Aung, Aye Aye Nwe, Thinn Thu Naing and Nilar Thein

With relations growing larger, distributed, and queries becoming more complex, parallel query processing is an increasingly attractive option for improving the performance of database systems. Distributed and parallel query processing has been widely used in data intensive applications where data of relevance to users are stored at multiple locations. It is becoming a reality. It can also be important in Grid since grid technologies have enabled sophisticated interaction and data sharing between resources that may belong to different departments or organizations. In this paper, we propose a three-tier middleware system for optimizing and processing of distributed queries in parallel on Cluster Grid architecture. The main contribution of this paper is providing transparent and integrated access to distributed heterogeneous data resources, getting performance improvements of implicit parallelism by extending technologies from parallel databases. We also proposed the dynamic programming algorithm for query optimization and site selection algorithm for resource balancing. An example query for employee databases is used throughout the paper to show the benefits of the system.

ONTOLOGY BASED EXTRACTION AND INTEGRATION OF INFORMATION FROM UNSTRUCTURED DOCUMENTS

Naychi Lai Lai Thein, Khin Haymar Saw Hla and Ni Lar Thein

The Semantic Web is an extension of the current Web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation One of the basic problems in the development of Semantic Web is information integration. Indeed, the web is composed of a variety of information sources, and in order to integrate information from such sources, their semantic integration and reconciliation is required. Also, web pages are formatted with HTML which is only a human readable format and the agents cannot understand their meaning. In this paper, we present an approach to extract information from unstructured documents (e.g. HTML) and are converted to standard format (XML) by using source ontology. Then, we translate XML output to local ontology. This paper also describes a key technology for mapping between ontologies to compute similarity measures to express complex relationships among concepts. In order to address this problem, we apply machine learning approach for semantic interoperability in the real, commercial and governmental world.

AN APPLICATION TO INTEGRATE RELATIONAL AND XML DATA SOURCES

Ana Mª Fermoso García, Roberto Berjón Gallinas and Mª José Gil Larrea

Nowadays, special with the Internet explosion, enterprises have to work with data from heterogeneous sources, such as data from conventional databases, or from new sources of Internet world like XML or HTML documents. Organizations have to work with these different data sources at the same time, so, it’s necessary to find some way to integrate this heterogeneous information. In this paper we are going to centre in two main types of data, conventional data from relational databases, and the new web data format XML. Traditional relational database continues being the main data store and XML has become the main format to exchange and representation data on the web. At the end our purpose would be that the necessary data in each moment were in the same and common format, in XML, because this is the most used format on the web. This paper proposes an efficient environment for accessing relational databases from a web perspective using XML. Our environment defines a query system based on XML for relational databases, called XBD. XBD has a full XML appearance, query language and query results are in XML format. For the end user it is similar to query a XML document. This system includes a model to adapt any relational database in order it could be queried in two new query languages, derived from XSL and XQuery languages, and a software tool to implement the functionality of the XBD environment.

CHANGE IMPACT ANALYSIS APPROACH IN A CLASS HIERARCHY

Khine Khine Oo

Change impact analysis is a technique for determining the potential effects of changes on a software system. As software system evolves, changes made to those systems can have unintended impacts elsewhere. Although, object-oriented features such as encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism, and dynamic binding contribute to the reusability and extensibility of systems. However, we have to face the more difficult to identify the effected components due to changes because there exits complex dependencies between classes and attributes. In this paper, we propose change impact analysis approach for a class hierarchy. Our approach is based on the program slicing techniques to extract the impact program fragment with respect to the slicing criterion of change information but aim to minimize unexpected side effects of change. We believe that our impact analysis approach provides the software developer in their maintaining process as well as debugging and testing processes.

CHANGE DETECTION AND MAINTENANCE OF AN XML WEB WAREHOUSE

Ching-Ming Chao

The World Wide Web is a popular broadcast medium that contains a huge amount of information. The web warehouse is an efficient and effective means to facilitate utilization of information on the Web. XML has become the new standard for semi-structured data exchange over the Web. In this paper, therefore, we study the XML web warehouse and propose an approach to the problems of change detection and warehouse maintenance in an XML web warehouse system. This paper has three major contributions. First, we propose an object-oriented data model for XML web pages in the web warehouse as well as system architecture for change detection and warehouse maintenance. Second, we propose a change detection method based on mobile agent technology to actively detect changes of data sources of the web warehouse. Third, we propose an incremental and deferred maintenance method to maintain XML web pages in the web warehouse. We compared our approach with a rewriting approach to storage and maintenance of the XML web warehouse by experiments. Performance evaluation shows that our approach is more efficient than the rewriting ap-proach in terms of the response time and storage space of the web warehouse.

TOWARDS DATA WAREHOUSES FOR NATURAL HAZARDS

Hicham Hajji, Mohand-Said Hacid and Hassan Badir

Data warehousing has emerged as an effective technique for converting data into useful information. It is an improved approach to integrate data from multiple, often very large, distributed, heterogeneous databases and other information sources. This paper examines the possibility of using data warehousing technique in the natural hazards management framework to integrate various functional and operational data which are usually scattered across multiple, dispersed and fragmented systems. We present a conceptual data model for the data warehouse in the presence of various data formats such as geographic and multimedia data. We propose OLAP operations for browsing information in the data warehouse.

XML-BASED SEMANTIC DATABASE DEFINITION LANGUAGE

Naphtali Rishe, Malek Adjouadi, Maxim Chekmasov, Dmitry Vasilevsky, Scott Graham, Dayanara Hernandez and Ouri Wolfson

The current paper analyzes different options for semantic database presentation and describes a presentation format XSDL. Presentation of semantic database in a certain format implies that the format fully preserves the database content. If the database is exported to this format and then imported back to the database engine, the resulting database should be equivalent to the one that was exported. XSDL is used for information exchange, reviewing data from databases, debugging database applications and for recovery purposes. Among other requirements that XSDL meets are support of both schema and data, readability by the user (therefore XSDL is a text format), full preservation of database content, support for simple and fast export/import algorithms, portability across platforms, and facilitation of data exchange.

TOWARDS AN AUTOMATIC DATA MART DESIGN

Ahlem Nabli, Ahlem Soussi, Jamel Feki, Hanêne Ben Abdallah and Faïez Gargouri

The manual design of data warehouse and data mart schemes can be a tedious, error-prone, and time-consuming task. In fact, it is a highly complex engineering task that calls for a methodological support. This paper lays the grounds for an automatic, stepwise approach for the generation of data warehouse and data mart schemes. For this, it first proposes a standard format for OLAP requirement acquisition. Secondly, it defines an algorithm that transforms automatically the OLAP requirements into data marts modelled either as star or constellation schemes. Thirdly, it defines a set of unification rules that merge the generated data mart schemes to construct the data warehouse schema. Finally, it outlines the mapping rules between the data sources and the data marts schemes

AN EFFICIENT APPROACH FOR WEB-SITE ADAPTATION

Seema Jani, Sam Makki and Xiaohua Jia

This paper implements a novel approach defined as the Preference-function Algorithm (PFA) for web-site adaptation. The algorithm extracts future preferences from the users’ past web navigational activities. Server web logs are used to identify users’ navigation behaviors by examining the traverses of various web pages. In this approach, the sessions are modeled as a finite state graph, where each visited web page is defined as a state. Then, traversing among various states provides the framework for determining the interest of the users’.

INTEGRATING WORKFLOW EXTENSIONS INTO A PROCESS-INTEGRATED ENVIRONMENT FOR CHEMICAL ENGINEERING

Michalis Miatidis and Matthias Jarke

Design is one of the most complex and creative tasks undertaken by chemical engineers. The early production stages of chemical design require an adequate support because of their critical impact on the competitiveness of the final products, as well as their environmental impact. In cooperation with researchers and industries from the chemical engineering domain, we have created an integrated flowsheet-centered environment for the support of the early stages of design. This environment has been build on top of the PRIME (Process-Integrated Modelling Environments) framework which empowers the delivery of direct fine-grained method guidance to the engineers through process-integrated tools. In order to address the global need for enterprise integration observed in today's highly competitive global economy, we had to make our system more aware of further organizational aspects of the executed processes. As a solution to this challenge, we integrated a number of workflow extensions inside our system. These extensions enabled PRIME to provide its method guidance further across the inter- and intra-enterprise environment of our enacted processes, with the future goal of seamless interoperating with other external systems of the overall enterprise environment. In this paper, after capturing the rationale behind the need for this integration, we successively describe the integrated environment support built upon PRIME and detail the extensions employed. Finally, we illustrate our approach on a small case study from our experience.

AN INTEGRATED DECISION SUPPORT TOOL FOR EU POLICIES ON HEALTH, TRANSPORT AND ARTISTIC HERITAGE RECOVERY

Kanana Ezekiel and Farhi Marir

In this paper, we describe an ongoing EU funded project (ISHTAR) that develops an advance integrated decision tool (ISHTAR suite) for the analysis of the effects of long-term and short-term policies to improve the quality of the environment, citizen’s health and preservation of heritage monuments. From the background of the project, the paper goes on to explain the integration of a large number of tools aimed at knowledge management and knowledge sharing to allow European cities to make balanced decisions on a wide range of issues such as health, noise, pollution, transport, and monumental heritage. We also identify solutions to various problems and difficulties when attempting to represent and share knowledge.

A UNIFIED FRAMEWORK FOR APPLICATION INTEGRATION - AN ONTOLOGY-DRIVEN SERVICE-ORIENTED APPROACH

Saïd Izza, Lucien Vincent and Patrick Burlat

The crucial problem of the enterprise application integration (EAI) is the semantic integration. This problem is not correctly addressed by today's EAI solutions that focus mainly on the technical and syntactical integration. Addressing the semantic aspect will promote EAI by providing it more consistency and robustness. Some efforts are suggested to solve the semantic problem, but they are still not mature. This article will propose an approach that combines both ontologies and web services in order to overcome the integration problem.

CHOOSING GROUPWARE TOOLS AND ELICITATION TECHNIQUES ACCORDING TO STAKEHOLDERS' FEATURES

Gabriela N. Aranda, Aurora Vizcaíno, Alejandra Cechich and Mario Piattini

The set of groupware tools used during a distributed development process is usually chosen by taking into account predetermined business politics, managers’ personal preferences, or people in charge of the project. However, perhaps the chosen groupware tools are not the most appropriate for all the group members and it is possible that some of them would not be completely comfortable with them. To avoid this situation we have built a model and its supporting prototype tool which, based on techniques from psychology, suggests an appropriate set of groupware tools and elicitation techniques according to stakeholders’ preferences.

CWM-BASED INTEGRATION OF XML DOCUMENTS AND OBJECT-RELATIONAL DATA

Iryna Kozlova, Martin Husemann, Norbert Ritter, Stefan Witt and Natalia Haenikel

In today’s networked world, a plenitude of data is spread across a variety of data sources with different data models and structures. In order to leverage the potential of distributed data, effective methods for the integrated utilization of heterogeneous data sources are required. In this paper, we propose a model for the integration of the two predominant types of data sources, (object-)relational and XML databases. It employs the Object Management Group’s Common Warehouse Metamodel to resolve structural heterogeneity and aims at an extensively automatic integration process. Users are presented with an SQL view and an XML view on the global schema and can thus access the integrated data sources via both native query languages, SQL and XQuery.

QL-RTDB: QUERY LANGUAGE FOR REAL-TIME DATABASES

Cicília R. M. Leite, Yáskara Y. M. P. Fernandes, Angelo Perkusich, Pedro F. R. Neto and Maria L. B. Perkusich

Although some research directed for real-time database, some functionalities provided for these as: control of concurrency, scheduling and query language still are being searched. In order to solve this problems, we consider to extend structured query language (SQL) to be used in a database in real-time, that we will call of query language for database in real-time (QL-RTDB). This article presents the implementation of QL-RTDB. As results, the best execution sequence of the transactions operations must be produced, where the transactions maximum amount attends it deadlines using valid data.

THE INDEX UPDATE PROBLEM FOR XML DATA IN XDBMS

Beda Christoph Hammerschmidt, Martin Kempa and Volker Linnemann

Database Management Systems are a major component of almost every information system. In relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) indexes are well known and essential for the performant execution of frequent queries. For XML Database Management Systems (XDBMS) no index standards are established yet; although they are required not less. An inevitable side effect of any index is that modifications of the indexed data have to be reflected by the index structure itself. This leads to two problems: first it has to be determined whether a modifying operation affects an index or not. Second, if an index is affected, the index has to be updated efficiently - best without rebuilding the whole index. In recent years a lot of approaches were introduced for indexing XML data in an XDBMS. All approaches lack more or less in the field of updates. In this paper we give an algorithm that is based on finite automaton theory and determines whether an XPath based database operation affects an index that is defined universally upon keys, qualifiers and a return value of an XPath expression. In addition, we give algorithms how we update our KeyX indexes efficiently if they are affected by a modification. The Index Update Problem is relevant for all applications that use a secondary XML data representation (e.g. indexes, caches, XML replication/synchronization services) where updates must be identified and realized.

AN ARCHITECTURE FOR LOCATION-DEPENDENT SEMANTIC CACHE MANAGEMENT

Heloise Manica, Murilo S. de Camargo and M.A.R. Dantas

Advances in mobile computing and wireless communications are allowing the development of some approaches which consider the geographical position of a mobile user to access data dependent on it. Location-Dependent Information Services is an emerging class of application that allows new types of queries such as location-dependent queries and continuous queries. In these systems, data caching plays an important role in data management due to its ability to improve system performance and availability in case of disconnection. In mobile environment, data cached can become obsolete when the client moves from a location to a new one. Therefore, cache management requires more than traditional solutions due to mobility and location. This paper presents a new semantic cache scheme for location dependent systems based on spatial property. The proposed architecture is called as Location Dependent Semantic Cache Management – LDSCM. In addition, we examine location-dependent query processing issues and propose a solution for the reorganization of the cached semantic segments.

COCO: COMPOSITION MODEL AND COMPOSITION MODEL IMPLEMENTATION

Naiyana Tansalarak and Kajal T. Claypool

Component-based software engineering attempts to address the ever increasing demand for new software applications by enabling a compositional approach to software construction in which applications are built from pre-fabricated components, rather than developed from scratch. However, the success of component-based development has been impeded by interoperability concerns that often come into play when composing two or more independently developed components. These concerns encompass five incompatibility dimensions: component model, semantic, syntactic, design and platform. In this paper we now propose a CoCo composition model that elevates compositions to first class citizenship status and defines the standard for describing the composition of components transparently to any underlying incompatibilities between the collaborating components; and a CoCo composition model implementation that provides the required support to describe and subsequently execute the composition to produce a composed application. In particular, we advocate the use of XML Schemas as a mechanism to support the composition model. To support the composition model implementation we provide (1) a taxonomy of primitive composition operators to describe the {\em connection} between components; (2) XML documents as a description {\em language} for the compositions; and (3) the development of a set of deployment plugins that address any incompatibilities and enable the generation of the composed application (or composite component) in different languages and component models as well as on different platforms.

SEFAGI: SIMPLE ENVIRONMENT FOR ADAPTABLE GRAPHICAL INTERFACES - GENERATING USER INTERFACES FOR DIFFERENT KINDS OF TERMINALS

Tarak Chaari and Frédérique Laforest

The SEFAGI project takes place in domains where many different user interfaces are needed in the same application. Instead of manually developing all the required windows, we propose a platform that automatically generates the needed code from high level descriptions of these windows. Code generation is done for standard screens and for small screens on mobile terminals. New windows are automatically taken in charge by an execution layer on the terminal. Data adaptation to the different terminals is also provided. A platform-independent window description language has been defined

TABLE-DRIVEN PROGRAMMING IN SQL FOR ENTERPRISE INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Hung-chih Yang and D. Stott Parker

In database systems, business logic is usually implemented in the forms of external processes, stored procedures, user-defined functions, components, objects, constraints, triggers, etc. In this paper, we propose storing business process logic in the attributes of tuples as functions defined by SQL expressions (or user-defined functions). This idea is to treat functions as data, and extend the type system of a relational database to include function datatypes. In short, data and functions are integrated in a relational manner. The introduction of these \emph{lightweight functions} to relational databases gives a basis for applying the software-engineering methodology of \emph{table-driven programming} in SQL. This methodology advocates storing functions and data in tables. The query evaluation process then needs only to be extended with mechanical evaluation of ``joined'' data and functions. This approach can make understanding and maintenance of stored business logic transparent as relational data.

ASPECT-ORIENTED DOMAIN SPECIFIC LANGUAGES FOR ADVANCED TRANSACTION MANAGEMENT

Johan Fabry and Thomas Cleenewerck

Transaction management is a widely used concurrency management technique in distributed systems, although it has some known drawbacks. These have been researched in the past, and many solutions in the form of advanced transaction models have been proposed. However none of these models are currently in use. An important reason for this is that they are too difficult to be used by the application programmer because of their complexity. In this paper we show how this can be solved by letting the application programmer specify these advanced transactions at a much higher abstraction level. To achieve this, we marry the software engineering techniques of Aspect Oriented Programming and Domain-Specific Languages. This allows the programmer to declare advanced transactions separately in one concise specification.

ANALYTICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATION OF STREAM-BASED JOIN

Henry Kostowski and Kajal T. Claypool

Continuous queries over data streams have gained popularity as the breadth of possible applications, ranging from network monitoring to online pattern discovery, have increased. Joining of streams is a fundamental issue that must be resolved to enable complex queries over multiple streams. However, as streams can represent potentially infinite data, it is infeasible to have full join evaluations as is the case with traditional databases. Joins in a stream environment are thus evaluated not over entire streams, but on specific windows defined on the streams. In this paper, we present windowed implementations of the traditional nested loops and hash join algorithms. In our work we analytically and experimentally evaluate the performance of these algorithms for different parameters. We find that, in general, a hash join provides better performance. We also investigate invalidation strategies to remove stale data from the window buffers, and propose an optimal strategy that balances processing time versus buffer size.

WRAPPING AND INTEGRATING HETEROGENEOUS RELATIONAL DATA WITH OWL

Seksun Suwanmanee, Djamal Benslimane, Pierre-Antoine Champin and Philippe Thiran

The number of web-based information systems has been increasing since Internet became a global open network accessible for all. The Semantic Web vision aims at providing supplementary meaningful information (meta-data) about Web resources in order to facilitate automatic processing by machines and interoperability between different systems. In this paper, we focus on an integration of heterogeneous data sources in the semantic Web context using a semantic mediation approach based on ontologies. We use the ontology description language OWL to formalize ontologies of different resources and to describe their relations and correspondences in order to allow the semantic interoperability between them. We propose an architecture adopting mediator-wrapper approach for a mediator based on OWL. Some illustrations of semantic mediation using OWL are also presented in the paper.

A PROTOTYPE FOR INTEGRATION OF WEB SERVICES INTO THE IRULES APPROACH TO COMPONENT INTEGRATION

Susan D. Urban, Vikram V. Kumar and Suzanne W. Dietrich

The ANON environment provides a framework for using events and rules in the integration of EJB components. This research has investigated the extensions required to integrate Web Services into the ANON architecture and execution environment. The ANON language framework and metadata have been extended for Web Services, with enhancements to Web Service interfaces for describing services that represent object manipulation operations as well as component enhancements such as event generation, stored attributes, and externalized relationships between distributed components. Web service wrappers provide the additional ANON functionality for the enhanced Web service interfaces, with a state management facility in the ANON environment providing persistent storage of stored attributes and externalized relationships. The ANON Web service wrappers are client-side, component-independent wrappers for Web Services, thus providing a more dynamic approach to the modification of service interfaces as well as the dynamic entry and exit of participants in the integration process.

VALUE ADDED WEB SERVICES FOR INDUSTRIAL OPERATIONS AND MAINTENANCE

Mika Viinikkala, Veli-Pekka Jaakkola and Seppo Kuikka

Efficient information management is needed at industrial manufacturing plants that compete in the present demanding business environment. Requirements to enhance operation and maintenance (O&M) information management emerge from problems within internal information flows of a plant, supporting the networked organization of O&M, and accomplishing the new demand-driven business model. O&M information management of an industrial process plant is here proposed to be enhanced by value added web services. A service framework will work as a supporting architectural context for the value added services. Information from existing systems, such as automation, maintenance, production control, and condition monitoring systems, is analyzed, refined and used in control activities by the value added services.

REAL-TIME SALES & OPERATIONS PLANNING WITH CORBA: LINKING DEMAND MANAGEMENT WITH PRODUCTION PLANNING

Elias Kirche, Janusz Zalewski and Teresa Tharp

Several existing mechanisms for order processing, such as Available-to-Promise (ATP), Materials Requirements Planning (MRP), or Capable-to-Promise (CTP), do not really include simultaneous capacity and profitability considerations. One of the major issues in the incorporation of profitability analysis into the order management system is the determination of relevant costs in the order cycle, and the real-time access to production parameters (i.e., target quantities based on current cycle time) to be included in the computation of planning and profitability. Our study attempts to provide insights into this novel area by developing a Decision Support System (DSS) for demand management that integrates real-time information generated by process control and monitoring systems into an optimization system for profitability analysis in a distributed environment via CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture). The model can be incorporated into current enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and dynamic use of real-time data from various functional support technologies.

A TREE BASED ALGEBRA FRAMEWORK FOR XML DATA SYSTEMS

Ali El bekai and Nick Rossiter

This paper introduces a framework in algebra for processing XML data. We develop a simple algebra, called TA (Tree Algebra), for processing storing and manipulating XML data, modelled as trees. We present assumptions of the framework, describe the input and the output of the algebraic operators, and define the syntax of these operators and their semantics in terms of algorithms. Furthermore we define the relational and their semantics in terms of algorithms. Examples show that this framework is flexible to capture queries expressed in the domain specific XML query language. As can be seen the input and output of our algebra is a tree, that is the input and output are XML document and the XML document is defined as a tree. We also present algorithms for many of the algebra operators; these algorithms show how the algebra operators such as join, union, complement, project, select, expose and vertex work on nodes of the XML tree or element and attributes of an XML document. Detailed examples show how the algebraic operators work.

DYNAMIC PRE-FETCHING OF VIEWS BASED ON USER-ACCESS PATTERNS IN AN OLAP SYSTEM

Karthik Ramachandran, Biren Shah and Vijay Raghavan

Materialized view selection plays an important role in improving the efficiency of an OLAP system. To meet the changing user needs, many dynamic approaches have been proposed for solving the view selection problem. Most of these approaches use some form of caching to store frequent queries and a replacement policy to replace the infrequent ones. While some of these approaches use demand fetching, where the query is computed only when it is asked, a few others have used a pre-fetching strategy, where certain additional information is used to pre-fetch queries that are likely to be asked in the near future. In this paper, we propose a global pre-fetching scheme that uses user access pattern information to pre-fetch certain candidate views that could be used for efficient query processing within the specified user context. For specific kinds of query patterns, called drill-down analysis, which is typical of an OLAP system, our approach significantly improves the query performance by pre-fetching drill-down candidates that otherwise would have to be computed from the base fact table. We compare our approach against dynamat; a demand fetching based dynamic view management system that is known to outperform optimal static view selection. The comparison is based on the detailed cost savings ratio, used for quantifying the benefits of view selection against incoming queries. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms dynamat and thus, also the optimal static view selection.

SEMANTIC QUERY TRANSFORMATION FOR INTEGRATING WEB INFORMATION SOURCES

Mao Chen, Rakesh Mohan and Richard T. Goodwin

The heterogeneousness and dynamics of web sources are the major challenges to Internet-scale information integration. The information sources are different in contents and query interfaces. In addition, the sources can be highly dynamic in the sense that they can be added, removed, or updated with time. This paper introduces a novel information integration framework that leverages the industry standards on web services (WSDL/SOAP), ontology description language (RDF/OWL), and a commercial database (IBM DB2 Information IntegratorDB2 II [DB2 II]). Taking advantage of the data integration and query optimization capability of DB2 II, this paper focuses on the methodologies to transform a user query to the queries on different sources and to combine the transformation results into a query to DB2 II. Wrapping information sources using web services and annotating them with regard to their contents, query capabilities and the logical relations between concepts, our query transformation engine is rooted in ontology-based reasoning. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first framework that uses web services as the interface of information sources and combines ontology-based reasoning, web services, semantic annotation on web services, as well as DB2 II to support Internet-scale information integration.

A HYBRID CLUSTERING CRITERION FOR R*-TREE ON BUSINESS DATA

Yaokai Feng, Zhibin Wang and Akifumi Makinouchi

It is well-known that multidimensional indices are efficient to improve the query performance on OLAP data. As one successful multi-dimensional index structure, R*-tree, a famous member of the R-tree family, is very popular. The clustering pattern of the objects (i.e., tuples in relational tables) among R*-tree leaf nodes is one of the deceive factors on query performance of range queries (a popular kind of queries on business data). Then, how is the clustering pattern formed? In this paper, we point out that the insert algorithm of R*-tree, especially, its criterion choosing subtrees for new coming objects, determines the clustering pattern of the tuples among the leaf nodes. According to our discussion and observations, it becomes clear that the present insert algorithm of R*-tree can not lead to good clustering pattern of tuples when R*-tree is applied to business data, which greatly degrades query performance. After that, a hybrid clustering criterion for the insert algorithm of R*-tree is introduced. Our discussion and experiments indicate that query performance of R*-tree on business data is improved clearly by the new creation.

SECURING THE ENTERPRISE DATABASE

V. Radha, Ved P. Gulati and N. Hemanth Kumar

Security is gaining importance once computers became indispensable in every organization. As the new concepts like E-Governance in Government and E-Commerce in business circles etc are heading towards reality, security issues penetrated even into the legal framework of every country. Database security acts as the last line of defence to withstand insider attacks and attacks from outside even if all the security controls like perimeter, OS controls have been compromised. Data protection laws such as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, Data protection Act, Sarbanes Oxleys Act are demanding for the privacy and integrity of the data to an extent that the critical information should be seen only by the authorized users which means the integrity of the database must be properly accommodated. Hence, we aim at providing an interface service in between enterprise applications and enterprise database that ensures the integrity of the data. This service acts as a security wrapper around any enterprise database.

CONDITIONS FOR INTEROPERABILITY

Nick Rossiter and Michael Heather

Interoperability remains a challenging area, both at the semantic and organisational levels. The original three-level architecture for databases is replaced by a categorical four-level one, based on concepts, constructions, schema types and data and the mappings between them. Such an architecture provides natural closure as further levels are superfluous. The manipulation of the architecture is done through the Godement calculus which enables arrows at any level to be composed with each other. Two conditions have been identified for interoperability to actually be achieved. Firstly there must be no breakdown of commutativity as exhibited by punctured diagrams. Type forcing may be needed to alleviate such problems. Secondly semantic annotation needs to be at a high enough level. Heyting logic may assist in this task.

EXTENDING OBJECT ORIENTED DATABASES TO SUPPORT THE VIEWPOINT MECHANISM

Fouzia Benchikha and Mahmoud Boufaida

An important dimension in the database technology evolution is the development of advanced/sophisticated database models. In particular, the viewpoint concept receives a widespread attention. Its integration to a data model gives a flexibility for the conventional object-oriented data model and allows one to improve the modeling power of objects. On the other hand, the viewpoint concept can be used as a means to master the complexity of the current systems permitting a distributed manner to develop them. In this paper we propose a data model MVDB (Multi-Viewpoint DataBase model) that extends the object database model with the viewpoint mechanism. The viewpoint notion is used as an approach for a distributed development of a database schema, as a means for object multiple description and as a mechanism for dealing with the integrity constraint problems commonly met in distributed environment.

DATA INTEGRATION AND USER MODELLING: AN APPROACH BASED ON TOPIC MAPS AND DESCRIPTION LOGICS

Mourad Ouziri, Christine Verdier and André Flory

We present in this paper a new way about semantic data integration. We coupled a Topic Maps approach with Description Logics. We propose a Web-based interface of queries based on Topic Maps and a specification of user profiles to complete the interface. This interface adapts the data and the display to each user and guarantees the security and the confidentiality of data. The user profiles are built on description logics concepts to enhance the consistency of the profile access rights and the user affectation to profiles.

ARCO: A LONG-TERM DIGITAL LIBRARY STORAGE SYSTEM BASED ON GRID COMPUTATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE

Han Fei, Paulo Trezentos, Nuno Almeida, Miguel Lourenço, José Borbinha and João Neves

Over the past several years the large scale digital library service has undergone enormous popularity. Arco project is a digital library storage project in Portuguese National library. To a digital library storage system like ARCO system, there are several challenges, such as the availability of peta-scale storage, seamless spanning of storage cluster, administration and utilization of distributed storage and computing resources, safety and stability of data transfer, scalability of the whole system, automatic discovery and monitoring of metadata, etc. Grid computing appears as an effective technology coupling geographically distributed resources for solving large scale problems in the wide area or local area network. The ARCO system has been developed on the Grid computational infrastructure, and on the basis of various other toolkits, such as PostgreSQL, LDAP, and the Apache HTTP server. Main developing languages are C, PHP, and Perl. In this paper, we discuss the logical structure sketch of the digital library ARCO system, resources organization, metadata discovering and usage, the system's operation details and some operations examples, as also the solution of large file transfer problem in Globus grid toolkit

ADAPTING ERP SYSTEMS FOR SUPPORTING DEFENSE MAINTENANCE PROCESSES

Robert Pellerin

The defense sector represents one of the largest potential areas for new ERP sales. Many defense organizations have already implemented ERP solutions to manage and integrate the acquisition, maintenance, and support processes. This paper addresses specifically the defense maintenance management functions that need to be integrated into an ERP solution by adopting the view of a defense repair and overhaul facility. We first discuss the specific nature of the defense maintenance activities, and then we present the difficulties of integrating a maintenance strategy into an ERP solution. We finally conclude by proposing a coherent and integrated ERP structure model for the management of the defense repair and overhaul processes. The model has been partly applied in a Canadian repair and overhaul facility and adapted into the SAP R/3 software.

SEMANTIC DATABASE ENGINE DESIGN

Naphtali Rishe, Armando Barreto, Maxim Chekmasov, Dmitry Vasilevsky, Scott Graham, Sonal Sood and Ouri Wolfson

New types of data processing applications are no longer satisfied with the capabilities offered by the relational data model. One example of this phenomenon is the growing use of the Internet as a source of data. The data on the Internet is inherently non-relational. As a result, demand developed for database management systems natively built on advanced data models. The semantic binary data model (Rishe, 1992), satisfies the criteria for the models required for today’s applications by providing the ability to build rich schemas with arbitrarily flexible relationships between objects. In this paper, we discuss a new design for a semantic database management system which is based on the semantic binary data model. Our challenge was to design and implement a database engine which, while being native to the model, is reasonably efficient on a wide variety of industrial applications, and which surpasses relational systems in performance and flexibility on those applications that require non-relational modelling. Special attention is given to multi-platform support by the semantic database engine.

OBJECT ID DISTRIBUTION AND ENCODING IN THE SEMANTIC BINARY ENGINE

Naphtali Rishe, Armando Barreto, Maxim Chekmasov, Dmitry Vasilevsky, Scott Graham, Sonal Sood and Ouri Wolfson

The semantic binary engine is a database management system built on the principles of the semantic binary data model (Rishe, 1992). A semantic binary database is a set of facts about objects. Objects belong to categories, are connected by relations, and may have attributes. Since the concept of an object is at the core of the data model, upon implementation it is crucial to design efficient algorithms that allow the semantic binary engine to store, retrieve, modify and delete information about objects in the semantic database. In this paper, we discuss the concept of object IDs for object identification and methods for object ID distribution and encoding in the database. Several encoding schemes and their respective efficiencies are discussed: Truncated Identical encoding, End Flag encoding, and Length First encoding.

STORAGE TYPES IN THE SEMANTIC BINARY DATABASE ENGINE

Naphtali Rishe, Malek Adjouadi, Maxim Chekmasov, Dmitry Vasilevsky, Scott Graham, Dayanara Hernandez and Ouri Wolfson

Modern database engines support a wide variety of data types. Native support for all of the types is desirable and convenient for the database application developer, as it allows application data to be stored in the database without further conversion. However, support for each data type adds complexity to the database engine code. To achieve a compromise between convenience and complexity, the semantic binary database engine is designed to support only the binary data type in its kernel. Other data types are supported in the user-level environment by add-on modules. This solution allows us to keep the database kernel small and ensures the stability and robustness of the database engine as a whole. By providing extra database tools, it also allows application designers to get database-wide support for additional data types.

MODELING AND EXECUTING SOFTWARE PROCESSES BASED ON INTELLIGENT AGENTS

M. Ahmed Nacer and F. Aoussat

This paper presents a new approach for modeling and executing software processes based on the concept of multi-agent system. We introduce the modeling process as one of the most important goal of the agent, and we use the concept of “intelligent agent” to give more flexibility when adapting software processes to unexpected changes. This is possible thanks to the multiple capacities of the agent like autonomy and reactivity.

DATA INTEGRATION ISSUES FOR BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE INTEGRATED ENTERPRISE INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Pierre F. Tiako

Business Intelligence (BI) provides the ability to access any type of data inside or across enterprises and to analyze and present them as usable information. To work on business intelligence, an enterprise has to deal with important problems relating to both (1) Data integration and (2) Analysis and presentation of data for strategic decision-making. No matter what the application, the need for business intelligence applies universally. This position paper focuses on Data Integration Issues for Business Intelligence Integrated Enterprise Information Systems.

ASSESSING THE IMPACT OF INTEGRATING A MES TO AN ERP SYSTEM

Young B. Moon and Varun Bahl

Despite of claims by software vendors on positive values of an integrated MES and ERP system, there has been no systematic study conducted to assess and evaluate the impact of such an integrated system on shop floor operations. This paper presents a simulation study to evaluate the impact of the MES integration with the ERP system on production lead times. First, we describe a methodology of using a discrete event computer simulation to address an inherent problem of the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system of handling uncertainties and unexpected events. Then, simulation study results comparing the performances of a manufacturing system with MES and a manufacturing system without MES are presented. The evaluation metric used in this simulation is the production lead time. However, the results obtained in this study can be expanded to more general situations with different evaluation metrics.

AN ARCHITECTURE FRAMEWORK FOR COMPLEX DATA WAREHOUSES

Jérôme Darmont, Omar Boussaïd, Jean-Christian Ralaivao and Kamel Aouiche

Nowadays, many decision support applications need to exploit data that are not only numerical or symbolic, but also multimedia, multistructure, multisource, multimodal, and/or multiversion. We term such data complex data. Managing and analyzing complex data involves a lot of different issues regarding their structure, storage and processing, and metadata are a key element in all these processes. Such problems have been addressed by classical data warehousing (i.e., applied to "simple" data). However, data warehousing approaches need to be adapted for complex data. In this paper, we first propose a precise, though open, definition of complex data. Then we present a general architecture framework for warehousing complex data. This architecture heavily relies on metadata and rests on the XML language, which helps storing data, metadata and domain-specific knowledge, and facilitates communication between the various warehousing processes. Finally, we enumerate the main issues in complex data warehousing.

CONTEXT ANALYSIS FOR SEMANTIC MAPPING OF DATA SOURCES USING A MULTI-STRATEGY MACHINE LEARNING APPROACH

Youssef Bououlid Idrissi and Julie Vachon

Be it on a webwide or inter-entreprise scale, data integration has become a major necessity urged by the expansion of the Internet and of its widespread use for communication between business actors. However, since data sources are often heterogeneous, their integration remains an expensive procedure. Indeed, this task requires prior semantic alignment of all the data sources concepts. Doing this alignment manually is quite laborious especially if there is a large number of concepts to be matched. Various solutions have been proposed attempting to automatize this step. This paper introduces a new framework for data sources alignment which integrates context analysis to multi-strategy machine learning. Although their adaptability and extensibility are appreciated, actual machine learning systems often suffer from the low quality and the lack of diversity of training data sets. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a new notion called ``informational context'' of data sources. We therefore briefly explain the architecture of a context analyser to be integrated into a learning system combining multiple strategies to achieve data source mapping.

METADATA PARADIGM FOR EFFECTIVE GLOBAL INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN THE MNCS

Longy O. Anyanwu, Gladys A. Arome and Jared Keengwe

Multinational business expansion and competition have escalated in the recent years, particularly in Eastern Europe and the third world. Tremendous opportunities, therefore, have been created for many companies and formidable hindrances have been amassed against others. Business failure rates among these multinational enterprises have alarmingly increased beyond expectation. So has their IT implementation. The increasing popularity and use of the Internet which businesses have little control of, are an added complication. This study identifies a matrix of mitigating factors, as well as information-base distribution mechanism, critical to successful GIT implementation in today’s multinational enterprises. The relevance and impact of these factors on the multinational businesses are discussed. Consequently, appropriate solutions for each problem are sug-gested.

CLUSTERING INTERESTINGNESS MEASURES WITH POSITIVE CORREALTION

Xuan-Hiep Huynh, Fabrice Guillet and Henri Briand

Selecting interestingness measures have been an important problem in the knowledge discovery in database research. A lot of measures have been proposed to extract the knowledge from large databases and many authors have introduced the interestingness properties for selecting a good measure for an application. Some measures are good for some application but the others are not, and it is difficult to capture what are the best measures for a given data set. In this paper, we present a new approach to select the groups or clusters of objective interestingness measures that highly correlated in an application and give to the user a small group of measures naturally different in interestingness

A SYSTEM TO INTERPRET AND SUMMARISE SOME PATTERNS IN IMAGES

Hema Nair and Ian Chai

A system that is designed and implemented for automatic interpretation of some patterns in images is described in this paper. The application domain being considered for this system is remote-sensed images. Some patterns such as land, island, water body, river, fire in remote-sensed images are extracted and summarised in linguistic terms using fuzzy sets. A new graphical tool (Multimedia University’s RSIMANA-Remote-Sensing Image Analyser) developed for image analysis which is part of the system is also described in this paper. The objectives of this user-friendly graphical tool include calculation of some feature descriptors such as area, length, perimeter of irregular-shaped objects/patterns, calculation of centroid of irregular objects, and automatic classification of some of the patterns in remote-sensed images such as land, island, water body, river, fire.

SYNTHESISE WEB QUERIES: SEARCH THE WEB BY EXAMPLES

Vishv Malhotra, Sunanda Patro and David Johnson

An algorithm to synthesise a web search query from example documents is described. A user searching for information on the Web can use a rudimentary query to locate a set of potentially relevant documents. The user classifies the retrieved documents as being relevant or irrelevant to his or her needs. A query can be synthesised from these categorised documents to perform a definitive search with good recall and precision characteristics.

FUZZY PATTERN RECOGNITION BASED FAULT DIAGNOSIS

Rafik Bensaadi and Hayet Mouss

In order to avoid catastrophic situations when the dynamics of a physical system (entity in a M.A.S architecture) are evolving toward an undesirable operating mode, particular and quick safety actions have to be programmed in the control design. Classic control (PID and even state model based methods) becomes powerless for complex plants (nonlinear, MIMO and ill-defined systems). A more efficient diagnosis requires an artificial intelligence approach. We propose in this paper the design of a Fuzzy Pattern Recognition System (FPRS) that solves, in real time, the main following problems: 1 Identification of an actual state, 2 Identification of an eventual evolution towards a failure state, 3 Diagnosis and decision-making.

IMPROVEMENT ON THE INDIVIDUAL RECOGNITION SYSTEM WITH WRITING PRESSURE BASED ON RBF

Lina Mi and Fumiaki Takeda

In our previous research work, an individual recognition system with writing pressure using neuro-template of multilayer feedforward network with sigmoid function was developed. Although this system is effective on recognition for known registrant, its rejection capability for counterfeit signature is not enough for commercial use. In this paper, a new activation function is proposed to improve the counterfeit rejection performance of the system on the premise of ensuring the recognition performance for known signature. The experiment results show that the proposed activation function is effective to improve the counterfeit rejection capability of the system with keeping the recognition capability for known signature satisfying compared with the original system with sigmoid function

KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION MODELING THROUGH DIALOGUE BETWEEN COGNITIVE AGENTS

Mehdi Yousfi-Monod and Violaine Prince

The work described in this paper tackles learning and communication between cognitive artificial agents. Focus is on dialogue as the only way for agents to acquire knowledge, as it often happens in natural situations. Since this restriction has scarcely been studied as such in artificial intelligence (AI), until now, this research aims at providing a dialogue model devoted to knowledge acquisition. It allows two agents, in a ’teacher’ - ’student’ relationship, to exchange information with a learning incentive (on behalf of the ’student’). The article first defines the nature of the addressed agents, the types of relation they maintain, and the structure and contents of their knowledge base. It continues by describing the different aims of learning, their realization and the solutions provided for problems encountered by agents. A general architecture is then established and a comment on an a part of the theory implementation is given.Conclusion is about the achievements carried out and the potential improvement of this work.

HOW TO VALUE AND TRANSMIT NUCLEAR INDUSTRY LONG TERM KNOWLEDGE

Anne Dourgnon-Hanoune, Eunika Mercier-Laurent and Christophe Roche

The French nuclear industry deals with technologies which will soon be thirty years old. If such technologies are not renewed they must last for another ten years- or more if the decision is taken to keep them working. There is a risk of technological obsolescence- something which is allowed for in other national and international projects. There is also the question of constant commercial demand- something also considered elsewhere in establishing contracts. Another problem is now beginning to emerge; the continuity and transmission of knowledge and experience concerning these plants. Personnel in the energy sector are being renewed. Most current employees are due to retire in the course of this decade. How is knowledge (both of maintenance and planning) to be transmitted to the new generations ? This knowledge includes written information but also know-how and implicit working assumptions; expertise, experience, self-learning…In the United States the EPRI produced a technical dossier “Capturing high value undocumented knowledge in the Nuclear Industry. Guidelines and methods 1002896 Final report. December 2002.” The problem of knowledge of old technologies is therefore recent, but almost universal. As far as EDF knows, nobody is considering this subject in its entirety. Instead, each technology puts the emphasis on operation (and thus safety) according to a fixed timetable (ten-year visits, end of use). In this perspective the initial knowledge of Requirements can be lost. It can happen, for example, that the need for renewal can oblige the agency to carry out a costly or difficult retro-engineering project so as to recover the original knowledge and technology. If we look ahead, the policy of long term development (notably extending the life of plants) requires us to consider the life-span of the different skills and knowledge required by each environment. So it is necessary to take into account the entire life cycle of a nuclear installation. We are working on organizing all this knowledge and building an innovating solution for easy acquisition, access and sharing knowledge and experiences. First we are creating an ontology-based common language for all involved and defining some applications on Intranet. Ontology, understood as an agreed vocabulary of common terms and meanings shared by a group of people, is a means for representing craft concepts upon which knowledge can be organised and classified. We shall present one of the first applications based on the Logic Diagrams Designer's ontology whose main goals are to keep in memory the craft knowledge about relay circuits schemas and to allow accessing and retrieval information. This choice of ontology as a basis provides an easy and relevant navigation, indexing and search of documents...

AN INFORMATION SYSTEM TO PERFORM SERVICES REMOTELY FROM A WEB BROWSER

M.P. Cuellar, M. Delgado, W. Fajardo and R. Pérez-Pérez

This paper presents the development of BioMen (Biological Management Executed over Network), an Internet-managed system. By using service ontologies, the user is able to perform services remotely from a web browser. In addition, artificial intelligence techniques have been incorporated so that the necessary information may be obtained for the study of biodiversity. We have built a tool which will be of particular use to botanists and which can by accessed from anywhere in the world thanks to Internet technology. In this paper, we shall present the results and how we developed the tool.

COMBINING NEURAL NETWORK AND SUPPORT VECTOR MACHINE INTO INTEGRATED APPROACH FOR BIODATA MINING

Keivan Kianmehr, Hongchao Zhang, Konstantin Nikolov, Tansel Özyer and Reda Alhajj

Bioinformatics is the science of managing, mining, and interpreting information from biological sequences and structures. In this paper, we discuss two data mining techniques that can be applied in bioinformatics: namely, Neural Networks (NN) and Support Vector Machines (SVM), and their application in gene expression classification. First, we provide description of the two techniques. Then we propose a new method that combines both SVM and NN. Finally, we present the results obtained from our method and the results obtained from SVM alone on a sample dataset.

CONSTRUCTION OF DECISION TREES USING DATA CUBE

Lixin Fu

Data classification is an important problem in data mining. The traditional classification algorithms based on decision trees have been widely used due to their fast model construction and good model understandability. However, the existing decision tree algorithms need to recursively partition dataset into subsets according to some splitting criteria i.e. they still have to repeatedly compute the records belonging to a node (called F-sets) and then compute the splits for the node. For large data sets, this requires multiple passes of original dataset and therefore is often infeasible in many applications. In this paper we present a new approach to constructing decision trees using pre-computed data cube. We use statistics trees to compute the data cube and then build a decision tree on top of it. Mining on aggregated data stored in data cube will be much more efficient than directly mining on flat data files or relational databases. Since data cube server is usually a required component in an analytical system for answering OLAP queries, we essentially provide “free” classification by eliminating the dominant I/O overhead of scanning the massive original data set. Our new algorithm generates trees of the same prediction accuracy as existing decision tree algorithms such as SPRINT and RainForest but improves performance significantly. In this paper we also give a system architecture that integrates DBMS, OLAP, and data mining seamlessly.

A RECURRENT NEURAL NETWORK RECOGNISER FOR ONLINE RECOGNITION OF HANDWRITTEN SYMBOLS

Bing Quan Huang and Tahar Kechadi

This paper presents an innovative hybrid approach for online recognition of handwritten symbols. This approach is composed of two main techniques. The first technique, based on fuzzy logic, deals with feature extraction from a handwritten stroke and the second technique, a recurrent neural network, uses the features as an input to recognise the symbol. In this paper we mainly focuss our study on the second technique. We proposed a new recurrent neural network architecture associated with an efficient learning algorithm. We describe the network and explain the relationship between the network and the Markov chains. Finally, we implemented the approach and tested it using benchmark datasets extracted from the Unipen database.

AN APPLICATION OF NON-LINEAR PROGRAMMING TO TRAIN RECURRENT NEURAL NETWORKS IN TIME SERIES PREDICTION PROBLEMS

M. P. Cuéllar, M. Delgado and M. C. Pegalajar

Artificial Neural Networks are bioinspired mathematical models that have been widely used to solve many complex problems. However, the training of a Neural Network is a difficult task since the traditional training algorithms may get trapped into local optimal solutions easily. This problem is greater in Recurrent Neural Networks, where the traditional training algorithms sometimes provide unsuitable solutions. Some evolutionary techniques have also been used to improve the training stage, and to overcome such local optimals solutions, but they have the disadvantage that the time taken to train the network is high. The objective of this work is to show that the use of some non-linear programming techniques is a good choice to train a Neural Network, since they may provide suitable solutions quickly. In the experimental section, we apply the models proposed to train an Elman Recurrent Neural Network in real Time Series Prediction problems.

AGENT-BASED INTRUSION DETECTION SYSTEM FOR INTEGRATION

Jianping Zeng and Donghui Guo

More and more software applications are built on the Internet for its wide distribution, low cost at application deployment. However, for the open property of the Internet, everyone may access the resources you put on it. As a result, there are many attacks, such as Deny of Service, illegal intrusion, etc. So, the security of application becomes a serious problem. Because of the shortcoming of all kinds of firewall systems in ensuring security, intrusion detection system (IDS) becomes popular. There exist many IDS systems, and these systems mainly concentrate on network-based and host-based detection. So, they can’t be applied to application-based detection because their ability of integration with actual applications is too poor. An agent-based intrusion detection system that can be integrated into applications of enterprise information systems very well is proposed. The system architecture, agent structure, integration mechanism, etc, are mainly discussed. In such an IDS system, we focus on three kinds of agents, i.e. client agent, server agent and communication agent. And we explain how to integrate agents with access control model to achieve better security performance. And by introducing standard protocol such as KQML, IDMEF into the design of agent, a more flexible and integratable agent-based IDS is built.

A PROPERTY SPECIFICATION LANGUAGE FOR WORKFLOW DIAGNOSTICS

E. E. Roubtsova

The paper presents a declarative language for workflow property specification. The language has been developed to help analysts in formulating workflow-log properties in such a way that the properties can be checked automatically. The language is based on the Propositional Linear Temporal Logics and the structure of logs. The standard structure of logs is used when building algorithms for property checks. Our tool for property driven workflow mining combines a tool-wizard for property construction, property parsers for syntax checkers and a verifier for property verification. The tool is implemented as an independent component that can extend any process management system or any process mining tool.

A WEB-BASED ARCHITECTURE FOR INDUCTIVE LOGIC PROGRAMMING IN BIOLOGY

Andrei Doncescu, Katsumi Inoue, Muhammad Farmer and Gilles Richard

In this paper, we present a current cooperative work involving different institutes around the world. Our aim is to provide an online Inductive Logic Programming tool. This is the first step in a more complete structure for enabling e-technology for machine learning and bio-informatics. We describe the main architecture of the project and how the data will be formatted for being sent to the ILP machinery. We focus on a biological application (yeast fermentation process) due to its importance for high added value end products.

MULTI-AGENT SYSTEM FORMAL MODEL BASED ON NEGOTIATION AXIOM SYSTEM OF TEMPORAL LOGIC

Xia Youming, Yin Hongli and Zhao Lihong

In this paper we describe the formal senmatic frame and introduce the formal language LTN to express the time and the ability and right of an agent on selecting action and negotiation process in a Multi-Agent system, the change of the right over time, the free action of an agent and the time need by a agent to complete an action. Based on the above, the independent negotiation system has been further complete. In this paper, it is also addressed that the axiom system is rational, validate and negotiation reasoning logic is soundness, completeness and consistent. Key words: Negotiation Axiom, senmatic frame, Multi-Agent system, negotiation reasoning logic, temporal logic

HANDLING MULTIPLE EVENTS IN HYBRID BDI AGENTS WITH REINFORCEMENT LEARNING: A CONTAINER APPLICATION

Prasanna Lokuge and Damminda Alahakoon

Vessel berthing in a container port is considered as one of the most important application systems in the shipping industry. The objective of the vessel planning application system is to determine a suitable berth guaranteeing high vessel productivity. This is regarded as a very complex dynamic application, which can vastly benefited from autonomous decision making capabilities. On the other hand, BDI agent systems have been implemented in many business applications and found to have some limitations in observing environmental changes, adaptation and learning. We propose new hybrid BDI architecture with learning capabilities to overcome some of the limitations in the generic BDI model. A new “Knowledge Acquisition Module” (KAM) is proposed to improve the learning ability of the generic BDI model. Further, the generic BDI execution cycle has been extended to capture multiple events for a committed intention in achieving the set desires. This would essentially improve the autonomous behavior of the BDI agents, especially, in the intention reconsideration process. Changes in the environment are captured as events and the reinforcement learning techniques have been used to evaluate the effect of the environmental changes to the committed intentions in the proposed system. Finally, the Adaptive Neuro Fuzzy Inference (ANFIS) system is used to determine the validity of the committed intentions with the environmental changes.

DEFENDING AGAINST BUSINESS CRISES WITH THE HELP OF INTELLIGENT AGENT BASED EARLY WARNING SOLUTIONS

Shuhua Liu

In the practice of business management, there is a pressing need for good information management instruments that can constantly acquire, monitor and analyze the early warning signals of business crises, thus effectively support decision makers in the early detection of crisis situations. With the development of advanced computing methods and information technology, there bring new opportunities for the construction of such instruments. In this paper, we proposed the use of business life cycle model as a larger framework of guidance for an early warning system of business crises. We also developed a framework for an intelligent agent based early warning system, and discussed the application of soft computing methods in the intelligent analysis of early warning information. This will provide a starting point for the development of intelligent agent based early warning solutions.

USER MODELLING FOR DIARY MANAGEMENT BASED ON INDUCTIVE LOGIC PROGRAMMING

Behrad Assadian and Heather Maclaren

Software agents are being produced in many different forms to carry out different tasks, with personal assistants designed to reduce the amount of effort it takes for the user to go about their daily tasks. Most personal assistants work with user preferences when working out what actions to perform on behalf of their user. This paper describes a novel approach for modelling user behaviour in the application area of Diary Management with the use of Inductive Logic Programming.

A CONCEPTION OF NEURAL NETWORKS IMPLEMENTATION IN THE MODEL OF A SELF-LEARNING VIRTUAL POWER PLANT

Robert Kucęba and Leszek Kiełtyka

The present article focuses on learning methods of self-learning organization (on the example of the virtual power plant), using artificial intelligence. There was multi-module structure of the virtual power plant model presented, in which there were automated chosen learning processes of the organization as well as decision making processes.

KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY FROM THE WEB

Maryam Hazman, Samhaa R. El-Beltagy, Ahmed Rafea and Salwa El-Gamal

The World Wide Web is a rich resource of information and knowledge. Within this resource, finding relevant answers to some given question is often a time consuming activity for a user. In the presented work we construct a web mining technique that can extract information from the web and create knowledge from it. The extracted knowledge can be used to respond more intelligently to user requests within the diagnosis domain. Our system has three main phases namely: a categorization phase, an indexing phase, and search a phase. The categorization phase is concerned with extracting important words/phrases from web pages then generating the categories included in them. The indexing phase is concerned with indexing web page sections. While the search phase interacts with the user in order to find relevant answers to their questions. The system was tested using a training web pages set for the categorization phase. Work in the indexing and search phase is still in going.

MULTIDIMENSIONAL SELECTION MODEL FOR CLASSIFICATION

Dymitr Ruta

Recent research efforts dedicated to classifier fusion have made it clear that combining performance strongly depends on careful selection of classifiers. Classifier performance depends, in turn, on careful selection of features, which on top of that could be applied to different subsets of the data. On the other hand, there is already a number of classifier fusion techniques available and the choice of the most suitable method relates back to the selection in the classifier, feature and data spaces. Despite this apparent selection multidimensionality, typical classification systems either ignore the selection altogether or perform selection along only single dimension, usually choosing the optimal subset of classifiers. The presented multidimensional selection sketches the general framework for the optimised selection carried out simultaneously on many dimensions of the classification model. The selection process is controlled by the specifically designed genetic algorithm, guided directly by the final recognition rate of the composite classifier. The prototype of the 3-dimensional fusion-classifier-feature selection model is developed and tested on some typical benchmark datasets.

MINING VERY LARGE DATASETS WITH SVM AND VISUALIZATION

Thanh-Nghi Do and François Poulet

We present a new support vector machine (SVM) algorithm and graphical methods for mining very large datasets. We develop the active selection of training data points that can significantly reduce the training set in the SVM classification. We summarize the massive datasets into interval data. We adapt the RBF kernel used by the SVM algorithm to deal with this interval data. We only keep the data points corresponding to support vectors and the representative data points of non support vectors. Thus the SVM algorithm uses this subset to construct the non-linear model. We also use interactive graphical methods for trying to explain the SVM results. The graphical representation of IF-THEN rules extracted from the SVM models can be easily interpreted by humans. The user deeply understands the SVM models’ behaviour towards data. The numerical test results are obtained on real and artificial datasets.

USING FUZZY LOGIC FOR PRICING

Acácio Magno Ribeiro, Luiz Biondi Neto, Pedro Henrique Gouvêa Coelho, João Carlos C. B. Soares de Mello and Lidia Angulo Meza

This paper deals with traditional pricing models under uncertainties. A fuzzy model is applied to the classical economical approach in order to calculate the possibilities of economical indices such as profits and losses. A realistic case study is included to illustrate a typical application of the fuzzy model to the pricing issue.

FREE SOFTWARE FOR DECISION ANALYSIS: A SOFTWARE PACKAGE FOR DATA ENVELOPMENT MODELS

Lidia Angulo Meza, Luiz Biondi Neto, João Carlos Correia Baptista Soares de Mello, Eliane Gonçalves Gomes and Pedro Henrique Gouvêa Coelho

Data Envelopment Analysis is based on linear programming problems (LPP) in order to find the efficiency of Decision Making Units (DMUs). This process can be computationally intense, as a LPP has to be run for each unit. Besides, a typical DEA LPP has a large number of redundant constraints concerning the inefficient DMUs. That results in degenerate LPPs and in some cases, multiple efficient solutions. The developed work intends to to fill out a gap in current DEA software packages i.e. the lack of a piece of software capable of producing full results in classic DEA models as well as the capability of using more advanced DEA models. The software package interface as well as the models and solution algorithms were implemented in Delphi. Both basic and advanced DEA models are allowed in the package. Besides the main module that includes the DEA models, there is an additional module containing some models for decision support such as the multicriteria model called Analytic Hierarchic Process (AHP). The developed piece of software was coined as FSDA – Free Software for Decision Analysis

KNOWLEDGE NEEDS ANALYSIS FOR E-COMMERCE IMPLEMENTATION: PEOPLE-CENTRED KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT IN AN AUTOMOTIVE CASE STUDY

John Perkins, Sharon Cox and Ann-Karin Jorgensen

A UK car manufacturer case study provides a focus upon the problem of aligning transactional information systems used in e-commerce with the necessary human skills and knowledge to make them work effectively. Conventional systematic approaches to analysing learning needs are identified in the case study, which identifies some shortcomings when these are applied to electronically mediated business processes. A programme of evaluation and review undertaken in the case study is used to propose alternative ways of implementing processes of developing and sharing knowledge and skills as part of the facilitation of networks of knowledge workers working with intra and inter-organisational systems. The paper concludes with a discussion on the implications of these local outcomes alongside some relevant literature in the area of knowledge management systems. This suggests that the cultural context constitutes a significant determinant of initiatives to manage, or at least influence, knowledge based skills in e-commerce applications.

EXTRACTING MOST FREQUENT CROATIAN ROOT WORDS USING DIGRAM COMPARISON AND LATENT SEMANTIC ANALYSIS

Zvonimir Rados, Franjo Jovic and Josip Job

A method for extracting root words from Croatian language text is presented. The described method is knowledge-free and can be applied to any language. Morphological and semantic aspects of the language were used. The algorithm creates morph-semantic groups of words and extract common root for every group. For morphological grouping we use digram comparison to group words depending on their morphological similarity. Latent semantic analysis is applied to split morphological groups into semantic subgroups of words. Root words are extracted from every morpho-semantic group. When applied to Croatian language text, among hundred most frequent root words, produced by this algorithm, there were 57 grammatically correct and 32 FAP (for all practical purposes) correct root words.

IMPROVED OFF-LINE INTRUSION DETECTION USING A GENETIC ALGORITHM

Pedro A. Diaz-Gomez and Dean F. Hougen

One of the primary approaches to the increasingly important problem of computer security is the Intrusion Detection System. Various architectures and approaches have been proposed including: Statistical, rule-based approaches; Neural Networks; Immune Systems; Genetics Algorithms; and Genetic Programming. This paper focuses on the development of an off-line Intrusion Detection System to analyze a Sun audit trail file. Off-line intrusion detection can be accomplished by searching audit trail logs of user activities for matches to patterns of events required for known attacks. Because such search is NP-complete, heuristic methods will need to be employed as databases of events and attacks grow. Genetic Algorithms can provide appropriate heuristic search methods. However, balancing the need to detect all possible attacks found in an audit trail with the need to avoid false positives (warnings of attacks that do not exist) is a challenge, given the scalar fitness values required by GAs. This study discusses a fitness function independent of variable parameters to overcome this problem. It also describes extending the system to account for the possibility that intrusions are either mutually exclusive or not mutually exclusive.

AN INTEGRATED FRAMEWORK FOR RESEARCH IN ORGANIZATIONAL KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

Sabrina S. S. Fu and Matthew K. O. Lee

Knowledge is an important key asset to many organizations. Organizations which can manage knowledge effectively are expected to gain competitive advantage. Information technologies have been widely employed to facilitate Knowledge Management (KM). This paper reviews and synthesise the main prior conceptual and empirical literature, resulting in a comprehensive framework for research in IT-enabled KM at the organizational level. The framework aids the understanding and classification of KM related research; and the generation of potential hypotheses for future research.

A CRYPTOGRAPHIC APPROACH TO LANGUAGE IDENTIFICATION: PPM

Ebru Celikel

In this study, the adaptive statistical modeling technique called Prediction by Partial Matching (PPM) is used for written language discrimination. PPM can well serve as a cryptographic tool in that, as long as the algorithm itself is unknown to the third parties, it represents the plaintext in a hard-to-recover form by encoding it. Furthermore, PPM algorithm yields lossless compression to far better rates (in bits per character –bpc) than that of conventional compression tools. Trained version of PPM is employed for implementation. Language identification experiment results obtained on sample texts from English, French and Turkish Corpora are given. The rate of success yielded that the performance of the system is highly dependent on the diversity, as well as the target text and training text file sizes. In practice, if the training text itself is kept secret, the system would provide cryptographic security to promising degrees.

SYSTEMATIC GENERATION IN DCR EVALUATION PARADIGM : APPLICATION TO THE PROTOTYPE CLIPS SYSTEM

Mohamed Ahafhaf

In this paper we present an extension of DCR evaluation method tested on a spoken language understanding and dialog system. It should allow a deep evaluation of spoken language understanding and dialog systems. The key point of our method is the use of a linguistic typology in order to generate an evaluation corpus that covers a significant number of the linguistic phenomena we want to evaluate our system on. This allows having a more objective and deep evaluation of spoken language understanding and dialog systems.

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SUPPORT FOR SYSTEM ENGINEERING COMMUNITY

Olfa Chourabi, Mohamed Ben Ahmed and Yann Pollet

Knowledge is recognized as a crucial ressource in today’s knowledge intensive organizations. Creating effective Knowledge Management structures is one of the key success factors in System process improvement initiatives (like the Capability Maturity Model , Spice , Trillium , etc.). This contribution aims to provide a starting point for discussions on how to design a Knowledge Management system that support System engineering organizations. After motivating the problem domain, we introduce a conceptual architecture supporting continuous learning and reuse of all kinds of experiences from the System Engineering (SE) domain and present the underlying methodology

VISUAL SVM

François Poulet

We present a cooperative approach using both Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithms and visualization methods. SVM are widely used today and often give high quality results, but they are used as "black-box", (it is very difficult to explain the obtained results) and cannot treat easily very large datasets. We have developed graphical methods to help the user to evaluate and explain the SVM results. The first method is a graphical representation of the separating frontier quality (it is presented for the SVM case, but can be used for any other boundary like decision tree cuts, regression lines, etc). Then it is linked with other graphical methods to help the user explaining SVM results. The information provided by these graphical methods can also be used in the SVM parameter tuning stage. These graphical methods are then used together with automatic algorithms to deal with very large datasets on standard personal computers. We present an evaluation of our approach with the UCI and the Kent Ridge Bio-medical data sets.

SYMBOLIC KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION IN TRANSCRIPT BASED TAXONOMIES

Philip Windridge, Bernadette Sharp and Geoff Thompson

The aim of this paper is to introduce a design for the taxonomical representation of participants’ instantial meaning-making, as the basis for providing a measure of ambiguity and contestation, during a social activity from which a transcript has been produced. We use hyponymy and meronymy as the basis for our taxonomies and adopt the System Network formalism as the basis for their representation. We achieve an integration of transcript and taxonomy using an XML based ‘satellite’ system of data storage which allows for the addition of an unlimited number of analyses stored using the same system. This is possible because of the separation of transcript content data from metadata. Content data forms a ‘Root’ document which can then ‘mapped’ to by an arbitrary number of ‘Descriptor’ documents. As a minimum configuration, Transcript Based Taxonomies require a Root document, a Taxonomy Descriptor and a document containing transcript specific data called an SLA Descriptor. This system automatically confers instantial meanings by mapping Descriptor document elements to elements in the Root. Subsequent references to Root elements automatically include all other mappings to that Root element. Part of this mapping also includes the sequence of Root elements, accommodating the diachronic representation of meaning-making. Together with a number of methods that identify specific areas of ambiguity and contestation, which use attributes in the Taxonomy Descriptor XML elements, this diachronic representation provides the basis for measuring ambiguity and contestation.

ENTERPRISE ANTI-SPAM SOLUTION BASED ON MACHINE LEARNING APPROACH

Igor Mashechkin, Mikhail Petrovskiy and Andrey Rozinkin

Spam-detection systems based on traditional methods have several obvious disadvantages like low detection rate, necessity to regularly update knowledge bases, absence of personalization. New intelligent methods for spam detection that use statistical and machine-learning algorithms solve these problems successfully. But these methods are not wide-used in spam classification for enterprise-level mail servers because of their high resources consumption and insufficient accuracy in terms of false-positive errors. In this paper we present the solution based on precise and fast algorithm, classification quality of which is better than Naïve-Bayes method’s that is most widespread now. The problem of time efficiency that is typical for learning algorithms is solved using multi-agent architecture that allows easily scale system and build uniform corporate system for spam detection based on heterogeneous enterprise mail system. Pilot program implementation and its experimental evaluation for standard data sets, and on real flows of mail have demonstrated that our approach outperforms existing learning and traditional methods of spam filtering. That allows to consider it as a promising platform for construction of enterprise spam filtering systems.

A SURVEY OF CASE-BASED DIAGNOSTIC SYSTEMS FOR MACHINES

Erik Olsson

Electrical and mechanical equipment such as gearboxes in an industrial robot or electronic circuits in an industrial printer sometimes fail to operate as intended. The faulty component can be hard to locate and replace and it might take a long time to get an enough experienced technician to the spot. In the meantime thousands of dollars may be lost due to a delayed production. Systems based on case-based reasoning are well suited to prevent this kind of hold in the production. Their ability to reason from past cases and to learn from new ones is a powerful method to use when a failure in a machine occurs. The system is able to automatically search its library of past cases and propose a solution to the problem. A less experienced technician can use this solution and quickly repair the machine. Case-based reasoning systems used for diagnosis of machines is a young field of research and it shows promising results for the future

A BAYESIAN NETWORKS STRUCTURAL LEARNING ALGORITHM BASED ON A MULTIEXPERT APPROACH

Francesco Colace, Massimo De Santo, Mario Vento and Pasquale Foggia

The determination of Bayesian network structure, especially in the case of large domains, can be complex, time consuming and imprecise. Therefore, in the last years, the interest of the scientific community in learning Bayesian network structure from data is increasing. This interest is motivated by the fact that many techniques or disciplines, as data mining, text categorization, ontology building, can take advantage from structural learning. In literature we can find many structural learning algorithms but none of them provides good results in every case or dataset. In this paper we introduce a method for structural learning of Bayesian networks based on a multiexpert approach. Our method combines the outputs of five structural learning algorithms according to a majority vote combining rule. The combined approach shows a performance that is better than any single algorithm. We present an experimental validation of our algorithm on a set of “de facto” standard networks, measuring performance both in terms of the network topological reconstruction and of the correct orientation of the obtained arcs.

A BAYESIAN APPROACH FOR AUTOMATIC BUILDING LIGHTWEIGHT ONTOLOGIES FOR E-LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

Francesco Colace, Massimo De Santo, Mario Vento and Pasquale Foggia

In the last decade the term “Ontology” has become a fashionable word inside the Knowledge Engineering Community. Although there are several methodologies and methods for building ontologies they are not fully mature if we compare them with software and knowledge engineering techniques. In literature the main approaches to solve this problem aim to facilitate manual ontology engineering by providing natural language processing tools or skeleton methods. Other approaches rely on machine learning and automated language processing techniques in order to extract concepts and relations from structured or unstructured data such as databases and text. This second approach is more interesting and fashionable but shows very poor results. On the other hand the concept of ontology is not unique. In this paper we propose a novel approach for building university curricula ontology through analysis of real data: answers of students to final course tests. In this paper the term ontology means Lightweight Ontology: a taxonomy with more semantic value In fact teachers design these tests keeping in mind the main topics of course knowledge domain and their semantic relation. The ontology building is accomplished by means of Bayesian Networks. The proposed method is composed by two steps: the first one uses a structural learning multi-expert system in order to build a Bayesian Network from data analysis. In the second step the obtained Bayesian Network is translated in the course ontology. This approach can be useful for performing subsequent inference and knowledge extraction tasks as for example the updating of lesson’s sequencing in e-learning environment or for improving intelligent tutoring systems performance.

A CLUSTER FRAMEWORK FOR DATA MINING MODELS - AN APPLICATION TO INTENSIVE MEDICINE

Manuel Santos, João Pereira and Álvaro Silva

Clustering is a technique widely applied in Data Miming problems due to the granularity, accuracy and adjustment of the models induced. Although the referred results, this approach generates a considerable large set of models which difficult the application to new cases. This paper presents a framework to deal with the enounced problem supported by a three-dimensional matrix structure. The usability and benefits of this instrument are demonstrated trough a case study in the area of intensive medicine.

QUALITY CONTENT MANAGEMENT FOR E-LEARNING: GENERAL ISSUES FOR A DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM

Erla Morales and Francisco García

In today’s world, reusable learning object concepts and standards for their treatment represent an advantage for knowledge management systems to whatever kind of business which supports an on-line system. Users are able to manage and reuse content according to their needs without interoperability problems. The possibility of importing learning objects for e-learning aim to increase their information repository but the learning object quality is not guaranteed. Due to the great importance of knowledge and its suitable management for e-learning, this work proposes a system to manage quality learning objects or units of learning to support teachers to select the best content to structure their course. To achieve this we suggest two subsystems: First, an importation, normalization and evaluation subsystem; and second, a selection, delivery and post evaluation subsystem.

INTELLIGENT SOLUTION EVALUATION BASED ON ALTERNATIVE USER PROFILES

Georgios Bardis, Georgios Miaoulis and Dimitri Plemenos

The MultiCAD platform is a system that accepts the declarative description of a scene (e.g. a building) as input and generates the geometric descriptions that comply with the specific description. Its goal is to facilitate the transition from the intuitive hierarchical decomposition of the scene to its concrete geometric representation. The aim of the present work is to provide the existing system with an intelligent module that will capture, store and apply user preferences in order to eventually automate the task of solution selection. A combination of two components based on decision support and artificial intelligence methodologies respectively are currently being implemented. A method is also proposed for the fair and efficient comparison of the results.

IMPLEMENTATION OF A HYBRID INTRUSION DETECTION SYSTEM USING FUZZYJESS

Aly El–Semary, Janica Edmonds, Jesús González and Mauricio Papa

This paper describes an implementation of a fuzzy logic inference engine that is used as a part of a Hybrid Fuzzy Logic Intrusion Detection System. A data-mining algorithm is used off-line to produce fuzzy-logic rules and capture features of interest in network traffic. Using an inference engine, the intrusion detection system evaluates these rules and gives network administrators indications of the firing strength of the ruleset. The inference engine implementation is based on the Java Expert System Shell (Jess) from Sandia National Laboratories and FuzzyJess available from the National Research Council of Canada. Examples and experimental results using data sets from MIT Lincoln Laboratory demonstrate the potential of the approach.

A DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM BASED ON NEURO-FUZZY SYSTEM FOR RAILROAD MAINTENANCE PLANNING

Michele Ottomanelli, Mauro Dell’Orco and Domenico Sassanelli

Optimization of Life Cycle Cost (LCC), related to the railroad maintenance, is one of the main goals of the railways managers. To obtain the best possible balance between safety and operating costs, “on condition” maintenance is more and more used; that is, a maintenance intervention is planned only when and where necessary. Nowadays, the conditions of railways are monitored through special diagnostic trains: such trains, like Archimede, the diagnostic train of Italian National Railways, measure simultaneously every 50 cm a number of dozens of characteristic quantities. Therefore, they provide with a vast amount of data, to be analyzed through an appropriate Decision Support System (DSS), in order to plan an efficient on condition maintenance. However, even the most up-to-date DSSs have some drawbacks: first of all, they are based on a binary logic with rigid thresholds, restricting their flexibility in use; additionally, they adopt considerable simplifications in the rail track deterioration model. In this paper, we present a DSS able to overcome these drawbacks: based on fuzzy logic, it is able to handle thresholds expressed as a range, an approximate number or even a verbal value; moreover, through artificial neural networks it is possible to obtain more likely the rail track deterioration models. The proposed model can analyze the data available for a given portion of rail-track and then it plans the maintenance, optimizing the avail-able resources.

SCENARIO MANAGEMENT: PROCESS AND SUPPORT

M. Daud Ahmed and David Sundaram

Scenario planning is a widely accepted management tool for decision support activities. Scenario planning, development, organisation, analysis, and evaluation are generally quite complex processes. Systems that purport to support these processes are complex and difficult to use and do not fully support all phases of scenario management. Though traditional Decision Support Systems (DSS) provide strong database, modelling and visualisation capabilities for the decision maker they do not explicitly support scenario management well. This paper presents an integrated life cycle approach for scenario driven flexible decision support. The proposed processes help the decision maker with idea generation, scenario planning, development, organisation, analysis, and execution. We also propose a generalised scenario evaluation process that allows homogeneous and heterogeneous scenario comparisons. This research develops a domain independent, component-based, modular framework and architecture that support the proposed scenario management process. The framework and architecture have been validated through a concrete prototype.

TRANSFERRING PROBLEM SOLVING STRATEGIES FROM THE EXPERT TO THE END USERS - SUPPORTING UNDERSTANDING

Anne Håkansson

To support sharing knowledge between people in an organisation, new types of systems are needed to transfer domain knowledge and problem solving strategies from an expert to end users and thereby making the knowledge available and applicable in a specific domain. However, to make the knowledge available these systems usually use a small number of views for displaying the contents of the system but the end users may use several different views. Moreover to apply the knowledge in the organisation, the systems need a way of illustrating the reasoning strategies involved in an interpretation of the knowledge to reach conclusions. One solution is to incorporate different diagrams knowledge management systems to facilitate the user’s grasping of the knowledge and the strategies. This paper describes the manners knowledge management systems can facilitate transferring problem solving strategies from a domain expert to different kinds of end users. To this objective, we suggest using visualisation and graphical diagrams together with simulation to support transferring problem solving strategies from a domain expert to end users. Visualisation can support end users to follow the reasoning strategy of the system more easily (Håkansson 2003:a; Håkansson 2003:b). This visualisation includes static presentation and dynamic presentation of rules and facts in the knowledge base, which are used during execution of the system. The static illustrates how different rules are statically related in sequence diagram of the Unified Modelling Language (UML). The dynamic visualises the rules used and the facts relevant to a specific consultation, i.e., the presentation depends on the input inserted by the users. This is illustrated in collaboration diagram of the UML. The dynamic presentation is also to be used to simulate of the reasoning strategy for particular session.

CLINICAL DECISION SUPPORT BY TIME SERIES CLASSIFICATION USING WAVELETS

Markus Nilsson, Peter Funk and Ning Xiong

Clinicians do sometimes need help with diagnoses, or simply need reinsurance that they make the right decision. This could be provided to the clinician in the form of a decision support system. We have designed and implemented a decision support system for the classification of time series. The system is called HR3Modul and is designed to assist clinicians in the diagnosis of respiratory sinus arrhythmia. Two parallel streams of physiological time series are analysed for the classification task. Patterns are retrieved from one of the time series by the support of the other time series. These patterns are transformed with wavelets and matched for similarity by Case-Based Reasoning. Pre-classified patterns are stored and are used as knowledge in the system. The amount of patterns that have to be matched for similarity is reduced by a clustering technique. In this paper, we show that classification of physiological time series by wavelets is a viable option for clinical decision support.

SOFTWARE MAINTENANCE EXPERT SYSTEM (SMXPERT) - A DECISION SUPPORT INSTRUMENT

Alain April and Jean-Marc Desharnais

Maintaining and supporting the software of an organization is not an easy task, and software maintainers do not currently have access to tools to evaluate strategies for improving the specific activities of software maintenance. This article presents a knowledge-based system which helps in locating best practices in a software maintenance capability maturity model (SMmm). The contributions of this paper are: 1) to instrument the maturity model with a support tool to aid software maintenance practitioners in locating specific best practices; and 2) to describe the knowledge-based approach and system overview used by the research team.

STRATEGIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS ALIGNMENT - A DECISION SUPPORT APPLICATION FOR THE INTERNET ERA

David Lanc and Lachlan MacKinnon

Strategic information systems planning, SISP, methods have proven organisationally complex to utilise, despite 40 years of research and evolution of Information Systems, IS, in the organisational context. The diverse nature of organisational strategy and environmental factors have been mooted as primary causes. On one hand, confusion exists in the literature due to divergent, deficient definitions of SISP. On the other, a lack of distinction exists between SISP as a planning process, and the broader alignment of organisational direction with the IS capability that provides the context for sustainable IS intellectual and cultural integration. Consequently, no methods or models for alignment of IS and organisational activities exist that have both validity in the literature and sustainability in practice. HISSOM (Holistic Information Systems Strategy for Organisational Management) is a practical, holistic model that co-ordinates and facilitates cohesive alignment of organisational needs and the IS capability required to meet those needs, at (1) stakeholder; (2) feedback metrics; (3) strategy and change management; and (4) organisational culture and capability levels. HISSOM was initially developed as a logical extension of the IS-alignment literature, and has been validated by action research in several significant studies in different industries, markets and organisational settings. The HISSOM model has been revised in the light of these studies, and a practical, Web-based decision support application, the HISSOM Decision Support Advisor, HDSA, is now under development, to promote wider use of the model and obtain evolutionary feedback from the user community. A synthesis of the development of HISSOM and work on designing the HDSA architecture is described, together with the impact of this research on extending the field of SISP and IS-alignment.

USING DMFSQL FOR FINANCIAL CLUSTERING

Ramón Alberto Carrasco, María Amparo Vila and José Galindo

At present we have a dmFSQL server available for Oracle© Databases, programmed in PL/SQL. This server allows us to query a Fuzzy or Classical Database with the dmFSQL language (Data Mining Fuzzy SQL) for any data type. The dmFSQL language is an extension of the SQL language, which permits us to write flexible (or fuzzy) conditions in our queries to a fuzzy or traditional database. In this paper we propose the use of the dmFSQL language for fuzzy queries as one of the techniques of Data Mining which can be used to obtain the clustering results in real time. This enables us to evaluate the process of extraction of information (Data Mining) at both a practical and a theoretical level (aplications in some Spanish Saving Banks). We present a new version of the prototype, called DAPHNE, for clustering wich use dmFSQL. We consider that this model satisfies the requirements of Data Mining systems (handling of different types of data, high-level language, efficiency, certainty, interactivity, etc) and this new level of personal configuration makes the system very useful and flexible

EXECUTION OF IMPERATIVE NATURAL LANGUAGE REQUISITIONS BASED ON UNL INTERLINGUA AND SOFTWARE COMPONENTS

Flávia Linhalis and Dilvan de Abreu Moreira

This paper describes the use of an Interlingua as a new approach to the execution of imperative natural language (NL) requisitions. Our goal is to embed a natural language interface into applications to allow the execution of users requisitions, described in natural language, through the activation of specific software components. The advantage of our approach is that natural language requisitions are first converted to an interlingua, UNL (Universal Networking Language), before the suitable components, methods and arguments are retrieved to execute each requisition. The interlingua allows the use of different human languages in the requisition (other systems are restricted to English). The NL-UNL conversion is preformed by the HERMETO system. In this paper, we also describe SeMaComp (Semantic Mapping between UNL relations and Components), a module that extracts semantic relevant information from UNL sentences and uses this information to retrieve the appropriated software components.

WEB USAGE MINING USING ROUGH AGGLOMERATIVE CLUSTERING

Pradeep Kumar, P. Radha Krishna, Supriya Kumar De and S. Bapi Raju

Tremendous growth of the web world incorporates application of data mining techniques to the web logs. Data Mining and World Wide Web encompasses an important and active area of research. Web log mining is analysis of web log files with web pages sequences. Web mining is broadly classified as web content mining, web usage mining and web structure mining. Web usage mining is a techniques to discover usage patterns from Web data, in order to understand and better serve the needs of Web-based applications. This paper demonstrates a rough set based upper similarity approximation method to cluster the web usage pattern. Results were presented using clickstream data to illustrate our technique.

A LINGUISTIC FUZZY METHOD TO STUDY ELECTRICITY MARKET AGENTS

Santiago Garcia-Talegon and Juan Moreno-Garcia

The aim of this paper is to study the behavior of the agents that participate in the Spanish electricity market, for this purpose, the data that the Market Operator provides us after the period of confidentiality are analyzed. The objective is to know the operation to simulate the offerings of blocks the some of them. Market participants are companies authorized to participate in the electricity production market as electricity buyers and sellers. The economic management of the electricity market is entrusted to Iberico Market Operator of Energy (MO). A fuzzy method has been created. It is based on the hour and in the matches obtained of the previous day at this hour, and it is capable of model the behavior that is going to have an agent of the electric market in each hour.

A METHODOLOGY FOR INTELLIGENT E-MAIL MANAGEMENT

Francisco P. Romero, Jose A. Olivas and Pablo Garcés

We present, in the context of the intelligent Information Retrieval, a soft-computing based methodology that enables the efficient e-mail management. We use fuzzy logic technologies and a data mining process for automatic classification of large amounts of e-mails in a folder organization. It is also presented a process to deal with the incoming messages to keep the achieved structure. The aim is to make possible an optimum exploitation of the information contained in these messages. Therefore, we apply Fuzzy Deformable Prototypes for the knowledge representation. The effectiveness of the method has been proved by applying these techniques in an IR system. The documents considered are composed by a set of e-mail messages produced by some distribution lists with different subjects and languages.

ANATOMY OF A SECURE AND SCALABLE MULTIAGENT SYSTEM FOR EVENT CAPTURE AND CORRELATION

Timothy Nix, Kenneth Fritzsche and Fernando Maymi

Event monitoring and correlation across a large network is inherently difficult given limitations in processing with regards to the huge quantity of generated data. Multiple agent systems allow local processing of events, with certain events or aggregate statistics being reported to centralized data stores for further processing and correlation by other agents. This paper presents a framework for a secure and scalable multiagent system for distributed event capture and correlation. We will look at what requirements are necessary to implement a generic multiagent system from the abstract view of the framework itself. We will propose an architecture that meets these requirements. Then, we provide some possible applications of the multiagent network within the described framework.

PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT AND CONTROL IN LOGISTICS SERVICE PROVIDING

Elfriede Krauth, Hans Moonen, Viara Popova and Martijn Schut

Planning is the process of assigning individual tasks to resources at a certain point in time. Initially a manual job, however, in the past decades information systems have largely overtaken this role, especially in industries such as (road-) logistics. This paper focuses on the performance parameters and objectives that play a role in the planning process. In order to gain insight in the factors that should play a role when designing a new software system for Logistical Service Providers (LSPs). Therefore we study the area of Key Performance Indicators (KPI). Typically, KPIs are used in a post-ante context: to evaluate the past performance of a company. We reason that KPIs could be utilized in the planning phase as well. The paper describes the extended literature survey that we performed, and introduces a novel framework that captures the dynamics of competing KPIs, by positioning them in the practical context of an LSP. This framework could be valuable input in the design of agent-based information systems, capable of incorporating the business dynamics of today’s LSPs.

DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR AFFORDABLE HOUSING

Deidre E. Paris

This research used neural networks to develop a decision support system, and model the relationship between one’s living environment and residential satisfaction. Residential satisfaction was investigated at two affordable housing multifamily rental properties located in Atlanta, Georgia. The neural network was trained using data from Defoors Ferry Manor and the network was validated using data from Moores Mill. The neural network accurately categorized ninety-eight percent of the cases in the training set and ninety-three percent of the cases in the validation test set. This research represents a first attempt to use neural networking to model the relationship between one’s living environment and residential satisfaction.

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT IN NON-GOVERNMENTAL ORGANISATIONS - A PARTNERSHIP FOR THE FUTURE

José Braga de Vasconcelos, Paulo Castro Seixas, Paulo Gens Lemos and Chris Kimble

This paper explores Knowledge Management (KM) practices for use with portal technologies in Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). The aim is to help NGOs become true CSOs (Civil Society Organizations). In order to deal with (at the top) more donors and (at the bottom) more beneficiaries, NGO’s working in Humanitarian Aid and Social Development will increasingly require a system to manage the creation, accessing and deployment information: within the NGOs themselves, between different NGO’s that work together and, ultimately, between NGOs and Civil Society as a whole.Put simply, NGOs are organizations that need an effective KM solution to tackle the problems that arise from both their local-global nature and from the difficulties of ensuring effective communication between and within NGO’s and Civil Society. To address these problems, the underlying objectives, entities, activities, workflow and processes of the NGO will be considered from a KM framework. Thus, this paper presents the needs of a responsible, cooperative and participative NGO from a KM perspective, in order to promote the growth of Communities of Practice in local as well as in global network. Viewed in this way we believe that KM will become an engine to turn NGOs into CSOs.

DISTRIBUTED COMMUNITY COOPERATION IN MULTI AGENT FILTERING FRAMEWORK

Sahin Albayrak and Dragan Milosevic

In nowadays easy to produce and publish information society, filtering services have to be able to simultaneously search in many potentially relevant distributed sources, and to autonomously combine only the best found results. Ignoring a necessity to address information retrieval tasks in a distributed manner is a major drawback for many existed search engines which try to survive the ongoing information explosion. The essence of a proposed solution for performing distributed filtering is in both installing filtering communities around information sources and setting a comprehensive cooperation mechanism, which both takes care about how promising is each particular source and tries to improve itself during a runtime. The applicability of the presented cooperation among communities is illustrated in a system serving as intelligent personal information assistant (PIA). Experimental results show that integrated cooperation mechanisms successfully eliminate long lasting filtering jobs with duration over 1000 seconds, and they do that within an acceptable decrease in feedback and precision values of only 3% and 6%, respectively.

USING ENSEMBLE AND LEARNING TECHNIQUES TOWARDS EXTENDING THE KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY PIPELINE

Sakthiaseelan Karthigasoo, Yu-N Cheah and Selvakumar Manickam

Knowledge discovery presents itself as a very useful technique to transform enterprise data into actionable knowledge. However, their effectiveness is limited in view that it is difficult to develop a knowledge discovery pipeline that is suited for all types of datasets. Moreover, it is difficult to select the best possible algorithm for each stage of the pipeline. In this paper, we define (a) a novel clustering ensemble algorithm based on self-organizing maps to automate the annotation of un-annotated medical datasets; (b) a data discretization algorithm based on Boolean Reasoning to discretize continuous data values; (c) a rule filtering mechanism; and (d) to extend the regular knowledge discovery process by including a learning mechanism based on neural network ensembles to produce a neural knowledge base for decision support. We believe that this would result a decision support system that is tolerant towards ambiguous queries, e.g. with incomplete inputs. We also believe that the boosting and aggregating features of ensemble techniques would help to compensate for any shortcomings in some stages of the pipeline. Ultimately, we combine these efforts to produce an extended knowledge discovery pipeline.

SITUATION ASSESSMENT WITH OBJECT ORIENTED PROBABILISTIC RELATIONAL MODELS

Catherine Howard and Markus Stumptner

This paper presents a new Object Oriented Probabilistic Relational language which is built upon the Bangsø Object Oriented Bayesian Network framework. We are currently studying the application of this language for situation assessment in complex military and business domains.

FACIAL POLYGONAL PROJECTION - A NEW FEATURE EXTRACTING METHOD TO HELP IN NEURAL FACE DETECTION

Adriano Martins Moutinho, Antonio Carlos Gay Thomé and Pedro Henrique Gouvêa Coelho

Locating the position of a human face in a photograph is likely to be a very complex task, requiring several image and signal processing methods. This paper proposes a new technique called polygonal facial projection that is able, by measuring specific distances on the image, to extract relevant features and improve efficiency of neural face identification systems (Rowley, 1999) (xxx and yyy, 2004), facilitating the separation of facial patterns from other objects present in the image.

USING A GAME THEORETICAL APPROACH FOR EXPERIMENTAL SIMULATION OF BROOD REDUCTION - CONFLICT AND CO-OPERATION, EFFECT ON BROOD SIZE WITH LIMITED RESOURCES

Fredrik Åhman and Lars Hillström

A number of hypothesis have been presented to explain the complex interactions occurring during brood reduction, but few simulation models successfully combines hypothesis together necessary to describe ESS. In our solution we present a simple experimental simulation for brood reduction for which each sibling act as an autonomous agent that has the ability to initiate actions for co-operation and competition against others chicks within the same brood. Agents have a limited set of actions which can be activated during onset of some environmental condition. Parameters for optimization of inclusive fitness is based on Mocks[5] earlier theory for maximizing inclusive fitness. During the experimental simulations we have studied sizes and fitness measures with varying degree of asynchrony, prey intensity and aggressiveness for siblings within the artificial brood. All siblings were assumed to be full sibs with relatedness 0.5. Results from the experimental simulation shows some interesting similarities with brood reduction in a real world setting. Agents within the artificial brood respond with competitiveness whenever resources are limited. Simulated later hatching also showed a lower rate of survival because of conflicts with older siblings.

TOWARDS A CHANGE-BASED CHANCE DISCOVERY

Zhiwen Wu and Ahmed Y. Tawfik

This paper argues that chances (risks or opportunities) can be discovered from our daily observations and background knowledge. A person can easily identify chances in a news article. In doing so, the person combines the new information in the article with some background knowledge. Hence, we develop a deductive system to discover relative chances of particular chance seekers. This paper proposes a chance discovery system that uses a general purpose knowledge base and specialized reasoning algorithms.

REDUCING RISK IN THE ENTERPRISE: PROPOSAL FOR A HYBRID AUDIT EXPERT SYSTEM

Susan Clemmons and Kenneth Henry

This paper theorizes the use of a hybrid expert system to support a complete audit of financial statements for an enterprise. The expert system proposed would support the audit process by using two types of artificial intelligence technologies: case-based reasoning and fuzzy logic technologies. The case base and automated reasoning recommendations would give the auditing firm another insight on the audit. Unlike previous audit expert systems, this system is intended to focus broadly on an enterprise’s entire financial statement audit process; it combines a case based knowledge representation with fuzzy logic processing. The attempt at capturing a wide domain is necessary to support organizational decision-making. Focusing on narrow decision points within an audit process limits the users and usefulness of the system.

PILOTING SOFTWARE ENGINEERING INSTITUTE’S SOFTWARE PROCESS IMPROVEMENT IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS GROUPS

Donald R. Chand

Although the Software Engineering Institute’s (SEI) software process improvement has been successfully used to improve the software development capabilities by software groups in commercial, aerospace, and DOD subcontractor organizations, the systems/applications development groups in Information Systems (IS) organizations have been slow in embracing the SEI approach. This paper describes the experience of piloting the SEI process improvement with six different IS groups in the Information Management and Technology (IM&T) division of a XYZ Corporation. The lessons learned provide an understanding of potential barriers for adopting the SEI approach in IS organizations

EARLY DETECTION OF COTS FUNCTIONAL SUITABILITY FOR AN E-PAYMENT CASE STUDY

Alejandra Cechich and Mario Piattini

The adoption of COTS-based development brings with it many challenges about the identification and finding of candidate components for reuse. Particularly, the first stage in the identification of COTS candidates is currently carried out dealing with unstructured information on the Web, which makes the evaluation process highly costing when applying complex evaluation criteria. To facilitate the process, in this paper we introduce an early measurement procedure for functional suitability of COTS candidates, and we illustrate the proposal by evaluating components for an e-payment case study.

BRAIL – SAFETY REQUIREMENT ANALYSIS

Jean-Louis Boulanger

In the European railways standards (CENELEC EN 50126, (1999); EN 50128, (2001); EN 50129, (2000)), it is required to obtain evidence of safety in system requirements specifications. In the railway domain, safety requirements are obviously severe. It is very important to keep requirements traceability during software development process even if the different used models are informal, semi formal or formal. This study is integrated into a larger one that aims at linking an informal approach (UML notation) to a formal (B method) one.

TOWARDS A META MODEL FOR BUSINESS PROCESS CONCEPTS

Boriana Rukanova, Mehmet N. Aydin, Kees van Slooten and Robert A. Stegwee

Although there have been attempts to identify essential business process concepts and to create a meta model of business process concepts, the current studies do not include an explicit approach on how to identify these concepts. Further, how to construct such a meta model and how to include new elements to it remains implicit. This paper presents an approach on how to construct a meta model for business process concepts. The approach defines how to capture and define business process concepts, how to construct a meta model using these concepts and how to extend the meta model. The paper also illustrates how to apply the approach. The actual construction of the meta model for business process concepts is a subject of further research.

BUILDING CLASS DIAGRAMS SYSTEMATICALLY

M. J. Escalona and J. L. Cavarero

The class diagram has become more important since the object-oriented paradigm has acquired more acceptance. This importance has been translated also in the new field of web engineering. However, in a lot of cases, it is not easy to get the best class diagram in a problem. For this reason, it is necessary to offer systematic processes (as cheaper and easier as possible) to give a suitable reference to the development team. This work presents two different processes developed in the University of Nice and in the University of Seville and applies them to the same problem comparing the results and getting some important conclusions.

DESIGN OF A STANDOFF OBJECT-ORIENTED MARKUP LANGUAGE (SOOML) FOR ANNOTATING BIOMEDICAL LITERATURE

Jing Ding and Daniel Berleant

With the rapid growth of electronically available scientific literature, text mining is attracting increasing attention. While numerous algorithms, tools, and systems have been developed for extracting information from text, little effort has been focused on how to mark up the information. We present the design of a standoff, object-oriented markup language (called SOOML), which is simple, expressive, flexible, and extensible, satisfying the demanding needs of biomedical text mining.

SPECIFICATION OF E-COMMERCE SYSTEMS USING THE UMM MODELLING METHODOLOGY

Ioannis Ignatiadis and Konstantinos Tarabanis

UN/CEFACT (United Nations / Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business) Modelling Methodology – in short UMM – has been developed by the TMWG (Technical Modelling Working Group) within UN/CEFACT, in order to support the development of e-business applications in a technology-neutral, implementation-independent manner. The purpose of this paper is to provide the results from an EU co-funded project, entitled “LAURA”, where UMM was used for the analysis and design of the e-commerce system to be developed. The goal of the ‘LAURA” project is to set-up adaptive zones of B2B electronic commerce for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) from the Less Favoured Regions of Europe. In particular, an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of UMM will be carried out, as those were evidenced from a practical perspective in the “LAURA” project.

WHAT CAN ORGANIZATIONAL ANALYSIS GIVE TO REQUIREMENT ANALYS? DEVELOPING AN INFORMATION SYSTEM IN HOSPITAL EMERGENCY DEPARTMENTS

Anne De Vos, Claire Lobet-Maris and Anne Rousseau

This paper presents an overview of the analytical framework we apply to organizational change in regard to the development of information systems. A 3-dimensional way of thinking is proposed, based on theory and methods taken from the literature on organizations, especially the organized action political theory developed by Crozier and Friedberg (1977, 1993) and the theory of the “ Economics of Worth ” as presented in Boltanski and Thevenot (1991). The first part of this paper will present the conceptual framework of our approach to the question : which organizational changes are inherent in the development of new information systems ? In the second part, we will put the framework into operation. The method raise a question regarding the role social sciences should play in the design of information systems.

PRESERVING THE CONTEXT OF INTERRUPTED BUSINESS PROCESS ACTIVITIES

Sarita Bassil, Stefanie Rinderle, Rudolf Keller, Peter Kropf and Manfred Reichert

The capability to safely interrupt business process activities is an important requirement for advanced process-aware information systems. Indeed, exceptions stemming from the application environment often appear while one or more application-related process activities are running. Safely interrupting an activity consists of preserving its context, i.e., saving the data associated with this activity. This is important since possible solutions for an exceptional situation are often based on the current data context of the interrupted activity. In this paper, a data classification scheme based on data relevance and on data update frequency is proposed and discussed with respect to two different real-world applications. Taking into account this classification, a correctness criterion for interrupting running activities while preserving their context is proposed and analyzed.

APPLYING SDBC IN THE CULTURAL-HERITAGE SECTOR

Boris Shishkov and Jan L.G. Dietz

Among the actual cultural-heritage-related problems is the one of effectively managing and globally distributing digitized cultural (and scientific) information. The only feasible way to realize this goal is via the Internet. Hence, a significant issue to be considered is the adequate design of software applications which to realize brokerage tasks within the global space. However, due to the great complexity of this cultural-heritage-related task (compared to other brokerage tasks successfully realized by software systems), the usage of the existing popular modeling instrumentarium seems inadequate. Hence, in this paper, an approach is presented and it is briefly discussed how the approach could be useful for building cultural heritage sector brokers.

RESEARCH ON SUPPORT TOOLS FOR OBJECT-ORIENTED SOFTWARE REENGINEERING

Xin Peng, Wenyun Zhao, Yijian Wu and Yunjiao Xue

Reengineering presents a practical and feasible approach to transform legacy systems into evolvable systems.Component-based systems are evolvable and can be easily reengineered. Internet and component-based software development also shows a new orientation for reengineering. Object-oriented software reengineering should base on component library and focus on seamlessly cooperating with component library and assembly tool to construct a whole reengineering system. So the reengineering discussed here concentrates on reconstructing the system into a more feasible one via comprehension and modification of the legacy system, extracting components from the system and submitting them to the component library. In this paper, we present an object-oriented software reengineering model and propose a component extraction algorithm. Our tool prototype FDReengineer is also discussed.

ASPECT IPM: TOWARDS AN INCREMENTAL PROCESS MODEL BASED ON AOP FOR COMPONENT-BASED SYSTEMS

Alexandre Alvaro, Eduardo Santana de Almeida, Daniel Lucrédio, Antonio Franscisco do Prado, Vinicius Cardoso Garcia and Silvio Romero de Lemos Meira

In spite of recent and constant researches in the Component-Based Development area, there is still a lack for patterns, processes and methodologies that effectively support either the development “for reuse” and “with reuse”. This paper presents Aspect IPM, a process model that integrates the concepts of component-based software engineering, frameworks, patterns, non-functional requirements and aspect-oriented programming. This process model is divided in two activities: Domain Engineering and Component-Based Development. An aspect-oriented non-functional requirements framework was built to aid the software engineer in this two activities. A preliminary, evaluation to analyze the results of using Aspect IPM, is also presented.

A SECURITY ARCHITECTURE FOR INTER-ORGANIZATIONAL WORKFLOWS: PUTTING SECURITY STANDARDS FOR WEB SERVICES TOGETHER

Michael Hafner, Ruth Breu and Michael Breu

Modern eBusiness processes are spanning over a set of public authorities and private corporations. Those processes require high security principles, rooted on open standards. The SECTINO project follows the paradigm of model driven security architecture: High level business-oriented security requirements for inter-organizational workflows are translated into a configuration for a standards based target architecture. The target architecture encapsulates a set of core web services, links them via a workflow engine, and guards them by imposing specified security policies.

THE “RIGHT TO BE LET ALONE” AND PRIVATE INFORMATION

Sabah S. Al-Fedaghi

The definition of privacy given by Warren and Brandeis as the “right to be let alone” is described as the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men. Nevertheless, the formulation of privacy as the right to be let alone has been criticized as “broad” and “vague” conception of privacy. In this paper we show that the concept of “right to let alone” is an extraordinary, multifaceted notion that coalesces practical and idealistic features of privacy. It embeds three types of privacy depending on their associated: active, passive and active/passive activities. Active privacy is “freedom-to” claim where the individual is an active agent when dealing with private affairs claiming he/she has the right to control the “extendibility of others’ involvement” in these affairs without interference. This is a right/contractual-based notion of privacy. Accordingly, Justice Rehnquist declaration of no privacy interest in a political rally refers to active privacy. Passive privacy is “freedom-from” notion where the individual is a passive agent when dealing with his/her private affairs and he/she has privacy not due control –as in active privacy– but through others being letting him/her alone. This privacy has duty/moral implications. In this sense Warren and Brandeis advocated that even truthful reporting leads to “a lowering of social standards and morality.” Active/passive privacy is when the individual is the actor and the one acted on. These three-netted interpretations of the “right to be alone” encompass most –if not all- definitions of privacy and give the concept the required narrowness and precision.

USING A WORKLOAD INFORMATION REPOSITORY - MAPPING BUSINESSES AND APPLICATIONS TO SERVERS AND PROCESSES

Tim R. Norton

Workloads are often defined differently within an organization, depending on the purpose of the analysis, making it very difficult to compare analysis from different points-of-view. WIRAM (Workload Informa-tion Repository for Analysis and Modeling) is a preliminary implementation of a database repository to collect application and system information about workload groupings and their relationships. This informa-tion can then be used to define consistent workloads from business products to computer systems, regard-less of the analysis or modeling tools used or the objectives of the analysis.

SERVICE BROKERAGE IN PROLOG

Cheun Ngen Chong, Sandro Etalle, Pieter Hartel, Rieks Joosten and Geert Kleinhuis

Service brokerage is a complex problem. At the design stage the semantic gap between user, device and system requirements must be bridged, and at the operational stage the conflicting objectives of many parties in the value chain must be reconciled. For example why should a user who wants to watch a film need to understand that due to limited battery power the film can only be shown in low resolution? Why should the user have to understand the business model of a content provider? To solve these problems we present (1) the concept of a packager who acts as a service broker, (2) a design derived systematically from a semi-formal specification (the CC-model), and (3) an implementation using our Prolog based LicenseScript language.

PATTERNS IN ONTOLOGY ENGINEERING: CLASSIFICATION OF ONTOLOGY PATTERNS

Eva Blomqvist and Kurt Sandkuhl

In Software Engineering, patterns are an accepted way to facilitate and support reuse. This paper focuses on patterns in the field of Ontology Engineering and proposes a classification scheme for ontology patterns. The scheme divides ontology patterns into five levels: Application Patterns, Architecture Patterns, Design Patterns, Semantic Patterns, and Syntactic Patterns. Semantic and Syntactic Patterns are quite well-researched but the higher levels of pattern abstraction are so far almost unexplored. To illustrate the possibilities of patterns on these levels some examples are discussed, together with ideas of future work. Application of the pattern classification would require defined patterns for all different kinds of ontologies, and both manual and automatic pattern implementation. Our reserach is focusing on the Design Pattern level, using existing patterns from other areas to create Ontology Design Patterns for use in semi-automatic ontology creation.

APPLYING COMPONENT-BASED UML-DRIVEN CONCEPTUAL MODELING IN SDBC

Boris Shishkov and Jan L.G. Dietz

With the great role of ICT in many areas, the importance of software applications (in utilizing ICT) increases. However, we often observe in software projects: low user satisfaction, increasing budgets, unrealized goals. It is claimed that one frequent cause of software project failure is the mismatch between (business) requirements and the actual functionality of the delivered software application. In order to overcome this, it is necessary to soundly align business process modeling and software specification. A possible and promising way to realize this is using components. In this paper, we report further results concerning the proposition of a new approach, namely SDBC. What distinguishes SDBC from the currently popular business/software modeling methods is the component-based business-software alignment, the thorough (multi-aspect) business process modeling perspective, and the consistency with the UML.

MODEL DRIVEN ARCHITECTURE BASED REAL-TIME ENTERPRISE INFORMATION INTEGRATION - AN APPROACH AND IMPACT ON BUSINESSES

Vikas S. Shah

The rapid advancements of enterprise applications urge organizations to access and process information in multiple incompatible systems accumulated as massive complex data in diversified formats due to lack of an accepted common base in the development community. EII solutions must provide interoperability across various software platforms with an ability to react and adapt enterprise operations in favour of continues internal and external environmental alterations dealing with time sensitive information. Concept of RTE is based upon the premise of getting the right information to the right people at the right time in “real time”. MDA specifications lead the industry towards interoperable, reusable, and portable software components as well as information models based on standard models. Recently, MDA is considered as another evolutionary step introducing an engineering discipline to practice pattern-based software development. In this paper, we present an innovative approach to achieve real-time intensive EII through combining respective strengths of MDA and RTE. Purpose is to discuss issues during architectural choices and trade-offs introducing the notion of intelligent enterprise integration. Preliminary observation reveals that the strategy provides consistent architectural framework and significantly reduces integration cost. The paper also reports potential advantages and implications of real-time EII over existing business models.

PERSPECTIVES ON PROCESS DOCUMENTATION - A CASE STUDY

Jörg Becker, Christian Janiesch, Patrick Delfmann and Wolfgang Fuhr

The documentation of IT projects is of paramount importance for the lasting benefit of a project’s outcome. However, different forms of documentation are needed to comply with the diverse needs of users. In order to avoid the maintenance of numerous versions of the same documentation, an integrated method from the field of reference modeling creating perspectives on configurable models is presented and evaluated against a case in the field of health care. The proposal of a holistic to-be model for process documentation provides useful hints towards the need of presenting a model that relates to a specific user’s perspective. Moreover it helped to evaluate the applicability of configurable, company-specific models concerning the relative operating efficiency.

AUTOMATING THE CONFIGURATION OF IT ASSET MANAGEMENT IN INDUSTRIAL AUTOMATION SYSTEMS

Thomas Koch, Esther Gelle and Patrick Sager

The installation and administration of large heterogeneous IT infrastructures, for enterprises as well industrial automation systems, are becoming more and more complex and time consuming. Industrial automation systems, such as those delivered by ABB, present an additional challenge, in that these control and supervise mission critical production sites. Nevertheless, it is common practice to manually install and maintain industrial networks and the process control software running on them, which can be both expensive and error prone. In order to address these challenges, we believe that in the long term such systems must behave autonomously. As preliminary steps to the realization of this vision, automated IT asset management tools and practices will be highlighted in this contribution. We will point out the advantages of combining process control and network management in the domain of industrial automation technology. Furthermore we will introduce a new component model for Autonomic Computing for network management and will apply this to industrial automation systems.

VERIFICATION AND VALIDATION OF THE REAL TIME SYSTEM IN THE RADAR SENSOR

Naibin Li

This paper presents the modeling, simulation and verification of the embedded real time system for the memory interface system based on the tool UPPAAl[1,2,4]. The real time system of the memory interface in the radar sensor is the arbiter as the kernel of the non-preemptive, fix cycle, round-robin schedule controls and schedules four input buffers, the five output buffers and two integrators working synchronously to share the system resource. We construct accurately dynamic model as the networks of timed automata with rigorous logic and real timed abstraction of this real time system, this hybrid system with discrete and continuous state change consists of six process templates and 20 concurrent processes. We simulate and verify the entire system to detect potential fault in order to guarantee the reliability of the design of the real time system.

A NEW PUBLIC-KEY ENCRYPTION SCHEME BASED ON NEURAL NETWORKS AND ITS SECURITY ANALYSIS

Niansheng Liu and Donghui Guo

A new public-key Encryption scheme based on chaotic attractors of neural networks is described in the paper. There is a one-way function relationship between the chaotic attractors and their initial states in an Overstoraged Hopfield Neural Networks (OHNN), and each attractor and its corresponding domain of attraction are changed with permutation operations on the neural synaptic matrix. If the neural synaptic matrix is changed by commutative random permutation matrix, we propose a new cryptography technique according to Diffie-Hellman public-key cryptosystem. By keeping the random permutation operation of the neural synaptic matrix as the secret key, and the neural synaptic matrix after permutation as public-key, we introduce a new encryption scheme for a public-key cryptosystem. Security of the new scheme is discussed

A FORMAL LANGUAGE FOR MODEL TRANSFORMATION SPECIFICATION

Dan Song, Keqing He, Peng Liang and Wudong Liu

Model transformation and its automation have been the core and major challenge of the MDA; consequently OMG issued a QVT RFP to standardize its process. Though many approaches have been proposed, their efficiency cannot be validated and their application scope is still limited. Meanwhile, UML, as a well-established standard for modelling, is experiencing the major updating. The task of providing a reliable solution to model transformation is a critical. This paper proposes an aspect-driven transformation approach combined with formal language to implement model transformation. Aspect-driven approach is convenient for customizing transformation rules and formal language is easy for automation. The foundation of our work is explained and a concrete transformation example from UML 1.4 to UML 2.0 is presented using the combined mechanism.

FUNCTIONAL AND NON-FUNCTIONAL APPLICATION SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS: EARLY CONFLICT DETECTION

Paulo Sérgio Muniz Silva and Leonardo Chwif

Usually, standard practices of application software development are only focused on functional requirements. However, IS managers know that when they have an experienced development team, typically systems break not because they do not meet functional requirements, but because some system attributes, also known as non-functional requirements, such as performance, reliability, etc., are not satisfied. One of the root causes of this failure is that non-functional requirements do not receive an adequate attention, are not well understood and are not appropriately modeled. Furthermore, non-functional requirements may present critical conflicts among them. This paper proposes a pragmatic method to help the early understanding of the relationships between the functional and the non-functional requirements of application software. The method has two main goals: to help the early traceability analysis between functional and non-functional requirements, and to analyze the potential conflicts between them.

MEASURING REQUIREMENTS COMPLEXITY TO INCREASE THE PROBABILITY OF PROJECT SUCCESS

Holly Parsons-Hann and Kecheng Liu

The widespread adoption of Information Technology has helped reduce market problems due to geographical separation and allow collaboration between organisations who are physically distributed around the globe. However, despite the successful strategic benefits brought by the evolution of the internet and other web based services, this has not led to a higher project success rate within companies. The biggest reason for project failure is cited as ‘incomplete requirements’ which suggests that research must be done into the requirements analysis to solve this reoccurring problem. This paper aims to highlight and analyse the current work done in the software complexity and requirements engineering field and demonstrate how measuring requirements complexity will lead to less project failures.

ACKNOWLEDGING THE IMPLICATIONS OF REQUIREMENTS

Ken Boness, Rachel Harrison and Kecheng Liu

The traditional software requirements specification (SRS) used as the principal instrument for management and planning and as the foundation for design can play a pivotal role in the successful outcome of a project. However this can be compromised by uncertainty and time-to-market pressures. In this paper we recognise that the SRS must be kept in a practical and useful state. We recognise three prerequisites to this end and introduce a programme of research aimed at developing a Requirements Profile that changes the emphasis of requirements engineering from defining the requirements to defining what is known about the requirements. The former (being a subset of the latter) leaves the traditional idea of a SRS unaffected whereas the latter adds much to the avoidance of misunderstanding.

EVOLUTIONARY SOFTWARE LIFE CYCLE FOR SELF-ADAPTING SOFTWARE SYSTEMS

Ahmed Ghoneim, Sven Apel and Gunter Saake

Robot software systems perform tasks continually to face environmental changes. These changes in the environment require to adapt the strategies of the set of behaviors or to add new ones according to the ability of the robot's hardware capabilities. We present an evolutionary life cycle for self-evolving robot software systems. The life cycle applies within a reflective architecture, that provides the ability to automatically trap the design information in form of uml/xmi documents of the base-level systems. The life cycle is composed of two cooperating cycles: the base-cycle which includes the running application and base-engine for getting the internal representation; and the meta-cycle which provides the adaptation engine for the base application. The evolutionary life cycle main features are highlighted as follows: First, it allows to extract the robots design information from uml models. Second, by using MOP capability the extracted data are trapped to constitute the meta-data. Third, incremental meta-cycles are applied to evolve and validate runtime changes. Finally, the modified meta-data are reflected to the base application and leaves it consistent with these changes. The proposed life cycle practicability is illustrated through a case study.

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND INVESTMENT IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES: A SOCIO-ECONOMIC ANALYSIS

Manuel João Pereira, Luís Valadares Tavares and Raquel Soares

The output of investments in Information Systems and Technologies (IST) has been a topic of debate among the IST research community. The “Productivity Paradox of IST Investments” sustains that the investment in IST does not increase productivity. Some researchers showed that developed countries have been having a rather stable and sometimes declining economic growth despite their efforts in Research and Development (R&D). Other researchers argue that there is sound evidence that investments in IST are having impacts on the productivity and competitiveness of countries. This paper analyses the relationship between IST and R&D investments and the global development of countries (not only productivity of countries) using economic, demographic and literacy independent variables that explain global development. The objective is to research whether R&D and IST investments are critical to the productivity and to global development of the countries. Working at a country level, the research used sixteen socio-economic variables during a period of five years (1995-1999). The research methodology included causal forecast, cluster analysis, factor analysis, discriminant analysis and regression analysis. The conclusion confirms the correlation between the Gross National Product (GNP) and R&D and IST investments. The variables illiteracy rate, life expectancy at birth, Software investment as percentage of GNP and number of patents per 1000 inhabitants can explain the development of a country.

DESCRIPTION OF WORKFLOW PATTERNS BASED ON P/T NETS

Guofu Zhou, Yanxiang He and Zhuomin Du

Through comparing and analyzing Aalst's workflow patterns, we model these patterns with P/T system without additional elements. Based on these models, the number of patterns can be reduced significatively. Moreover, synchronic distance is presented to specify workflow patterns.

INTEGRATED PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

Faribors Ronaghi

Recently the performance of companies has gained a significant meaning due to globalization and new conditions in the field of the markets and the competition area. To be successful the set objectives derived from the strategy in different levels must be controlled and an approach must be chosen that integrates the three parts, performance management concept, IT and organisation. The proposed article is to depict the basic requirements for integrated performance management and shows as a result a meta model, where all the basic objects and their relations are considered.

COLLABORATIVE ONTOLOGIES AND ITS VISUALISATION IN CSCW SYSTEMS

Michael Vonrueden and Thorsten Hampel

The goal of semantic structures and especially the semantic web is to simplify knowledge retrieval in computer based systems. The Visual Cooperative Ontology Environment - short visCOntE - aims to support the process of a collaborated creation of ontologies and the mapping of an individual's mental map into a digital system. Due to the collaborative and graphical approach many requirements have to be considered to establish such a project. Beneath a deep description of visCOntE and possible usage scenarios, the question of which requirements a successfull collaborative ontology creation should fit and which functions a system should make available will be determined in detail.

MODEL SHARING IN THE SIMULATION AND CONTROL OF DISTRIBUTED DISCRETE-EVENT SYSTEMS

Fernando Gonzalez

Today, sophisticated discrete-event systems are being designed whose complexity necessitates the employment of distributed planning and control. While using a distributed control architecture results in the overall system model consisting of a collection of independent models, today's commercially available simulation languages can only accommodate a single model. As a result, in order to use these simulation languages one must create a new system model that consists of a single model but yet models a collection of models. Typically the communication among the distributed models are ignored causing inaccurate results. In this paper we use our simulation concept, also presented in this paper, to create a simulation tool that enables the simulation of distributed systems by using a collection of models rather than a single model. With our concept we create a methodology that accomplishes this by simulating the communications among the distributed models. Besides the benefit of not having to create a new model for simulation, this methodology produces an increase in accuracy since the communication among the models is taken into consideration. Furthermore this tool has the capability to control the system using the same collection of models.

THREAT-DRIVEN ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN OF SECURE INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Dianxiang Xu and Josh Pauli

To deal with software security issues in the early stages of system development, this paper presents a threat-driven approach to the architectural design and analysis of secure information systems. We model security threats to systems with misuse cases and mitigation requirements with mitigation use cases at the requirements analysis phase, and drive system architecture design (including the identification of architectural components and their connections) by use cases, misuse cases, and mitigation use cases. According to the misuse case-based threat model, we analyze whether or not a candidate architecture is resistant to the identified security threats and what constraints must be imposed on the choices of system implementation. This provides a smooth transition from requirements specification to high-level design and greatly improves the traceability of security concerns in high assurance information systems. We demonstrate our approach through a case study on a security-intensive payroll information system.

CONCEPTUAL OPTIMISATION IN BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT

Yves Callejas, Jean Louis Cavarero and Martine Collard

To optimise business processes is a very complex task. The goal is double: to improve productivity and quality. The method, developed in this paper, is composed of 4 steps : the first one is the modelisation step (to describe the business process in a very rigorous way), then a conceptual optimisation (supported by evaluation and simulation tools) to improve the business process structure (to make it more consistent, to normalise it), then an operational optimisation to improve the business process performing (to make it more efficient) by providing to each operation the necessary resources and at last a global optimisation (to take into account all the business processes of the company under study). The conceptual optimisation is, in fact, a static optimisation (achieved independently of resources) while the operational optimisation is dynamic. The main difference between these 2 steps is the fact that the first one is totally hand made (we want to build, from the set of indicators provided by evaluation and simulation, the best business process as possible), in opposition with the second which is totally automatic (since it requires linear and non linear programming tools). This method is the result of three years research achieved for the French organism “Caisses d’Allocations Familiales: CAF”. It was validated on the business processes of the CAF, which deal with information (files and documents), but it can also be applied on industrial business processes (dealing with products and materials).

ADAPTIVE BUSINESS OBJECTS - A NEW COMPONENT MODEL FOR BUSINESS INTEGRATION

Prabir Nandi and Santhosh Kumaran

We present a new component model for creating next generation e-Business applications. These applications have two overriding requirements: (1) Ability to change the application behavior quickly and easily in line with the fast-changing business conditions and (2) Seamless integration of people, process, information, and systems. Our new component model is built around the concept of Adaptive Business Objects, and fulfills both the above requirements. This paper describes this component model and demonstrates its use in real business solutions.

A METHODOLOGY FOR ROLE-BASED MODELING OF OPEN MULTI-AGENT SOFTWARE SYSTEMS

Haiping Xu and Xiaoqin Zhang

Multi-agent systems (MAS) are rapidly emerging as a powerful paradigm for modeling and developing distributed information systems. In an open multi-agent system, agents can not only join or leave an agent society at will, but also take or release roles dynamically. Most of existing work on MAS uses role modeling for system analysis; however, role models are only used at conceptual level with no realizations in the implemented system. In this paper, we propose a methodology for role-based modeling of open multi-agent software systems. We specify role organization and role space as containers of conceptual roles and role instances, respectively. Agents in an agent society can take or release roles from a role space dynamically. The relationships between agents are deduced through a mechanism called A-R mapping. As a potential solution for automated MAS development, we summarize the procedure to generate a role-based design of open MAS. Finally, we give a case study of organizing a conference to illustrate the feasibility of our approach.

SEMANTIC-BASED SIMILARITY DECISIONS FOR ONTOLOGIES

Anne Yun-An Chen and Dennis McLeod

Many data representation structures, such as web site categories and domain ontologies, have been established for semantic-based information search and retrieval on the web. These structures consist of concepts and their interrelationships. Approaches to determine the similarity in semantics among concepts in data representation structures have been developed in order to facilitate information retrieval and recommendation processes. Some approaches are only suitable for similarity computations in pure tree structures. Other approaches designed for the Directed Acyclic Graph structures yield high computational complexity for online similarity decisions. Another approach is the Cosine-Similarity Measure. This approach requires manual edits for the data similarity matrix. In order to provide efficient similarity computations for data representation structures, we propose a geometry-based solution. Structures are first spontaneously adapted into a geometric 3-dimensional space. Similarity computations are based on geometric properties. The similarity model is based on the proposed geometry-based solution, and the online similarity computation is performed in a constant time. An application of the proposed similarity model to earthquake ontology is exemplified.

MODELING STRATEGIC ACTOR RELATIONSHIPS TO SUPPORT RISK ANALYSIS AND CONTROL IN SOFTWARE PROJECTS

Subhas C. Misra, Vinod Kumar and Uma Kumar

In this paper, we present an approach project managers could use to model and control risks in software projects. There are no similar approaches on modeling software project risks in the existing pieces of literature. The approach is, thus, novel to the area of software risk management. The approach is helpful to project managers for performing means-end analysis, thereby uncovering the structural origin of risks in a project, and how the root-causes of such risks can be controlled from the early stages of the projects. We have illustrated this approach with a simple example typical of software development projects. Though some attempt has been made to model risk management in enterprise information systems using conventional modeling techniques, like data flow diagrams, and UML, the previous works have analyzed and modeled the same just by addressing “what” a process is like, however, they don’t address “why” the process is the way it is. The approach addresses this limitation of the existing software project risk management models by exploring the strategic dependencies between the actors of a project, and analyzing the motivations, intents, and rationales behind the different entities and activities in a project. However, the intention of our work is not to provide a new risk management framework. Our work is restricted to providing a methodology that one can use in the existing risk management lifecycle models to analyze and uncover the structural origin of the risks, and control the risks from the early phases of a project.

A STRATEGIC MODELING TECHNIQUE FOR CHANGE MANAGEMENT IN ORGANIZATIONS UNDERGOING BPR

Subhas C. Misra, Vinod Kumar and Uma Kumar

Because of the competitive economy, organizations today seek to rationalize, innovate, and adapt to changing environments, and circumstances as part of Business Process Reengineering (BPR) efforts. Irrespective of the process reengineering program selected, and the technique used to model it, BPR brings with it the issues of organizational, and process changes, which involves managing organizational changes (also called “change management”). Change management is non-trivial, as organizational changes are difficult to accomplish. Though some attempt has been made to model change management in enterprise information systems using conventional conceptual modeling techniques, they have just addressed “what” a change process is like, and they don’t address “why” the process is the way it is. Our approach is novel in the sense that it presents a actor-dependency-based 5-phased technique for analysing, and modeling early-phase requirements of organizational change management that provides the motivations, intents, and rationales behind the entities, and activities. We have considered a case study to illustrate this approach. Finally, we have provided concluding remarks by describing the importance, and the limitations of this approach.

A MODEL FOR POLICY BASED SERVICE COMMUNITY

Hironobu Kuruma and Shinichi Honiden

Since the World Wide Web is an open system, it is difficult to maintain the information about services on the Web in a centralized server. Therefore the service mediation system could be constructed by federation of service communities, in which each community provides and mediates limited number of services according to its own policy. The federation should preserve the policy of each community. Furthermore, (1) scalability, (2) verifiability of policy compliance, and (3) flexibility to the change of federation relation should be considered in implementing the federation. In this paper, we introduce a notion of policy of community based on access control among players and show a community model that is aimed at specifying communications between players compliant with policy. The community model provides function specification of the service mediation system. Since a meta-architecture based language is used to describe community model, communications for the cooperation of communities can be represented separately from the communications for service request and provision. As the result, our community model (1) represents communications between players in a modular way, (2) provides a basis for verification of policy compliance, and (3) encapsulates the dependencies on partner communities.

A COST-ORIENTED TOOL TO SUPPORT SERVER CONSOLIDATION

Danilo Ardagna, Chiara Francalanci, Gianfranco Bazzigaluppi, Mauro Gatti, Francesco Silveri and Marco Trubian

Nowadays, Companies perceive the IT infrastructure as a commodity not delivering any competitive advantage and usually, as the first candidate for budget squeezing and costs reductions. Server consolidation is a broad term which encompasses all the projects put in place in order to rationalize the IT infrastructure and reduce operating costs. This paper presents a design methodology and a software tool to support Server Consolidation projects. The aim is to identify a minimum cost solution which satisfies user requirements. The tool has been tested by considering four real test cases, taken from different geographical areas and encompassing multiple application types. Preliminary results from the empirical verification indicate that the tool identifies a realistic solution to be refined by technology experts, which reduces consolidation projects costs, time and efforts.

ENTERPRISE INFRASTRUCTURE PLANNING - MODELLING AND SIMULATION USING THE PROBLEM ARTICULATION METHOD

Simon Tan and Kecheng Liu

Current systems development costs rise almost exponentially as development time increases, underscoring the importance of effective enterprise planning and project management. Enterprise infrastructure planning offers an avenue to effectively improve and shorten design and development time; and to develop a system of high quality and with significantly lower operating and development costs. The Problem Articulation Method (PAM) is a method for articulating business and technical requirements in an organisation. It is capable of assimilating the internal systems changes in response to the dynamics and uncertainties of the business environment. The requirements and specifications, from this analysis constitute as a baseline for managing changes, and provide the mechanism by which the reality of the enterprise and its systems can be aligned with planned enterprise objectives. An illustration of planning the development of a procurement system will be used to demonstrate the enterprise infrastructure requirements with a discrete-event enterprise simulation package “Enterprise Dynamic”. This paper will examine the capability of PAM in the articulation and simulation of complex enterprise requirements.

METRIC SUITE DIRECTING THE FAILURE MODE ANALYSIS OF EMBEDDED SOFTWARE SYSTEMS

Guido Menkhaus and Brigitte Andrich

Studies have found that reworking defective requirements, design, and code typically consumes up to 50 percent of the total cost of software development. A defect has a high impact when it has been inserted in the design and is only detected in a later phase of a project. This increases project cost, time and may even jeopardize the success of a project. More time needs to be spent on analysis of the design of the project. When analysis techniques are applied on the design of a software system, the primary objective is to anticipate potential scenarios of failure in the system. The detection of defects that may cause failures and the correction is more cost effective in the early phases of the software lifecycle, whereas testing starts late and defects found during testing may require massive rework. In this article, we present a metric suite that guides the analysis during the risk assessment of failure modes. The computation of the metric suite bases on Simulink models. We provide tool support for this activity.

TYPE AND SCOPE OF TRUST RELATIONSHIPS IN COLLABORATIVE INTERACTIONS IN DISTRIBUTED ENVIRONMENTS

Weiliang Zhao, Vijay Varadharajan and George Bryan

In this paper, we consider the modelling of trust relationships in distributed systems based on a formal mathematical structure. We discuss different forms of trust. In particular, we address the base level authentication trust at the lower layer with a hierarchy of trust relationships at a higher level. Then we define and discuss trust direction and symmetric characteristics of trust for collaborative interactions in distributed environments. We define the trust scope label in order to describe the scope and diversity of trust relationship under our taxonomy framework. We illustrate the proposed definitions and properties of the trust relationships using example scenarios. The discussed trust types and properties will form part of an overall trust taxonomy framework and they can be used in the overall methodology of life cycle of trust relationships in distributed information systems that is currently in the process of development.

TOWARDS AN APPROACH FOR ASPECT-ORIENTED SOFTWARE REENGINEERING

Vinicius Garcia, Daniel Lucrédio, Antonio Francisco do Prado, Eduardo Santana de Almeida, Alexandre Alvaro and Silvio Romero de Lemos Meira

This paper presents a reengineering approach to help in migrating pure object-oriented codes to a mixture of objects and aspects. The approach focuses on aspect-mining to identify potential crosscutting concerns to be modeled and implemented as aspects, and on refactoring techniques to reorganize the code according to aspect-oriented paradigm by using code transformations it is possible to recover the aspect-oriented design using a transformational system. With the recovered design it is possible to add or modify the system requirements in a CASE tool, and to generate the codes in an executable language, in this case AspectJ.

A NON PROPRIETARY FRAMEWORK FOR POLICY CONTROLLED MANAGEMENT OF THE MODEL IN THE MVC DESIGN PARADIGM

Aaron Jackson and John G. Keating

There are a variety of systems available to help automate and control the Web Content Management (WCM) process. Most of these systems are modelled using the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design paradigm. This is a design technique frequently adopted by software developers to assist in modularity, flexibility, and re-use of object oriented web developments. This design paradigm involves separating the objects in a particular interaction into 3 categories for the purpose of providing a natural set of encapsulating boundaries, encouraging many-to-many relationships along the separate component boundaries, and segregating presentation and content. These MVC based systems control what is known as static content. In this paper we propose a new framework for controlling the software tools used in MVC based systems. More precisely, the automatic deployment of model software tools based on XML defined policies. This framework incorporates a non-proprietary component based architecture and well structured representations of Policies. The Policies are not embedded in the system, they are generated, and therefore each component is self contained and can be independently maintained. Our framework will work on a centralized or distributed environment and we believe that the use of this framework makes it easier to deploy MVC based systems.

TOWARDS A SELF-FORMING BUSINESS NETWORKING ENVIRONMENT

Claudia-Melania Chituc and Americo Lopes Azevedo

The rapid evolution of the markets and the changing client’s demands determined enterprises to adapt their business from traditional business practices to e-business, and new forms of collaboration (such as supply chain enterprises, extended enterprises or virtual enterprises) were created. In this context, emerging technologies (such as Peer-to-Peer, Web services, Intelligent agents, Workflow) become core technologies supporting enterprise integration. They address business integration needs, streamlining transactions while supporting process coordination and consistency. The aim of this paper is to analyse business integration concepts and solutions, and to propose a new inter-operability paradigm: Plug-and-Do-Business that represents the basis of a conceptual framework for a self-forming business networking environment. The paper is organized in four sections. After a brief introduction to the topic, issues related to enterprise integration are presented, such as enterprise integration needs, reference models, technologies and architectures. Two comparisons of business-to-business (B2B) standards are than referred. The third section presents the emergence of the novel Plug-and-Do-Business paradigm that models the natural integration of an enterprise in a networked environment. The methodology developed for the research project is than described. The fourth and last section contains the conclusions of the paper.

AN MDA-EDOC BASED DEVELOPMENT PROCESS FOR DISTRIBUTED APPLICATIONS

Rita Suzana Pitangueira Maciel, Bruno Carreiro da Silva, Carlos André Guimarães Ferraz and Nelson Souto Rosa

With the proposal of MDA by OMG, the modelling of systems, in development process of distributed applications, has become a central point, therefore software models go beyond system documentation. EDOC - MDA profile for modelling distributed application - uses as conceptual framework the RM-ODP. These elements, although very useful, are insufficient for a software development process; therefore they are not followed by development methodologies. In this article is presented a MDA-based development process for distributed applications that utilize EDOC and the RM-ODP. The process is described as a sequence of steps and a set of diagrams that should be specified to provide a MDA-based system description.

BRINGING SOCIAL CONSTRUCTS TO THE INFORMATION SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT PROCESS: CONTRIBUTIONS OF ORGANIZATIONAL SEMIOTICS

Carlos Alberto Cocozza Simoni, M. Cecília C. Baranaukas and Rodrigo Bonacin

Literature has shown the influence of the social, cultural and organizational aspects involved in the process of developing information systems. The Unified Process (UP) has been widely used in the software industry, but literature has shown its drawbacks when applied to the modelling of human actions in the social and organizational contexts. Our research investigates the use of Organizational Semiotics (OS) methods combined with the UP to compose a complete cycle of system development, aiming at bringing social constructs to the development process of information systems.

TRANSFORMING SA/RT GRAPHICAL SPECIFICATIONS INTO CSP+T FORMALISM - OBTAINING A FORMAL SPECIFICATION FROM SEMI-FORMAL SA/RT ESSENTIAL MODELS

Manuel I. Capel and Juan A. Holgado

A correct system specification is systematically obtained from the essential user requirements model by applying a set of rules, which give a formal semantics to the graphical analysis entities of SA/RT. The aim of the systematic procedure is to set the methodological infrastructure necessary for deriving a complete system specification of a given real-time system in terms of CSP+T processes. A detailed complete solution to the Production Cell problem has been discussed so as to show how the method can be applied to solve a real-world industrial problem.

DECOUPLING MVC: J2EE DESIGN PATTERNS INTEGRATION

Francisco Maciá-Pérez, Virgilio Gilart-Iglesias, Diego Marcos-Jorquera, Juan Manuel García-Chamizo and Antonio Hernández-Sáez

Nowadays the Internet has become a suitable environment for the new business models, by means of which companies can reach the new open market world-widely. However, adapting the traditional application architectures is not enough in order to take advantage of this environment in effective way. For this reason, it is necessary to develop new approaches so as to reach the environment’s full potential, as in the case of the distributed software components on n-tier architectures model. Due to its complexity, this model requires technological platforms, like J2EE, in order to support the development of such applications. In spite of the power that the J2EE platform provides, some organizations refuse to develop applications under this platform because it requires a deep knowledge of the J2EE technology and its design patterns. In this article we propose a model based on the Model-View-Controller paradigm and built over the integration of open source frameworks (StrutsEJB-Cocoon-Struts) which are used by a wide community but have not been managed as a global solution. This model and its underlying integrated framework offer a powerful environment that reduces the complexity associated with the development of J2EE applications.

THE SEMIOTIC LEARNING FRAMEWORK – HOW TO FACILITATE ORGANISATIONAL LEARNING

Angela Nobre

The complexity of current organisational contexts implies the need for innovative theorisation of learning at organisational level. Organisational learning represents a critical aspect of each organisation’s capacity to innovate, and to nurture and maintain its inner dynamism. The Semiotic Learning Framework is presented as a theoretical approach to organisational learning and as a working methodology to be applied within organisational contexts. It derives its rationale from social semiotics and from social philosophy and it focuses on critical organisational key issues. This framework is to be applied as an organisational learning initiative at organisational level, as the content of a post-graduate programme, and as a methodology for interdisciplinary team works.

EVALUATION AND COMPARISON OF ADL BASED APPROACHES FOR THE DESCRIPTION OF DYNAMIC OF SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURES

Mohamed Hadj Kacem, Mohamed Jmaiel, Ahmed Hadj Kacem and Khalil Drira

This paper presents an evaluation study of Architecture Description Languages (ADL) which allows to compare the expressive power of these languages for specifying the dynamicity of software architectures. Our investigation enabled us to release two categories of ADLs: configuration languages and description languages. Here, we address both categories, and we focus on two aspects : the the behaviour of software components and the evolution of the architecture during execution. In addition, we explain how each ADL handles these aspects and demonstrate that they are generally not or not enough dealt with by most of the ADLs. This motivates future extensions to be undertaken in this domain. Throughout this paper, we illustrate the comparison of these two aspects by describing an example of a distributed application for collaborative authoring support.

SEMANTIC WEB SUPPORT FOR BUSINESS PROCESSES

Airi Salminen and Maiju Virtanen

Development of semantic web technologies has been initiated to improve the utilization of web resources particularly by software applications. Limitations in the capabilities of applications to process data accessible on the web as well as limitations in the interconnectivity of software applications cause vastly extra human work in business processes. Semantic web is intended to extend the current web by metadata adding meaning to web resources. In an interorganizational business process context, semantic web could be an extension of the current intranet, extranet, and internet resources better enabling computers and people in business processes to work in cooperation. In the paper we will explore the possibilities of the semantic web technologies to support business processes. Particularly we will evaluate the possibilities and problems related to the utilization of RDF (Resource Description Framework), which enables formal representing of metadata and metadata schemas. The possibilities of RDF metadata are discussed in describing various types of metadata, such as contextual and contentual metadata of a process. The challenges in RDF schema design are analyzed in defining the most important concepts for a schema. We will use the Finnish legislative process as a case to demonstrate the issues discussed. It is an example of a complex interorganizational process participated by many organizations. In the end we will draw implications of our analysis to the development of RDF schemas and other semantic web solutions for business processes.

PROCESS ORIENTED DISCOVERY OF BUSINESS PARTNERS

Axel Martens

Emerging technologies and industrial standards in the field of Web services enable a much faster and easier cooperation of distributed partners. With the increasing number of enterprises that offer specific functionality in terms of Web services, discovery of matching partners becomes a serious issue. At the moment, discovery of Web services generally is based on meta-information (e.g. name, business category) and some technical aspects (e.g. interface, protocols). But, this selection might be to coarse grained for dynamic application integration, and there is much more information available, which can be used to increase precision. This paper describes an approach to discover business partners based on the comparison of their published Web service process models.

SYSTEM ENGINEERING PROCESSES ACTIVITIES FOR AGENT SYSTEM DESIGN: COMPONENT BASED DEVELOPMENT FOR RAPID PROTOTYPING

Jaesuk Ahn, Dung Lam, Thomas Graser and K. Suzanne Barber

Agent Technology is becoming a new means of designing and building complex, distributed software systems. Agent technology is now being applied to the development of large open software systems; such development requires methodologies to construct software systems that select and assemble highly flexible agent technology components written at different times by various developers. However, the lack of mature agent software development methodologies, the diversity of agent technologies, and the lack of a common framework for describing these technologies challenges designers attempting to evaluate, compare, select, and potentially reuse agent technology. This paper proposes (1) categorization and comparison of agent technologies under a common ontology, (2) a repository of agent technologies which will assist the agent designer in browsing and evaluating agent technologies in the context of a given high level reference architecture and associated requirements, (3) an architecting process to rapidly prototype by selecting agent technology components that fulfill the designer’s requirements, and (4) toolkit support to build a technology repository and agent system

TOWARDS A GLOBAL SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT MATURITY MODEL

Leonardo Pilatti and Jorge Audy

Build softwares have always been a challenge. To shape and to implement a computational viable solution involves a lot of technical and social questions (referring to the interaction between stakeholders). This complexity increases, significantly, when dispersed global teams are used. The necessity to have a set of processes better to organize the development strategy appears as one of the main challenges to be explored. The objective of this article is to present a proposal of structure for a maturity model for global software development. The study is based on an ample theoretical revision on the structures of the main maturity and government models of information technology. The empirical base of this study will involve a multinational organization of software development with branch offices in Brazil, Russia and India.

SOFTWARE PROJECT DRIVEN ANALYSIS AND DEVELOPMENT OF PROCESS ACTIVITIES SUPPORTING WEB BASED SOFTWARE ENGINEERING TOOLS

Shriram Sankaran and Joseph E. Urban

The field of software engineering has seen the development of software engineering tools that allow for distributed development of software systems over the web. This paper covers the development of a web based software design tool that served as the basis for software requirements formulation of a software process tracking tool. These software tools are an outgrowth of a software engineering project capstone. The discussion focuses on those development activities that assisted the front end of the development through needs determination and software requirements formulation. This paper describes the background for the software engineering projects, software tool development processes, and the developed software tools.

A METHODOLOGY OF FORECASTING DEMANDS OF THE COMMUNICATION TRAFFIC

Masayuki Higuma and Masao J. Matsumoto

A Traffic demand of the communication has strong relations between the gross domestic product (GDP). However the Linear regression Model (LM) cannot apply analyzing a traffic demand, because its relations have non linear shape. Otherwise the Auto Regression model (AR) has problems ,which cannot reflect trends of social and economical issues ,and has big forecasting errors, when a traffic demand has a trend component. Therefore this paper considers a new methodology forecasting traffic demands, which has high quality by resolving the above problems, by modeling and indexing social and economical issues.

QUALITY OF SERVICE IN FLEXIBLE WORKFLOWS THROUGH PROCESS CONSTRAINTS

Shazia Sadiq, Maria Orlowska, Joe Lin and Wasim Sadiq

Workflow technology has delivered effectively for a large class of business processes, providing the requisite control and monitoring functions. At the same time, this technology has been the target of much criticism due to its limited ability to cope with dynamically changing business conditions which require business processes to be adapted frequently, and/or its limited ability to model business processes which cannot be entirely predefined. Requirements indicate the need for generic solutions where a balance between process control and flexibility may be achieved. In this paper we present a framework that allows the workflow to execute on the basis of a partially specified model where the full specification of the model is made at runtime, and may be unique to each instance. This framework is based on the notion of process constraints. Where as process constraints may be specified for any aspect of the workflow, such as structural, temporal, etc. our focus in this paper is on a constraint which allows dynamic selection of activities for inclusion in a given instance. We call these cardinality constraints, and this paper will discuss their specification and validation requirements.

CARTOGRAPHIES OF ONTOLOGY CONCEPTS

Hatem Ben Sta, Lamjed Ben Said, Khaled Ghédira, Michel Bigand and Jean Pierre Bourey

We are interested to study the state of the art of ontologies and to synthesize it. This paper makes a synthesis of definitions, languages, ontology classifications, ontological engineering, ontological platforms and application fields of ontologies. The objective of this study is to cover up and synthesize the ontological concepts through the proposition of a whole of cartographies relative to these concepts.

REVEALING THE REAL BUSINESS FLOWS FROM ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS TRANSACTIONS

Jon Espen Ingvaldsen, Jon Atle Gulla, Ole Andreas Helge and Atle Prange

Understanding the dynamic behavior of business flows is crucial for being able to modify, maintain and improve an organization. In this paper we present an approach and a tool to business flow analysis that helps us reveal the real business flows and get and exact understanding of current situation. Analyzing the logs of large enterprise systems, the tool reconstructs models of how people work and detects important performance indicators. The tool is used as part of change projects and replaces much of the traditional manual work that is involved.

ICT BASED ASSET MANAGEMENT FRAMEWORK

Abrar Haider and Andy Koronios

Manufacturing and production environment is subjected to radical change. Impetus to this change has been fuelled by intensely competitive liberalised markets; with technological advances promising enhanced services and improved asset infrastructure and plant performance. This emergent re-organisation has a direct influence on economic incentives associated with the design and management of asset equipment and infrastructures, for continuous availability of these assets is crucial to profitability and efficiency of the business. As a consequence, engineering enterprises are faced with new challenges of safeguarding the technical integrity of these assets, and the coordination of support mechanisms required to keep these assets in running condition. At present, there is insufficient understanding of optimised technology exploitation for realisation of these processes; and theory and model development is required to gain understanding that is a prerequisite to influencing and controlling asset operation to the best advantage of the business. This paper aims to make a fundamental contribution to the development and application of ICTs for asset management, by investigating the interrelations between changing asset design, production demand and supply management, maintenance demands, asset operation and process control structures, technological innovations, and the support processes governing asset operation in manufacturing, production and service industries. It takes lifecycle perspective of asset management by addressing economic and performance tradeoffs, decision support, information flows, and process re-engineering needs of superior asset design, operation, maintenance, decommissioning, and renewal.

A LOOSELY COUPLED ARCHITECTURE FOR DIGITAL LIBRARIES: THE PHRONESIS CASE

Juan C. Lavariega, Andan Salinas, David Garza, Lorena Gomez and Martha Sordia

Digital Libraries (DL) provide services for submission, indexing, classification, storage, searching, retrieval, and administration of digital documents. There are several DL projects and products, some of them focus on the administration of domain specific collections, and others limit collections to be physically located within the borders of site where the DL software resides. Phronesis is a tool for creation and administration of DL which can be geographically distributed and which are accessible over the WWW. Phronesis developing team intention was to make the project accessible to other developers, who can improve its functionality. However, one of the major drawbacks was Phronesis’ data centric architecture and the highly coupled subsystems which made hard to maintain and to add new functionality. This paper addresses the problems with the old data centric Phronesis architecture. Throughout the paper we discuss the functionality provided by the subsystems, and present a loosely coupled architecture for digital libraries. The approach presented here follows the style of services oriented architectures (SOA). The SOA for Phronesis is a framework that provides services for the submission, indexing and compression of documents. Phronesis SOA is organized into layers of functionality that favor maintenance, reuse, and testing of the entire project; increasing performance and availability.

PROCESS REFERENCE MODEL FOR DATA WAREHOUSE DEVELOPMENT - A CONSENSUS-ORIENTED APPROACH

Ralf Knackstedt, Karsten Klose, Björn Niehaves and Jörg Becker

IS literature provides a variety of Data Warehouse development methodologies focusing on technical issues, for instance the automatical generation of Data Warehouse or OLAP schemata from conceptual graphical models or the materialization of views. On the other hand, we can observe a growing influence of conceptual modelling in the move of general IS development which is specifically addressing early phase design issues. Here, conceptual modelling solves communicational problems which emerge when for instance IT personnel and business personnel work together, mostly having distinct educational and professional backgrounds as well as using distinct domain languages. Thus, the aim of this paper is to provide the foundation of a Data Warehouse development methodology in form of a process reference model which is based on a conceptual modelling approach. After analyzing theoretical-epistemological issues fundamental to conceptual modelling issues, we instantiate and operationalize them focusing the consensus-oriented approach. This understanding provides the basis for the consensus-oriented Data Warehouse development methodology.

PROCESS MODELLING FOR SERVICE PROCESSES - MODELLING METHODS EXTENSIONS FOR SPECIFYING AND ANALYSING CUSTOMER INTEGRATION

Karsten Klose, Ralf Knackstedt and Jörg Becker

Service Provider business processes require extensive customer participation. Due to the customer’s substantial impact on the successful implementation of performance processes, measures of customer interaction must be planned meticulously. At present, there are numerous modelling techniques for a model-based structuring of these processes. Admittedly, these models provide only general operations for model modifications such as the ability to delete and add elements. As a result, process designers are not supported sufficiently by domain-specific business design options. This paper demonstrates possible extensions for process modelling techniques which are intended to assist service providers in analysing their processes with particular regard to customer integration and contract formulation. In the presented business case, the application of the method allowed for some rapid, useful and promising recommendations regarding the improvement of customer processes of an IT service provider.

XML-BASED IMPACT ANALYSIS USING CHANGE-DETECTION APPROACH FOR SYSTEM INTERFACE CONTROL

Namho Yoo

In this paper, an XML-based approach is presented for the impact analysis of interface control in sustained systems. Once a system is completed developed, it goes into a sustained phase supported by many interfaces. As new technologies develop, updating and maintaining such systems require non-trivial efforts. A clear pre-requisite before the deployment of a new system is to clarify the influence of changes on other systems connected through interfaces. However, as each sustained system manages its own information separately, integrating relevant information among the interfaced systems is a major hurdle. In our approach, the XML technology is applied to support impact analysis for interface control architecture using change-detection approach for the reference. In particular, I focus on messaging interface issues in Health Level Seven typically used in medical information system and propose a scheme to represent message information that can be used for the decision support of interface impact between sustained systems.

XML VIEWS, PART III: AN UML BASED DESIGN METHODOLOGY FOR XML VIEWS

Rajugan R., Tharam S. Dillon, Elizabeth Chang and Ling Feng

Object-Oriented (OO) conceptual models have the power in describing and modelling real-world data semantics and their inter-relationships in a form that is precise and comprehensible to users. Today UML has established itself as the language of choice for modelling complex enterprises information systems (EIS) using OO techniques. Conversely, the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is fast emerging as the dominant standard for storing, describing and interchanging data among various enterprises systems and databases. With the introduction of XML Schema, which provides rich facilities for constraining and defining XML content, XML provides the ideal platform and the flexibility for capturing and representing complex enterprise data formats. Yet, UML provides insufficient modelling constructs for utilising XML schema based data description and constraints, while XML Schema lacks the ability to provide higher levels of abstraction (such as conceptual models) that are easily understood by humans. Therefore to enable efficient business application development of large-scale enterprise systems, we need UML like models with rich XML schema like semantics. To address such issue, we proposed a semantic aware XML view mechanism [Raju03] to conceptually model and design XML Schema based view mechanism to support data modelling of complex domains such as data warehousing. In our later work, we proposed a semantic net based design methodology [Raju04] for designing XML views. In this paper, we propose a UML stereotype based approach to design and transform XML views.

MODEL DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT OF BUSINESS PROCESS MONITORING AND CONTROL SYSTEMS

Tao Yu and Jun-Jang Jeng

This paper describes model-driven approach in monitoring and controlling the behavior of business processes. The business-level monitoring and control requirements are first described by a series of policies that can be combined together to construct a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), which can be regarded as the Platform Independent Model (PIM) for the high level business solution. PIM provides a convenient and clear way for business users to understand, monitor and control the interactions in the target business process. Then the PIM is transformed to an executable representation (Platform Specific Model, PSM), such as BPEL (Business Process Execution Language for Web Service) by decomposing the DAG into several subprocesses and modeling each sub-process as a BPEL process that will be deployed to runtime.

ACCESS CONTROL MODEL FOR GRID VIRTUAL ORGANIZATIONS

Nasser B., Benzekri A., Laborde R., Grasset F. and Barrère F.

The problems encountered in the scientific, industrial and engineering fields entail sophisticated processes across widely distributed communities. The Grid emerged as a platform that has a goal enabling coordinated resources sharing and problem resolving in dynamic multi-institutional virtual organizations. Though the multi-institutional aspect is considered in the grid definition, there is no recipe that indicates how to fabricate a VO in such environment where mutual distrust is a constraint. Excluding a central management authority, the different partners should cooperate to put in place a multi-administrated environment. The role of each partner in the VO should be clear and unambiguous (permissions, interdictions, users and resources to manage…). Organizing a large scale environment is error prone where not well formalized models lead to unexpected security breaches. Within the access control models RBAC has proved to be flexible but is not adapted to model the multi-institutional aspect. In this context, we propose a formal access control model, ORBAC (Organization Based Access Control model), that encompass all the concepts required to express a security policy in complex distributed organizations. Its generality and formal foundation makes this model the best candidate to serve as a common framework for setting up Virtual Organizations.

GRAPHICAL SPECIFICATION OF DYNAMIC NETWORK STRUCTURE

Fredrik Seehusen and Ketil Stølen

We present a language, MEADOW, for specifying dynamic networks from a structural viewpoint. We demonstrate MEADOW in three examples addressing dynamic reconfiguration in the setting of object-oriented networks, ad hoc networks and mobile code networks. MEADOW is more expressive than any language of this kind (e.g. SDL-2000 agent diagrams, composite structures in UML 2.0) that we are aware of, but maintains, in our opinion, the simplicity and elegance of these languages.

DIALOGUE ACT MODELLING FOR ANALYSIS AND SPECIFICATION OF WEB-BASED INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Ying Liang

Web-based information systems aim to enable people to live and do thing in society with help of computer systems on internet. User interfaces and navigation structures of these systems become more important and critical than the ones of traditional information systems to the user because of the nature of these systems. The experiences on requirements analysis and specification of these systems have shown need of gathering and specifying communicational requirements for the system in the analysis model as a basis for designing user interfaces and navigation structures. This paper addressed this issue and proposes a dialogue act modelling approach that has focus on communicational requirements with pragmatic and descriptive views in terms of the Speech Theory in the social science and the object modelling techniques in Software Engineering.

REAL TIME DETECTION OF NOVEL ATTACKS BY MEANS OF DATA MINING TECHNIQUES

Marcello Esposito, Claudio Mazzariello, Francesco Oliviero, Simon Pietro Romano and Carlo Sansone

Rule-based Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) rely on a set of rules to discover attacks in network traffic. Such rules are usually hand-coded by a security administrator and statically detect one or few attack types: minor modifications of an attack may result in detection failures. For that reason, signature based classification is not the best technique to detect novel or slightly modified attacks. In this paper we approach this problem by extracting a set of features from network traffic and computing rules which are able to classify such traffic. Such techniques are usually employed in off line analysis, as they are very slow and resource-consuming. We want to state the affordability of a detection technique which combines the use of a common signature-based intrusion detection system and the deployment of a pattern recognition technique. We will introduce the problem, describe the developed architecture and show some experimental results to demonstrate the usability of such a system.

A THEORETICAL PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS METHOD FOR BUSINESS PROCESS MODEL

Liping Yang, Ying Liu and Xin Zhou

During designing a business process model, to predict its performance is very important. The performance of business operational process is heavily influenced by its bottlenecks. In order to improve the performance, finding the bottlenecks is critical. This paper proposes a theoretical analysis method for bottleneck detection. An abstract computational model is designed to capture the main elements of a business operational process model. Based on the computational model, a balance equation system is set up. The bottlenecks can be detected by solving the balance equation system. Compared with traditional bottleneck detection methods, this theoretical analysis method has two obvious advantages: the cost of detecting bottlenecks is very low because they can be predicted in design time with no need for system simulation; and it can not only correctly predict the bottlenecks but also give the solutions for improving the bottleneck by solving the balance equation system.

MULTIVIEWS COMPONENTS FOR INFORMATION SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT

Bouchra El Asri, Mahmoud Nassar, Bernard Coulette and Abdelaziz Kriouile

Component based software intends to meet the need of reusability and productivity. View concept allows software flexibility and maintainability. This work addresses the integration of these two concepts. Our team has developed a view-centred approach based on an extension of UML called VUML (View based Unified Modelling Language). VUML provides the notion of multiviews class that can be used to store and deliver information according to users viewpoints. Recently, we have integrated into VUML multiviews component as a unit of software which can be accessed through different viewpoints. A multiviews component has multiviews interfaces that consist of a base interface (shared interface) and a set of view interfaces, corresponding to different viewpoints. VUML allows dynamic changing of viewpoint and offers mechanisms to manage consistency among dependent views. In this paper, we focus on the static architecture of the VUML component model. We illustrate our study with a distant learning system case study.

DEFINITION OF BUSINESS PROCESS INTEGRATION OPERATORS FOR GENERALIZATION

Georg Grossmann, Yikai Ren, Michael Schrefl and Markus Stumptner

Integration of autonomous object-oriented systems requires the integration of object structure and object behavior. Past research in the integration of autonomous object-oriented systems has so far mainly addressed integration of object structure. During our research we have identified business process correspondences and give proper integration operators. In this paper we define these integration operators by a set of high level operation calls and demonstrate them on a car dealer and car insurance example. For modelling purposes we use a formalised subset of UML activity diagrams.

RESOURCE-AWARE CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT USING XML FOR MITIGATING INFORMATION ASSURANCE VULNERABILITY

Namho Yoo

This paper suggests an XML-based configuration management for mitigating information assurance vulnerability. Once an information assurance vulnerability notice is given for a system, it is important for reducing massive system engineering efforts for configuration management. When multiple systems are updated by security patches for mitigating system vulnerability, configuration management based on system resource is trivial, in order to increase accuracy, efficiency and effectiveness of software processes. By employing XML technology, we can achieve seamless and efficient configuration management between heterogeneous system format as well as data formats in analysing and exchanging the pertinent information for information assurance vulnerability. Thus, when a system is updated to improve system vulnerability, the proposed XML-based configuration management mechanism refers to the system resource information and analyse the security model and posture of affected sustained system and minimize the propagated negative impact. Then, an executable architecture for implementation to verify the proposed scheme and algorithm and testing environment is presented to mitigate vulnerable systems for sustained system.

A FRAMEWORK FOR MANAGING MULTIPLE ONTOLOGIES: THE FUNCTION-ORIENTED PERSPECTIVE

Baowen Xu, Peng Wang, Jianjiang Lu, Dazhou Kang and Yanhui Li

Ontologies are now ubiquitous in Semantic Web and knowledge representation areas. Managing multiple ontologies is a challenging issue including comparing existing ontologies, reusing complete ontologies or their parts, maintaining different versions, and so on. However, most previous multiple ontologies management work focused on ontologies maintenance, evolutions, and versioning. They ignored the very important point: exploiting the functions of multiple ontologies provide. This paper proposed a new framework for managing multiple ontologies based on the function-oriented perspective, and its goal is to bring multiple ontologies together to provide more powerful capabilities for the practical applications. The new multiple ontologies management architecture is not only feasible, but also robust in the dynamic and distributed Semantic Web environment.

INTRUSION DETECTION AND RESPONSE TO AUTOMATED ATTACKS

Shawn Maschino

This paper investigates current research in the fields of intrusion detection and response for automated attacks such as worms, denial-of-service, and distributed denial-of-service attacks. As the number of networked systems rise the ability to detect and respond to attacks is an essential part of system security for protecting data and ensuring availability of systems. This survey highlights current risk due to the latest automated attack technology and applies historical and current research to show the information security approach to detecting and preventing these types of attacks. Recent technologies such as virtualization and grid computing are discussed in relation to the roles they play in this area, and future areas of work are addressed.

USER-CENTRIC ADAPTIVE ACCESS CONTROL AND RESOURCE CONFIGURATION FOR UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING ENVIRONMENTS

Mike White, Brendan Jennings and Sven van der Meer

Provision of adaptive access control is key to allowing users harness the full potential of ubiquitous computing environments. In this paper, we introduce the M-Zones Access Control (MAC) process, which provides user-centric attribute-based access control, together with automatic reconfiguration of resources in response to the changes in the set of users physically present in the environment and. User control is realised via user-specified policies, which are analysed in tandem with system policies and policies of other users, whenever events occur that require policy decisions and associated configuration operations. In such a system user’s policies may habitually conflict with system policies, or indeed other users’ policies; thus, policy conflict detection and resolution is a critical issue. To address this we describe a conflict detection/resolution method based on a policy precedence scheme. To illustrate the operation of the MAC process and its conflict detection/resolution method, we discuss its realisation in a test bed emulating an office-based ubiquitous computing environment.

METAPOLICIES AND CONTEXT-BASED ACCESS CONTROL

Ronda R. Henning

An access control policy mediates access between authorized users of a computer system and system resources. Access control policies are defined at a given level of abstraction, such as the file, directory, system, or network, and can be instantiated in layers of increasing (or decreasing) abstraction. In this paper, the concept of a metapolicy, or policy that governs execution of subordinate security policies, is introduced. The metapolicy provides a method to communicate updated higher level policy information to all components of a system; it minimizes the overhead associated with access control decisions by making access decisions at the highest level possible in the policy hierarchy. This paper discusses how metapolicies are defined and how they relate to other access control mechanisms. The rationale for revisiting metapolicies as an access control option is presented. Finally, a proposed research methodology is presented to determine the feasibility of metapolicy derivation and deployment in current generation distributed and federated computing environments

C# TEMPLATES FOR TIME-AWARE AGENTS

Merik Meriste, Tõnis Kelder, Jüri Helekivi and Leo Motus

Autonomous behaviour of components characterises today computer applications. This has introduced a new generic architecture - multi-agent systems - where the interactions of autonomous proactive components, i.e. agents - are decisive in determining the overall behaviour of the system. Increasingly, the agents' applications need time-awareness of agents and/or their interactions. Therefore the application architecture is to be enhanced with sophisticated time model that enables the study of time-aware behaviour and interactions of agents. The focus of this paper is on the inner structure of an agent that provides explicit hooks for elaboration of time support to enable time-aware behaviour of agents, on the general infrastructure for time-sensitive communication of agents, and on templates for building interactive time-aware agents.

A NEW MODEL FOR DATABASE SERVICE DISCOVERY IN MOBILE AGENT SYSTEM

Lei Song, Xining Li and Jingbo Ni

One of the main challenges of mobile agent technology is how to locate hosts that provide services specified by mobile agents. As it is a newly emerging research topic, few research groups have paid attention to offering an environment that combines the concept of service discovery and mobile agents to build dynamic distributed systems. Traditional Service Location Protocols (SDPs) can be applied to mobile agent systems to explore the Service Discovery issue. However, because of their architecture deficiencies, they do not adequately solve all the problems that may arise in a dynamic domain such as Database Location Discovery. From this point of view, we need some enhanced service discovery techniques for the mobile community. This article proposes a new model for solving the database service location problem in the domain of mobile agents by implementing a Service Discovery Module based on Search Engine techniques. As a typical interface provided by a mobile agent server, the Service Discovery Module also improves the self-decision intelligent ability of mobile agents with respect to Information Retrieval. This work focuses on the design of an independent search engine, IMAGOSearch and a discussion of how to integrate it with the IMAGO System, thus providing a global scope service location tool for intelligent mobile agents.

AN ARCHITECTURE FOR INTRUSION DETECTION AND ACTIVE RESPONSE USING AUTONOMOUS AGENTS IN MOBILE AD HOC NETWORKS

Ping Yi, Shiyong Zhang and Yiping zhong

A mobile ad hoc network is a collection of wireless mobile hosts forming a temporary network without the aid of any established infrastructure or centralized administration. The flexibility in space and time induces new challenges towards the security infrastructure. Contrary to their wired counterpart, mobile ad hoc networks do not have a clear line of defense, and every node must be prepared for encounters with an adversary. Therefore, a centralized or hierarchical network security solution does not work well. We provide scalable, distributed security architecture for mobile ad hoc networks in this paper. The architecture integrates the ideas of immune system and a multi-agent architecture. Compared with traditional security system, the proposed security architecture is designed to be distributed, autonomy, adaptability, scalability.

A SOFTWARE FRAMEWORK FOR OPEN STANDARD SELF-MANAGING SENSOR OVERLAY FOR WEB SERVICES

Wail Omar, Bassam Ahmad, Azzelarabe Taleb-Bendiab and Yasir Karm

To improve the usability and reliability of grid-based applications, instrumentation middleware services are now proposed and widely accepted as a means to monitor and manage grid users’ applications. A plethora of research works now exist focusing on the design and implementation of a range of software instrumentation techniques (Lee et al. 2003, Reilly and Taleb 2002) to enhance general systems’ management including; QoS, fault-tolerance, systems recovery and load-balancing. However, management and assurance concerns of related to sensors and actuation (effectors) for grid and web services environment received little to no attention. This paper presents a lightweight framework for the generation, deployment and discovery of different types of sensors and actuators together with two associated description languages namely; monitor session description language and sensor and actuation description langue. These are used respectively to describe the set of deployed sensors and actuators in a given self-managing grid infrastructure, and to define monitoring properties and policies of a given target service/application. In addition, the paper presents a developed sensor framework to provide the basic systems awareness fabric layer for managing decentralised web services. The paper concludes with a case study illustrating the use of the sensor framework and monitoring job request to manage and schedule the sensor’s operation.

LEVELS OF ABSTRACTION IN PROGRAMMING DEVICE ECOLOGY WORKFLOWS

SengW. Loke, Sea Ling, Gerry Butler and Brett Gillick

We explore the notion of the workflow for specifying interactions among collections of devices (which we term "device ecologies"). We discuss three levels of abstraction in programming device ecologies: high-level workflow, low-level workflow and device conversations, and how control (in the sense of operations issued by an end-user on such workflows or exceptions) is passed between levels. Such levels of abstraction are important since the system should be as user friendly as possible while permitting programmability not only at high levels of abstraction but also at low levels of detail. We also present a conceptual architecture for the device ecology workflow engine for executing and managing such workflows.

GENERIC FAULT-TOLERANT LAYER SUPPORTING PUBLISH/SUBSCRIBE MESSAGING

Milovan Tosic and Arkady Zaslavsky

With the introduction of clustered messaging brokers and the fault-tolerant Mobile Connector, we can guarantee the exactly-once consumption of messages by agents. The context-aware messaging allowed us to decrease the messaging overhead which has to be present in any fault-tolerant solution. This paper proposes a complete fault-tolerant layer for multi-agent systems (EFTL) that does not restrict agent autonomy and mobility in any way. An application can choose if it wants EFTL support and that decision is based on support costs. A persistent publish/subscribe messaging model allows the creation of an external platform-independent fault-tolerant layer. In order to support the multi-agent platforms of different vendors, a large part of the application logic is moved from those platforms to an application server. We present the EFTL system architecture, the algorithm of exactly-once message consumption and the system’s performance analysis.

LIGHTWEIGHT CLIENT-PULL PROTOCOL FOR MOBILE COMMUNICATION

Stefano Sanna, Emanuela De Vita, Andrea Piras and Christian Melchiorre

Consumer mobile devices, such as cellular phones and PDAs, rely on TCP/IP as main communication protocol. However, cellular networks are not reliable as wired and wireless LAN, due to both users mobility and geographical obstacles. Moreover, limited bandwidth outside urban areas requires an application level data priority management, in order to improve user experience and avoid communication stack deadlocks. This paper presents early specification and first prototype of the LCPP (Lightweight Client-Pull Protocol), a UDP-based communication protocol specially designed to provide better performance, fast responsiveness and save processing power on mobile devices. Using some concepts adopted in the field of P2P file sharing, LCPP provides data priority management approach, which enables application to negotiate concurrent access to communication channel and to be notified about delaying, network congestion or remote device inability to process data.

EVALUATION OF METHODS FOR CONVERTING REQUEST FOR QUOTATION DATA INTO ORDINAL PREFERENCE DATA: ESTIMATING PRODUCT PREFERENCE IN ONLINE SHOPPING SYSTEM

Toshiyuki Ono, Hirofumi Matsuo and Norihisa Komoda

Obtaining timely information on consumer preference is critical in the success of marketing and operations management. Ono and Matsuo (2000) proposed a method for estimating consumer preference that uses the consumers’ history of browsing among possible configurations of personal computer in an online shopping environment. This method consists of three steps: (1) collecting the data on each consumer’s browsing history of quotation and purchase requests, (2) converting requests for quotation and purchase order data into ordinal preference data, and (3) estimating consumer preference on product attributes by applying a multi-attribute utility function. The proposed method assumes that a product configuration quoted later is preferred to those quoted earlier. It also assumes that how many times a production configuration is quoted does not affect the estimate of product preference as long as it is quoted at least once. Although these assumptions are critical in estimating consumer preference, their validity is not examined. In this paper, we examine the validity of such hypotheses on the relationships between the consumer preference and the sequence and frequency of quoted product configurations, and propose six methods for estimating consumer preference. We show experimentally that, for about 60% of the examinees, all of the proposed methods approximate the consumer preference obtained by the conjoint analysis, and that there is little difference in precision between the six methods. Therefore, we conclude that any of proposed six methods can be used equally well for estimating consumer preference in a timely fashion.

ALIGNMENT OF WEB SITES TO CUSTOMER PROCESSES - A STUDY IN THE BANKING INDUSTRY

Juergen Moormann and Nicole Kahmer

Banks continually claim to supply customer-orientated services. However, banking services are still focused on purely delivering financial products. Customers who approach the bank will usually receive financial products but often no specific solution to their true problem. In that way, customers’ perception of banking services is often far from satisfaction. In addition, important targets of marketing strategy (e.g., customer loyalty, cross- and up-selling) do not get achieved. Therefore, the consistent alignment of financial services to customer processes becomes increasingly important and will significantly enhance the competitiveness of banks. This paper investigates the extent of customer support provided by banks with respect to the customers’ problem solving process. The study focuses on one certain customer interface within the multi-channel approach – the Internet. As the basis of this study, the paper offers the theoretical framework of customer processes. Secondly, it provides an empirical identification of customer processes which has been conducted by means of a comprehensive questionnaire. Thirdly, the evaluation of 100 web sites of banks represent the main part of the study. As a result, the paper reveals that most of the analyzed web sites fail to assist customers within their processes. It will be a major challenge for the banks’ managers to bring together both sides: Developing technically sound front end application systems and at the same time incorporating the idea of a consequent customer-driven approach.

A MICROKERNEL ARCHITECTURE FOR DISTRIBUTED MOBILE ENVIRONMENTS

Thomas Bopp and Thorsten Hampel

Microkernels are well known in the area of operating systems research. In this paper we adapted the concept of microkernel to the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Learning (CSCW/L) to provide a basic underlying architecture for various collaborative systems. Such architecture serves well for the fields of mobile and distributed collaborative infrastructures with its new inclusion of small mobile devices and ad-hoc network structures. Our architecture provides a distributed object repository for an overlay network of CSCW/L peers. Nodes can dynamically join and leave this network and each peer is still autonomous. In this network different kinds of peers exist depending on the module configuration of a system. So-called super-peers with lots of storage and computing power provide gateways to the network (for example HTTP).

AN AGENT FOR EMERGENT PROCESS MANAGEMENT

John Debenham

Emergent processes are business processes whose execution is determined by the prior knowledge of the agents involved and by the knowledge that emerges during a process instance. The amount of process knowledge that is relevant to a knowledge-driven process can be enormous and may include common sense knowledge. If a process' knowledge can not be represented feasibly then that process can not be managed; although its execution may be partially supported. In an e-market domain, the majority of transactions, including trading orders, requests for advice and information, are knowledge-driven processes for which the knowledge base is the Internet, and so representing the knowledge is not at issue. Multiagent systems are an established platform for managing complex business processes. What is needed for emergent process management is an intelligent agent that is driven not by a process goal, but by an in-flow of knowledge, where each chunk of knowledge may be uncertain. These agents should assess the extent to which it chooses to believe that the information is correct, and so they require an inference mechanism that can cope with information of differing integrity. An agent is described that achieves this by using ideas from information theory, and by using maximum entropy logic to derive integrity estimates for knowledge about which it is uncertain. Emergent processes are managed by these agents that extract the process knowledge from this knowledge base --- the Internet --- using a suite of data mining bots. The agents make no assumptions about the internals of the other agents in the system including their motivations, logic, and whether they are conscious of a utility function. These agents focus only on the information in the signals that they receive.

ADVISORY AGENTS IN THE SEMANTIC WEB

Ralf Bruns, Jürgen Dunkel and Sascha Ossowski

In this paper, we describe the advances of the Semantic E-learning Agent project, whose objective is to develop virtual student advisers that render support to university students in order to successfully organize und perform their studies. The advisory agents are developed with novel concepts of the Semantic Web and agent technology. The key concept is the semantic modeling of the domain knowledge by means of XML-based ontology languages such as OWL. Software agents apply ontological and domain knowledge in order to assist human users in their decision making processes. Agent technology enables the incorporation of personal confidential data with public accessible knowledge sources of the Semantic Web in the same inference process.

BUILDING A LARGE-SCALE INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR THE EDUCATION SECTOR: A PROJECT EXPERIENCE

Pawel Gruszczynski, Bernard Lange, Michal Maciejewski, Cezary Mazurek, Krystian Nowak, Stanislaw Osinski, Maciej Stroinski and Andrzej Swedrzynski

Implementing a large-scale information system for the education sector involves a number of engineering challenges, such as high security and correctness standards imposed by the law, a large and varied group of end users, or fault-tolerance and a distributed character of processing. In this paper we report on our experiences with building and deploying a senior high school recruitment system for five major cities in Poland. We discuss system architecture and design decisions, such as thin vs. rich client, on-line vs. off-line processing, dedicated network vs. Internet environment. We also analyse potential problems our present approach may cause in the future.

DESIGN OF CONTINUOUS CALL MARKET WITH ASSIGNMENT CONSTRAINTS

A. R. Dani, V. P. Gulati and Arun K Pujari

Today’s companies increasingly use Internet as common communication medium for commercial transactions. Global connectivity and reach of Internet means that companies face increasing competition from various quarters. This requires that companies must optimize the way they do business, change their business processes and introduce new business processes. This has opened up new research issues and electronic or automated negotiation is one such area. Few companies have tried to introduce electronic auctions for procurement and for trade negotiations. In the present paper, we propose the design of continuous call market, which can help enterprises in electronic procurement as well as selling items electronically. The design is based on double sided auctions, where multiple buyers and sellers submit their respective bids and asks. Buyers and sellers can also specify assignment constraints. The main feature of our work is an algorithm, which generates optimum matching with polynomial time complexity under assignment constraints

BEST PRACTICES AGENT PATTERNS FOR ON-LINE AUCTIONS

Ivan Jureta, Manuel Kolp and Stéphane Faulkner

Today high volume of goods and services is being traded using online auction systems. The growth in size and complexity of architectures to support online auctions requires the use of distributed and cooperative software techniques. In this context, the agent software development paradigm seems appropriate both for their modelling, development and implementation. This paper proposes an agent-oriented patterns analysis of best practices for online auction. The patterns are intended to help both IT managers and software engineers during the requirement specification of an on-line auction system while integrating benefits of agent software engineering.

A LIGHTWEIGHT APPROACH TO UNBREAKABLE LINKS IN WWW-BASED HYPERTEXT ENVIRONMENTS: “USERS AND TOOLS WANT TO BREAK LINKS”

Thomas Bopp, Thorsten Hampel and Bernd Eßmann

In this paper, we present a lightweight approach to achieve link consistency through a combination of object pointers and WWW-style path-oriented links. Our goal is to allow the use of common web-based tools with our CSCW/L system sTeam, but at the same time achieve link consistency within the system.

WEB RECOMMENDATION SYSTEM BASED ON A MARKOV-CHAINMODEL

Francois Fouss, Stephane Faulkner, Manuel Kolp, Alain Pirotte and Marco Saerens

This work presents some general procedures for computing dissimilarities between nodes of a weighted, undirected, graph. It is based on a Markov-chain model of random walk through the graph. This method is applied on the architecture of a Multi Agent System (MAS), in which each agent can be considered as a node and each interaction between two agents as a link. The model assigns transition probabilities to the links between agents, so that a random walker can jump from agent to agent. A quantity, called the average first-passage time, computes the average number of steps needed by a random walker for reaching agent k for the first time, when starting from agent i. A closely related quantity, called the average commute time, provides a distance measure between any pair of agents. Yet another quantity of interest, closely related to the average commute time, is the pseudoinverse of the Laplacian matrix of the graph, which represents a similarity measure between the nodes of the graph. These quantities, representing dissimilarities (similarities) between any two agents, have the nice property of decreasing (increasing) when the number of paths connecting two agents increases and when the “length” of any path decreases. The model is applied on a collaborative filtering task where suggestions are made about which movies people should watch based upon what they watched in the past. For the experiments, we build a MAS architecture and we instantiated the agents belief-set from a real movie database. Experimental results show that that the Laplacian-pseudoinverse based similarity outperforms all the other methods.

ESTIMATION OF THE SECURITY LEVEL IN A MOBILE AND UBIQUITOUS ENVIRONMENT BASED ON THE SEMANTIC WEB

Reijo Savola

The emerging Semantic Web enables semantic discovery and systematic maintenance of information that can be used as reference data when estimating the security level of a network, or a part of it. Using suitable security metrics and ontologies, nodes can estimate the level of security from both their own and the network’s point of view. The most secure applications and communication peers can be selected based on estimation results. In this paper we discuss security level estimation in a mobile and ubiquitous environment based on the Semantic Web. An inte