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nima kaviani

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Università degli Studi dell'Insubria

Nematollah Bidokhti

University of Kent

IIT Kanpur

Klaus-Peter Fischer-Hellmann

University of Genova

Laura Amarilla Cardoso

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Papers by nima kaviani

Automatic Abstraction of Flow of Control in a System of Distributed Software Components

Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science, 2015

CloudFoundry (CF) provides an open source platform-as-a-service software for deploying scalable s... more CloudFoundry (CF) provides an open source platform-as-a-service software for deploying scalable software systems to the cloud. The architecture for CF is distributed by design and consists of several components which interact with one another through a message-oriented middleware. This message-oriented distributed design delivers on the scalability and resiliency requirements of the platform. In such a complex distributed multicomponent system, there is a steep learning curve for software developers to understand how components interact, what messages are exchanged between them, and how the message exchanges affect the behaviour of the system. In particular developers find it difficult to identify the execution flows, the authentication flows, interactions with the persistence layer, etc. We have developed a framework that allows interpreting the behaviour of the system by analyzing the exchanged messages between components, inspecting message contents, and extracting data and control flow across components. The paramount aim is to improve developers' understandability of the system and to examine software resiliency through approaches like bug injection and message alterations. An initial version of our framework was released to the CF community and we have collected feedback that indeed show that we are achieving some of our goals.

A Two-factor Authentication Mechanism Using Mobile Phones

Mobile devices are becoming more pervasive and more advanced with respect to their processing pow... more Mobile devices are becoming more pervasive and more advanced with respect to their processing power and memory size. Relying on the personalized and trusted nature of such devices, security features can be deployed on them in order to uniquely identify a user to a service provider. In this paper, we present a strong authentication mechanism that exploits the use of mobile devices to provide a two-factor authentication method. Our approach uses a combination of one-time passwords, as the first authentication factor, and credentials stored on a mobile device, as the second factor, to offer a strong and secure authentication approach. We also present an analysis of the security and usability of this mechanism. The security protocol is analyzed against an adversary model; this evaluation proves that our method is safe against various attacks, most importantly key logging, shoulder surfing, and phishing attacks. Our usability evaluation shows that, although our technique does add a layer...

A Two-Factor Authentication System using Mobile Phones

The use of untrusted computers to access critical information introduces one of the main challeng... more The use of untrusted computers to access critical information introduces one of the main challenges in protecting the security of users' confidential information. Providing an easy method of accessing such information, without releasing long term credentials and by trusting on less vulnerable devices, is one of the main research areas being investigated by researchers all around the world. Cell phones with their growing functionalities and inherent personalized nature are attracting a lot of attention to be used as tokens to authenticate users. However, their screen size and small keypads makes it impossible to use them for long term transactions. We introduce a two-factor authentication method that not only benefits from the personalized features of cell phones but also allows users to simply use the untrusted client without any fear of losing critical information.

Towards Unifying Rules and Policies for Semantic Web Services

Simplifying the discovery of web services on one hand and protecting them from misuse on the othe... more Simplifying the discovery of web services on one hand and protecting them from misuse on the other hand has initiated several lines of research in the area of policyaware semantic web services. However, the diversity of approaches, ontologies and languages chosen for defining Semantic Web services and policies has made the research area cluttered. It is now ambiguous how different registries and agents with different policy languages and Semantic Web service ontologies would share their information. In this paper we try to solve the problem of exchanging information between the registries by defining an interchange framework to transform business rules and concepts from one language to another using a third intermediary language called R2ML. The expressivity of the new framework exempts any service provider or service requester from the difficulties it may encounter during the process of transformation from one business rule language to the other. It also guarantees that information...

Closing the Loop View project Supporting higher education to integrate learning analytics View project

Cross-Tier Application and Data Partitioning of Web Applications for Hybrid Cloud Deployment

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2013

Hybrid cloud deployment offers flexibility in trade-offs between the cost-savings/scalability of ... more Hybrid cloud deployment offers flexibility in trade-offs between the cost-savings/scalability of the public cloud and control over data resources provided at a private premise. However, this flexibility comes at the expense of complexity in distributing a system over these two locations. For multi-tier web applications, this challenge manifests itself primarily in the partitioning of application-and database-tiers. While there is existing research that focuses on either application-tier or data-tier partitioning, we show that optimized partitioning of web applications benefits from both tiers being considered simultaneously. We present our research on a new cross-tier partitioning approach to help developers make effective trade-offs between performance and cost in a hybrid cloud deployment. In two case studies the approach results in up to 54% reduction in monetary costs compared to a premise only deployment and 56% improvement in execution time compared to a naïve partitioning where application-tier is deployed in the cloud and data-tier is on private infrastructure.

Profiling-as-a-Service: Adaptive Scalable Resource Profiling for the Cloud in the Cloud

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2011

Runtime profiling of Web-based applications and services is an effective method to aid in the pro... more Runtime profiling of Web-based applications and services is an effective method to aid in the provisioning of required resources, for monitoring service-level objectives, and for detecting implementation defects. Unfortunately, it is difficult to obtain accurate profile data on live client workloads due to the high overhead of instrumentation. This paper describes a cloud-based profiling service for managing the tradeoffs between: (i) profiling accuracy, (ii) performance overhead, and (iii) costs incurred for cloud computing platform usage. We validate our cloud-based profiling service by applying it to an open-source e-commerce Web application.

Model-Driven Engineering of a General Policy Modeling Language

2008 IEEE Workshop on Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks, 2008

Despite many efforts in developing policy languages which work in different logical domains and w... more Despite many efforts in developing policy languages which work in different logical domains and with various reasoning engines, there has been limited attention paid to bringing policy definition, design, and integration into the realm of the mainstream software development process. There seems to be a lack of appropriate software development tooling that can allow for easy representation and integration of policies with other pieces of software at the design time. This paper presents a General Policy Modeling Language (GPML), following the rationale of Model Driven Engineering (MDE), as a means to design policies and integrate them to the software development process. We describe the logical foundation and the modeling rationale behind GPML and show how it is adjustable to the existing policy languages.

What goes where?

Proceedings of the First International Conference on Internet Multimedia Computing and Service - ICIMCS '09, 2009

In this paper we describe our current research in the field of interactive large public displays ... more In this paper we describe our current research in the field of interactive large public displays with mobile device interaction. The core of our research is based on a user interface concept that takes advantage of input and output capabilities of interactive large public displays and mobile devices. We call this concept the &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;dual display&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot; concept, which allows us to

Investigating distributed user interfaces across interactive large displays and mobile devices

Proceedings of the International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces - AVI '10, 2010

ABSTRACT The use of a dual mobile and large screen approach offers a number of intriguing possibi... more

Automated Staged Configuration with Semantic Web Technologies

International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, 2010

Since the introduction in the early nineties, feature models receive a great deal of attention in... more Since the introduction in the early nineties, feature models receive a great deal of attention in industry and academia. Industrial success stories in applying feature models for modeling software product lines, and using them for configuring software-intensive systems motivate academia to discover ways to integrate different feature dependencies into the feature model, and automate verified feature configuration. In this paper we demonstrate how ontologies and Semantic Web technologies facilitate seamless integration of required external services and deployment platform capabilities into the feature model. Furthermore, we also contribute with an algorithm for automating staged configuration using Semantic Web reasoners to discover unfeasible features of the feature model.

Business Process Integration by Using General Rule Markup Language

11th IEEE International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference (EDOC 2007), 2007

Abstract A business process usually includes multiple business partners that use systems with the... more Abstract A business process usually includes multiple business partners that use systems with their business logics represented in different rule (or policy) languages. The integration of business processes is a major goal followed by business enterprises and involves the interchange of business rules and policies between partners. However, the variety of business rules employed by the partners presents a significant burden to the integration of collaborating business systems. In this paper, we propose a solution that enables ...

Partitioning of web applications for hybrid cloud deployment

Journal of Internet Services and Applications, 2014

Hybrid cloud deployment offers flexibility in trade-offs between the cost-savings/scalability of ... more Hybrid cloud deployment offers flexibility in trade-offs between the cost-savings/scalability of the public cloud and control over data resources provided at a private premise. However, this flexibility comes at the expense of complexity in distributing a system over these two locations. For multi-tier web applications, this challenge manifests itself primarily in the partitioning of application- and database-tiers. While there is existing research that focuses on either application-tier or data-tier partitioning, we show that optimized partitioning of web applications benefits from both tiers being considered simultaneously. We present our research on a new cross-tier partitioning approach to help developers make effective trade-offs between performance and cost in a hybrid cloud deployment. The general approach primarily benefits from two technical improvements to integer-programming based application partitioning. First, an asymmetric cost-model for optimizing data transfer in en...

On Metamodeling in Megamodels

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) introduced the notion of metamodeling as the main means for defini... more Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) introduced the notion of metamodeling as the main means for defining modeling languages. As a well organized engineering discipline, MDE should also have its theory clearly defined in terms of the relationships between key MDE concepts. Following the spirit of MDE, where models are first class citizens, even the MDE theory can be defined by models, or so called megamodels. In this paper, we use Favre's megamodel that was already used for defining linguistic metamodeling. Starting from the premise that this megamodel can also be used for defining other MDE concepts, we use it to specify the notion of ontological metamodeling. Here, we show that in order for this megamodel to be able to fully capture all the concepts of ontological metamodeling, some refinements should be applied to its definition. We also show how these new changes are in the same direction with the work of Kühne in defining linguistic and ontological metamodels.

MANTICORE: A framework for partitioning software services for hybrid cloud

4th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science Proceedings, 2012

Hybrid cloud deployment can be an attractive option for companies wanting to deploy software serv... more Hybrid cloud deployment can be an attractive option for companies wanting to deploy software services on scalable public clouds, while still assuming local control over sensitive data resources. A hybrid deployment, despite providing better control, is difficult to design since code must be partitioned and distributed efficiently between public and private premises. This paper describes our research into automated partitioning of software services for hybrid clouds. We have identified two specific shortfalls of existing partitioning research which are important to a hybrid cloud setting: (i) inflexibility in placement of software function execution between public/private hosts and (ii) no support for making explicit tradeoffs between monetary cost and performance. We propose a new software profiling and partitioning framework (called MANTICORE) which addresses these problems. Experiments on an open-source Web application show that the new approach ensures better performance without increasing costs.

Web Rule Languages to Carry Policies

Eighth IEEE International Workshop on Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks (POLICY'07), 2007

Ontologies and Software Engineering

Handbook on Ontologies, 2009

The chapter analyzes the state of the art in the use of ontologies for various software engineeri... more The chapter analyzes the state of the art in the use of ontologies for various software engineering tasks. The chapter starts from defining software engineering as an application context for ontologies. Next, it introduces a framework that identifies places in software lifecycle where ontologies can contribute to improvethe current state of software engineering.

Mapping Policies to Web Rules

Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications

Web rule languages have recently emerged to enable different parties with different business rule... more Web rule languages have recently emerged to enable different parties with different business rules and policy languages to exchange their rules and policies. Describing the concepts of a domain through using vocabularies is another feature supported by Web rule languages. Combination of these two properties makes web rule languages appropriate mediums to make a hybrid representation of both context and rules of a policy-aware system. On the other hand, policies in the domain of autonomous computing are enablers to dynamically regulate the behaviour of a system without any need to interfere with the internal code of the system. Knowing that policies are also defined through rules and facts, Web rules and policy languages come to a point of agreement, where policies can be defined through using web rules. This chapter focuses on analyzing some of the most known policy languages (especially, KAoS policy language) and describes the mappings from the concepts for KAoS policy language to ...

Investigating a Design Space for Multidevice Environments

International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 2012

There has been significant research interest over recent years in the use of public digital displ... more There has been significant research interest over recent years in the use of public digital displays and in particular their capability to offer both interactivity and personalized content. While a number of interaction technologies have been investigated, a promising approach has been the use of the ubiquitous cell phone which not only offers a means to interact with displays, but increasingly offers a small, but high quality screen to complement the larger public display. However, to-date there has been little investigation into the impact on users when interfaces are distributed across this type of dual screen setup. This paper reports on a series of experiments we carried out to determine if there is a significant quantitative or qualitative effect on user performance when interaction is split across large public and smaller private screens.

Integration of rules and policies for Semantic Web Services

International Journal of Advanced Media and Communication, 2007

Multimedia service providers on the web need their services to be well protected and easily acces... more Multimedia service providers on the web need their services to be well protected and easily accessible worldwide. This has initiated several lines of research to provide semantically rich policy-aware web services. However, the existence of various technologies to define and protect services has made the communication of services questionable. Currently, it is ambiguous how a broker agent looking for a special object would communicate to an online service provider, with different policy and service definition languages, to obtain the appropriate object. Here, we propose a solution to such problems by introducing an interchange framework to transform business rules and policies between different enterprises using REWERSE Rule Markup Language.

Automatic Abstraction of Flow of Control in a System of Distributed Software Components

Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science, 2015

CloudFoundry (CF) provides an open source platform-as-a-service software for deploying scalable s... more CloudFoundry (CF) provides an open source platform-as-a-service software for deploying scalable software systems to the cloud. The architecture for CF is distributed by design and consists of several components which interact with one another through a message-oriented middleware. This message-oriented distributed design delivers on the scalability and resiliency requirements of the platform. In such a complex distributed multicomponent system, there is a steep learning curve for software developers to understand how components interact, what messages are exchanged between them, and how the message exchanges affect the behaviour of the system. In particular developers find it difficult to identify the execution flows, the authentication flows, interactions with the persistence layer, etc. We have developed a framework that allows interpreting the behaviour of the system by analyzing the exchanged messages between components, inspecting message contents, and extracting data and control flow across components. The paramount aim is to improve developers' understandability of the system and to examine software resiliency through approaches like bug injection and message alterations. An initial version of our framework was released to the CF community and we have collected feedback that indeed show that we are achieving some of our goals.

A Two-factor Authentication Mechanism Using Mobile Phones

Mobile devices are becoming more pervasive and more advanced with respect to their processing pow... more Mobile devices are becoming more pervasive and more advanced with respect to their processing power and memory size. Relying on the personalized and trusted nature of such devices, security features can be deployed on them in order to uniquely identify a user to a service provider. In this paper, we present a strong authentication mechanism that exploits the use of mobile devices to provide a two-factor authentication method. Our approach uses a combination of one-time passwords, as the first authentication factor, and credentials stored on a mobile device, as the second factor, to offer a strong and secure authentication approach. We also present an analysis of the security and usability of this mechanism. The security protocol is analyzed against an adversary model; this evaluation proves that our method is safe against various attacks, most importantly key logging, shoulder surfing, and phishing attacks. Our usability evaluation shows that, although our technique does add a layer...

A Two-Factor Authentication System using Mobile Phones

The use of untrusted computers to access critical information introduces one of the main challeng... more The use of untrusted computers to access critical information introduces one of the main challenges in protecting the security of users' confidential information. Providing an easy method of accessing such information, without releasing long term credentials and by trusting on less vulnerable devices, is one of the main research areas being investigated by researchers all around the world. Cell phones with their growing functionalities and inherent personalized nature are attracting a lot of attention to be used as tokens to authenticate users. However, their screen size and small keypads makes it impossible to use them for long term transactions. We introduce a two-factor authentication method that not only benefits from the personalized features of cell phones but also allows users to simply use the untrusted client without any fear of losing critical information.

Towards Unifying Rules and Policies for Semantic Web Services

Simplifying the discovery of web services on one hand and protecting them from misuse on the othe... more Simplifying the discovery of web services on one hand and protecting them from misuse on the other hand has initiated several lines of research in the area of policyaware semantic web services. However, the diversity of approaches, ontologies and languages chosen for defining Semantic Web services and policies has made the research area cluttered. It is now ambiguous how different registries and agents with different policy languages and Semantic Web service ontologies would share their information. In this paper we try to solve the problem of exchanging information between the registries by defining an interchange framework to transform business rules and concepts from one language to another using a third intermediary language called R2ML. The expressivity of the new framework exempts any service provider or service requester from the difficulties it may encounter during the process of transformation from one business rule language to the other. It also guarantees that information...

Closing the Loop View project Supporting higher education to integrate learning analytics View project

Cross-Tier Application and Data Partitioning of Web Applications for Hybrid Cloud Deployment

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2013

Hybrid cloud deployment offers flexibility in trade-offs between the cost-savings/scalability of ... more Hybrid cloud deployment offers flexibility in trade-offs between the cost-savings/scalability of the public cloud and control over data resources provided at a private premise. However, this flexibility comes at the expense of complexity in distributing a system over these two locations. For multi-tier web applications, this challenge manifests itself primarily in the partitioning of application-and database-tiers. While there is existing research that focuses on either application-tier or data-tier partitioning, we show that optimized partitioning of web applications benefits from both tiers being considered simultaneously. We present our research on a new cross-tier partitioning approach to help developers make effective trade-offs between performance and cost in a hybrid cloud deployment. In two case studies the approach results in up to 54% reduction in monetary costs compared to a premise only deployment and 56% improvement in execution time compared to a naïve partitioning where application-tier is deployed in the cloud and data-tier is on private infrastructure.

Profiling-as-a-Service: Adaptive Scalable Resource Profiling for the Cloud in the Cloud

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2011

Runtime profiling of Web-based applications and services is an effective method to aid in the pro... more Runtime profiling of Web-based applications and services is an effective method to aid in the provisioning of required resources, for monitoring service-level objectives, and for detecting implementation defects. Unfortunately, it is difficult to obtain accurate profile data on live client workloads due to the high overhead of instrumentation. This paper describes a cloud-based profiling service for managing the tradeoffs between: (i) profiling accuracy, (ii) performance overhead, and (iii) costs incurred for cloud computing platform usage. We validate our cloud-based profiling service by applying it to an open-source e-commerce Web application.

Model-Driven Engineering of a General Policy Modeling Language

2008 IEEE Workshop on Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks, 2008

Despite many efforts in developing policy languages which work in different logical domains and w... more Despite many efforts in developing policy languages which work in different logical domains and with various reasoning engines, there has been limited attention paid to bringing policy definition, design, and integration into the realm of the mainstream software development process. There seems to be a lack of appropriate software development tooling that can allow for easy representation and integration of policies with other pieces of software at the design time. This paper presents a General Policy Modeling Language (GPML), following the rationale of Model Driven Engineering (MDE), as a means to design policies and integrate them to the software development process. We describe the logical foundation and the modeling rationale behind GPML and show how it is adjustable to the existing policy languages.

What goes where?

Proceedings of the First International Conference on Internet Multimedia Computing and Service - ICIMCS '09, 2009

In this paper we describe our current research in the field of interactive large public displays ... more In this paper we describe our current research in the field of interactive large public displays with mobile device interaction. The core of our research is based on a user interface concept that takes advantage of input and output capabilities of interactive large public displays and mobile devices. We call this concept the &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;dual display&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot; concept, which allows us to

Investigating distributed user interfaces across interactive large displays and mobile devices

Proceedings of the International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces - AVI '10, 2010

ABSTRACT The use of a dual mobile and large screen approach offers a number of intriguing possibi... more

Automated Staged Configuration with Semantic Web Technologies

International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, 2010

Since the introduction in the early nineties, feature models receive a great deal of attention in... more Since the introduction in the early nineties, feature models receive a great deal of attention in industry and academia. Industrial success stories in applying feature models for modeling software product lines, and using them for configuring software-intensive systems motivate academia to discover ways to integrate different feature dependencies into the feature model, and automate verified feature configuration. In this paper we demonstrate how ontologies and Semantic Web technologies facilitate seamless integration of required external services and deployment platform capabilities into the feature model. Furthermore, we also contribute with an algorithm for automating staged configuration using Semantic Web reasoners to discover unfeasible features of the feature model.

Business Process Integration by Using General Rule Markup Language

11th IEEE International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference (EDOC 2007), 2007

Abstract A business process usually includes multiple business partners that use systems with the... more Abstract A business process usually includes multiple business partners that use systems with their business logics represented in different rule (or policy) languages. The integration of business processes is a major goal followed by business enterprises and involves the interchange of business rules and policies between partners. However, the variety of business rules employed by the partners presents a significant burden to the integration of collaborating business systems. In this paper, we propose a solution that enables ...

Partitioning of web applications for hybrid cloud deployment

Journal of Internet Services and Applications, 2014

Hybrid cloud deployment offers flexibility in trade-offs between the cost-savings/scalability of ... more Hybrid cloud deployment offers flexibility in trade-offs between the cost-savings/scalability of the public cloud and control over data resources provided at a private premise. However, this flexibility comes at the expense of complexity in distributing a system over these two locations. For multi-tier web applications, this challenge manifests itself primarily in the partitioning of application- and database-tiers. While there is existing research that focuses on either application-tier or data-tier partitioning, we show that optimized partitioning of web applications benefits from both tiers being considered simultaneously. We present our research on a new cross-tier partitioning approach to help developers make effective trade-offs between performance and cost in a hybrid cloud deployment. The general approach primarily benefits from two technical improvements to integer-programming based application partitioning. First, an asymmetric cost-model for optimizing data transfer in en...

On Metamodeling in Megamodels

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) introduced the notion of metamodeling as the main means for defini... more Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) introduced the notion of metamodeling as the main means for defining modeling languages. As a well organized engineering discipline, MDE should also have its theory clearly defined in terms of the relationships between key MDE concepts. Following the spirit of MDE, where models are first class citizens, even the MDE theory can be defined by models, or so called megamodels. In this paper, we use Favre's megamodel that was already used for defining linguistic metamodeling. Starting from the premise that this megamodel can also be used for defining other MDE concepts, we use it to specify the notion of ontological metamodeling. Here, we show that in order for this megamodel to be able to fully capture all the concepts of ontological metamodeling, some refinements should be applied to its definition. We also show how these new changes are in the same direction with the work of Kühne in defining linguistic and ontological metamodels.

MANTICORE: A framework for partitioning software services for hybrid cloud

4th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science Proceedings, 2012

Hybrid cloud deployment can be an attractive option for companies wanting to deploy software serv... more Hybrid cloud deployment can be an attractive option for companies wanting to deploy software services on scalable public clouds, while still assuming local control over sensitive data resources. A hybrid deployment, despite providing better control, is difficult to design since code must be partitioned and distributed efficiently between public and private premises. This paper describes our research into automated partitioning of software services for hybrid clouds. We have identified two specific shortfalls of existing partitioning research which are important to a hybrid cloud setting: (i) inflexibility in placement of software function execution between public/private hosts and (ii) no support for making explicit tradeoffs between monetary cost and performance. We propose a new software profiling and partitioning framework (called MANTICORE) which addresses these problems. Experiments on an open-source Web application show that the new approach ensures better performance without increasing costs.

Web Rule Languages to Carry Policies

Eighth IEEE International Workshop on Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks (POLICY'07), 2007

Ontologies and Software Engineering

Handbook on Ontologies, 2009

The chapter analyzes the state of the art in the use of ontologies for various software engineeri... more The chapter analyzes the state of the art in the use of ontologies for various software engineering tasks. The chapter starts from defining software engineering as an application context for ontologies. Next, it introduces a framework that identifies places in software lifecycle where ontologies can contribute to improvethe current state of software engineering.

Mapping Policies to Web Rules

Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications

Web rule languages have recently emerged to enable different parties with different business rule... more Web rule languages have recently emerged to enable different parties with different business rules and policy languages to exchange their rules and policies. Describing the concepts of a domain through using vocabularies is another feature supported by Web rule languages. Combination of these two properties makes web rule languages appropriate mediums to make a hybrid representation of both context and rules of a policy-aware system. On the other hand, policies in the domain of autonomous computing are enablers to dynamically regulate the behaviour of a system without any need to interfere with the internal code of the system. Knowing that policies are also defined through rules and facts, Web rules and policy languages come to a point of agreement, where policies can be defined through using web rules. This chapter focuses on analyzing some of the most known policy languages (especially, KAoS policy language) and describes the mappings from the concepts for KAoS policy language to ...

Investigating a Design Space for Multidevice Environments

International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 2012

There has been significant research interest over recent years in the use of public digital displ... more There has been significant research interest over recent years in the use of public digital displays and in particular their capability to offer both interactivity and personalized content. While a number of interaction technologies have been investigated, a promising approach has been the use of the ubiquitous cell phone which not only offers a means to interact with displays, but increasingly offers a small, but high quality screen to complement the larger public display. However, to-date there has been little investigation into the impact on users when interfaces are distributed across this type of dual screen setup. This paper reports on a series of experiments we carried out to determine if there is a significant quantitative or qualitative effect on user performance when interaction is split across large public and smaller private screens.

Integration of rules and policies for Semantic Web Services

International Journal of Advanced Media and Communication, 2007

Multimedia service providers on the web need their services to be well protected and easily acces... more Multimedia service providers on the web need their services to be well protected and easily accessible worldwide. This has initiated several lines of research to provide semantically rich policy-aware web services. However, the existence of various technologies to define and protect services has made the communication of services questionable. Currently, it is ambiguous how a broker agent looking for a special object would communicate to an online service provider, with different policy and service definition languages, to obtain the appropriate object. Here, we propose a solution to such problems by introducing an interchange framework to transform business rules and policies between different enterprises using REWERSE Rule Markup Language.