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Business transactions between companies are more and more executed by a flow of well-defined electronic business documents. The resulting inter-organizational business processes are often realized by concepts known from service-oriented computing. Exchanging a business document corresponds to a service call and the input/output of the service calls commonly follows a certain business document standard. However, these standards typically present the superset of all required elements used in any business context. In a specific context (in a specific industry, in a specific geopolitical region, etc.) the input/output is adjusted to this context by constraints on the generic structure. Accordingly, a specific service is always used in a specific context. It follows that it is important to define the business context of a service (in a structured format). For this purpose we have developed the Business Context Ontology model (BCOnt). In this paper we elaborate on the theoretical concepts and the underlying algorithms as well as on their implementation in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Service orientation has significantly facilitated the development of complex distributed systems spanning multiple organizations. However, different application areas approach such systems in domain-specific ways, focusing on particular aspects relevant only for their application types. As a result, we observe a very fragmented landscape of service-oriented systems, which does not enable collaboration across organizations. To address this concern, in this work we introduce the notion of Collaborative, Dynamic and Complex (CDC) systems and position them with respect to existing technologies. In addition, we present how CDC systems are modeled and the steps to provision and execute them. We also contribute an architecture enabling CDC Systems with full life cycle coverage that allows for leveraging service-oriented and Cloud-related technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents Halos Networks as an architectural paradigm for developing ubiquitous networking and computing services at the edge of the networks A Halos Network is like a wireless network spontaneously emerging through the interactions of distributed resources embedding wireless communication capabilities. Halos Networks are capable of delivering services and data virally through multiple devices, machines and objects interconnected with one other. This paper discusses business roles for Stakeholders in Halos Networks scenarios, specifically concluding with some remarks about the Operators' role. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper aims to develop a model that can explain the critical determinants that influencing the behavioral intention (BI) of mobile commerce (m-commerce) in collectivist cultures such as the Arab culture; particularly Jordan. The proposed model employs the technology acceptance model (TAM). TAM has been augmented with subjective norms (SN) from the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA). The augmented model further decomposed SN into different levels. In addition, three variables were used to extended TAM: Personal innovativeness in IT (PIIT) from Diffusion of Innovations (DOI), Facilitating Conditions (FC) from Decomposed Theory of Planned Behavior (DTPB) and cost derived from literature. M-commerce acceptance literature revealed the majority of the researches were conducted in developed nations. Moreover, the academic research of m-commerce acceptance in the Arab world is limited; therefore, there has been little attempt to fill the gap in understanding the antecedents of BI to accept m-commerce in the region. This conceptual model will provide a foundation for future research and a greater knowledge of the potential users of m-commerce adoption in Jordan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is a truism that the information and communication technologies (ICT) have changed the way people engage in all aspects of their lives, including how the judiciary functions. The ICT applications adopted by the courts are varied including access to legal materials, high technology information and evidence display systems, electronic filing, foreign language translation, multimedia court records, information and evidence retrieval, audio conferencing, video conferencing and the public's access to court information via the worldwide web. Drawn from an ongoing research, this paper aims to highlight that the growing adoption of ICT by the courts in many jurisdictions in fact raises several issues of security risks. This paper begins by illustrating the concept of courtroom technology and the current technical applications available in the Malaysian courts. The examination of the emergence of non-legal risks closely connected to security and the legal risk raised by courtroom technology is mediated through the understanding of several basic security control requirements involving authentication, non-repudiation, confidentiality, data integrity and privacy encroachment. The paper contends that despite the common notion that law will always lag behind technology, the courts would need to understand these legal and non-legal security risks and manage them in the most efficient and effective manner if judicial business were to be continually advanced by the ICT. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents an architecture proposal for mobile services. It covers server-side and terminal-side components for the easy creation, provision and consumption of mobile services. The intrinsic characteristics of mobile services are reflected in this approach. Especially the role of the power user, that not only consumes mobile services but also modifies them or creates services of his own, is in the focus of this design. The paper concludes with a proof-of-concept that has been carried out in a European research project. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper proposes a practical model for non-Telecom staff to determine enterprise-Business-Context (eBC) status for employees' service requests. This is used to grant selective funding for business usage, which is distinguished from unfunded personal usage. The eBC Model interprets enterprise objectives via layered prioritization. It computes the eBC status from dynamic Attributes, grouped into Factors that characterize the Task context. We built the eBC Model with typical Task Templates and representative scenarios. The simulation results proved the eBC Model to be robust, flexible and easily customizable by non-Telecom people. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Business Intelligence (BI) is highly promoted and praised, yet not all expectations are realised. Instead, numerous reports of failed BI implementations and challenges prevail. This paper examines BI challenges in the context of Goods-Dominant (G-D) and Service-Dominant (S-D) Logic. Literature sources and a qualitative case study are used to identify BI's challenges, conceptual perceptions and related beliefs. The link between these is then reflected and examples are provided demonstrating how G-D Logic may potentially be an underlying cause of or contributor to BI's challenges. A dominant focus -- typical of G-D Logic -- on BI as a product of a BI technology process is identified in BI's prevailing perceptions and beliefs. In this paper we demonstrate examples of how this is detrimental to the use and benefit of BI and propose S-D Logic as a solution with potential. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the recent years the following two trends have been accelerated: on the one hand, as Content Services became at the center of Internet usages, OTTs strengthen their position. On the other hand, in several cases, Telcos are seeing their role shrinking to “dumb pipes” providers. This paper introduces advanced Telcos' positioning in future content distribution services. In particular, it focuses on the “value” that Telcos can bring to CDN providers and Content providers and analyses the required evolutions of the involved systems' architectures (network and content delivery). Value is assessed with respect to both users' trends and content ecosystem evolution. We show that existing Telcos' assets could indeed be leveraged to make the proposed move, bringing to Telcos a major differentiator in this arena. For that, an open and efficient control infrastructure is necessary, the paper presents the core required functionalities and architectural framework, as well as related challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How to prevent brand crisis in present interactive environment? From a social psychological perspective, this paper argues that firms should consider how to launch the dialogue and interaction with customers at a strategic level, for enhancing their brand trust, mobilizing the masses of customers to participate in crisis-prevention works. Therefore, this paper introduces an important concept: interaction orientation, which is different from the customer orientation, and constructs the model of "interaction orientation ¡ú interaction quality ¡ú brand trust ¡ú crisis perception". Empirical studies have found that interaction orientation help firms improve interaction qualities. By training the employees' expertise and problem-solving abilities, firms can increase the customers' brand trust, which can prevent the spreading of the crisis incentives and reduce the crisis' negative impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In large enterprises, there are an abundance of IT assets which provide employees with the productivity tools necessary to do their jobs. There are also large numbers of applications and services for running the 'back office'. A challenge to all enterprises is cataloging these services, in order that organization can effectively put the services into business use, retire unused services or duplicate services, and build new services to fill gaps in the catalog. Furthermore, it is necessary to understand the relationships among available services in order to combine them into convenient and useful packages/bundles which employees can immediately put into use. In this paper we will describe the process used in the IBM enterprise to create and distribute these bundles. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

with the widely application of information technology in the coal mining industry, the number of information systems has grown significantly. However, how to take advantage of the information fully from those heterogeneous systems to provide an integrated service has become a barrier to the development of mine. Meanwhile, the scope of the information services in coal mine is so limited that only those managers can enjoy the information and decision supporting services. Because of these above reasons, most of miners can't enjoy the benefits of informatization. Based on the background, a framework of the context-aware-based intelligent service system for miners is proposed for the coal industry in the paper. In order to construct the system, three key technologies are emphasized, i.e. context information modeling, context information reasoning, and business service calling & composition. In the end, a detailed system implementation is given to illustrate how to apply the framework to establish the context-aware-based service system in the coal industry. The result of application is satisfactory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Future Internet (FI) constitutes a complex and dynamic environment, the requirements of which cannot be adrressed by traditional management schemes. The alternative is the approach of autonomic network and service management. In this context, the UniverSelf research project proposes a promising solution, called Unified Management Framework (UMF), which targets the unification of autonomic network and service management. UMF addresses FI challenges by exploiting governance of automatically managed infrastructures and services, unification of diverse autonomic solutions, and adaptation to rapidly changing environment with respect to managed system properties and service and user's requirements. Accordingly, this paper presents the UMF core blocks, namely Governance, Coordination and Knowledge blocks, including a description of their underlying mechanisms. The paper also describes the Network Empowerment Mechanisms (NEM) that empower networks with autonomic algorithms/solutions and can be embedded into existing and future systems in a “plug and play” way. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In a service-oriented architecture, adaptive and evolvable applications should be able to select, configure and compose different existing application services to deal with the changes which can arise from runtime contextual changes or the change of user requirements and preferences. To support this, hybrid service composition approaches have been proposed, in which the core of application logic, which is rather stable, is specified in terms of processes while rules are employed to specify the conditions and constraints to adapt the application behaviour. The rules are then exposed as a decision service which can be employed by the process to make adaptation decision with respect to runtime circumstances. The interaction between processes and decision services are generally performed in synchronous request-response manner. We argue that such an interaction is not efficient to support different types of adaptation at runtime and therefore asynchronous interaction should also be supported. In this paper, we present an adaptive service provisioning architecture and a decision service template allowing both synchronous request-response interaction and asynchronous notification. To motivate the proposed architecture and the decision service template, we use a blood pressure monitoring scenario from the homecare domain. We also explain the implementation of the proposed approach based on commercially available rule and process engines. Finally, we discuss: 1) what is the efficient way (synchronous request-response interaction vs. asynchronous notification) of calling decision service to execute different types of decision rules? and 2) to what extent the use of decision service facilitates dealing with the unforeseen changes? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides a framework for service composition and reconfiguration. In addition to making composition decisions by considering functional attributes, technology for composition by meeting non-functional requirements such as QoS is also needed. In this paper, we present an approach to compose business process by considering context-based service reputation. Since some services may perform well only at specific context, we may use context similarity to filter out those services that are not fit given a user's context. We present the design of a Context Manager which works as part of an SOA middleware to compose and reconfigure services. Simulation results show the effectiveness of our design. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With the growth of mobile applications, user context becomes a dynamic but important factor for quality of service (QoS) in the cyber world. Many digital services have distinctly different performance under different service contexts. At runtime, an unexpected transition of user context may cause an application to fail to deliver the required QoS. In this paper, we propose a proactive service selection and reconfiguration approach to prevent service process failure. In our middleware support, a user's most probable context changes are actively predicted according to the current context state and historical data. Some backup service solutions for these anticipated state changes are then prepared. When the user context actually changes, the service process will be immediately routed to the preferred backup plan to prevent service disruption. We use a probabilistic graph model to describe the transition relationships between context attributes. The experimental results show that our context-aware proactive reconfiguration approach significantly improves the overall QoS under dynamically changing user context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The inter-disciplinarity of information systems, applied discipline and activity of design, and the study from different paradigms perspectives explains the diversity of problems addressed. The context is broad and includes important issues beyond technology, as the application, use, effectiveness, efficiency and their organizational and social impacts. In design science, the research interest is in contributing to the improvement of the processes of the design activity itself. The relevance of research in design science is associated with the result obtained for the improvement of living conditions in organizational, inter-organizational and Society contexts. In the research whose results are artifacts, the adoption of design research as a process of research is crucial to ensure discipline, rigor and transparency. Based on a literature review, this paper clarifies the terms of design science and design research. This is the main motivation for presenting this paper, determinant for the phase in research in technologies and information systems which are the three research projects presented. As a result the three projects are discussed in relation to the concepts of design science and design research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Cloud services allow for hosting applications partially or completely in the Cloud by migrating their components and data. Especially with respect to data migration, a series of functional and non-functional challenges like data confidentiality arise when considering private and public Cloud data stores. In this paper we identify some of these challenges and propose a set of reusable solutions focusing on the non-functional aspects, organized together as a set of Cloud Data Patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With ubiquitous computing technologies, business processes become more mobile and distributed and are executed in varying contexts. Context-aware access control mechanisms are an important prerequisite to protect sensitive data and services in secure ubiquitous computing environments. In an IT-supported workflow, process-related context constraints are a means to consider context information in access control decisions. A context constraint specifies that certain conditions must be fulfilled to permit the execution of a particular task. However, standard process modeling languages do not support the notion of context constraints in business processes. In this paper, we integrate context constraints with process-related role-based access control (RBAC) models and thereby support context-dependent task execution. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Rapid expansion of wireless technologies has provided a platform to support intelligent systems in the domain of mobile marketing. Utilizing Location Based Services (LBS) and Global Navigational Satellite Systems (GNSS) infrastructure provides the transport of real-time, scheduled, location-based advertising to individuals and business. In this paper a distributed synchronous platform is proposed called iMAS. iMAS proposes to use an open source platform independent approach to provide the services and interaction with the iMAS system. Intelligent advertising services (IAS) is an integral component of the system and uses a global positioning system (GPS) to enable information to be received depending on the longitude and latitude coordinates of the iMAS device. This allows for contextual information to be used as a means to provide intelligent context-aware location-centric targeted marketing advertisements to the general public. At this stage iMAS is a proof of concept and subsequent research is already under way to test the device in a controlled environment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In order to design distributed business applications or services, the common practice consists in setting up a multi-tier architecture on top of a relational database. Due to the recent evolution of the needs in terms of scalability and availability in cloud environments, the design of the data access layer got significantly more complicated because of the trade-off decisions between consistency, scalability and availability that have to be taken into account in accordance with the CAP theorem. An interesting compromise in this context consists in offering some flexibility at the consistency level, in order to allow multi-tier architectures to support partition tolerance flexibility while guaranteeing availability. This paper introduces a flexible data layer that guarantees availability and gives the ability to the developers to easily select the required execution context, by integrating eventually consistent storage with strongly consistent databases. A given query can either be executed in an eventually consistent but very scalable context or in a strongly consistent context with limited scalability. The benefits of the proposed framework are validated in a real-world use case. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Along with recent trends in using goal-oriented approaches for requirements engineering and system development activities, various techniques for managing adaptable stakeholder goals and requirements are proposed and used by the software engineering industry. Enterprise Architecture (EA) models which tie business goals, business processes and supporting IT systems are also expected to support reasoning on impact of changes on goals and requirements. Unfortunately common Enterprise Architecture (EA) frameworks like The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) and EA modeling languages like Archimate lacks support for analyzing goal and requirement change impacts in EA goal models. This paper reports an effort to fill this gap by extending a metamodel of already existing requirements and goal modeling language. The extension adds semantically reach definitions for goal influence relations that support reasoning on these relations. To leverage existing change impact analysis techniques, a literature review was conducted on existing goal change management techniques. Two candidate approaches (TROPOS and NFR framework) were chosen from the review results based on comparative analysis study. However, there is no evidence suggesting which of these two approaches suits more for EA goal model analysis. To find empirical evidence on the applicability of these approaches, we develop an adapted algorithm as well as a tool support for both techniques and apply both approaches on an industrial case study. Two main lessons were learned from the result of the case study. First both approaches have some limitations when applied to EA goal analysis and second, the NFR/Fuzzy logic based approaches provide more concrete results than the TROPOS based approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper addresses the matter of quality in the software process for service-oriented systems. We argue for the need of involving the users/stakeholders into the specification and evaluation of quality (requirements) and we develop means for supporting such an involvement. For this purpose we introduce classifications of user and quality types and as a basis for the characterization of evaluation cases. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Functional usability features like Undo or Auto-Save can greatly add to the usability of interactive software systems. This paper presents a pragmatic approach to considering usability features as “first-class citizens” during early phases of software development, in particular during requirements analysis and definition. A catalog of usability patterns is used to describe proven and reusable solutions and to support software engineers in selecting appropriate usability features for a system. To allow for a systematic consideration, usability features are specified in a use case-based software requirements specification using semiformal specification templates. The resulting extended specification defines where and how usability features shall be integrated in the system, thus facilitating subsequent development activities (e. g. software architecture design, implementation, and test). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The lack of flexibility during process execution has been commonly identified as a major drawback of classical process-aware information systems. Hence, in the last decade, extensive research has been done and multiple approaches concerning process flexibility have emerged. Since an increasing degree of freedom implies a decreasing inbuilt guidance regarding the way business processes are handled, the decision making about their execution is delegated to the personnel at runtime. Obviously, there is an imperative necessity for functionalities that support users in finding the right decisions during flexible runtime procedures. Concerning this matter, the following paper investigates the application of recommender systems as they are widely known from the e-commerce domain. Its main contribution is a profound state of the art analysis and an identification of current research gaps. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Empowering the enterprise to control their own session policy for mobile broadband is not only necessary for consumerization, but is beneficial in controlling budgets and protecting corporate network resources. We propose a practical method of establishing dynamically enterprise-Business-Context (eBC) status to determine whether or not the enterprise should fund employees'' service requests and what QoS and funding levels should be assigned. To do that, the enterprise can use context information that is not available externally and apply corporate business objectives. This paper describes the eBC Function process, platform, logic, data sources and call flows, and details the computation method. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Businesses are, nowadays, keen on organizing their business processes in the most flexible way, as to cope with the tough competition. Two major concerns are emerging, while dealing with the construction of new process functionalities: (1) shortening the development periods, and (2) managing the privacy risks. An effective solution for dealing with both concerns, consists of reusing fragments of existing business processes. These fragments need to be declared as safe, however, from a privacy perspective. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive approach for decomposing existing business processes into reusable fragments, that are privacy-aware; i.e., these fragments do not allow the disclosure of so-called sensitive associations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Most human centric business activities, like the handling of an insurance claim or the design of an IT solution, do not follow a formal process model word-by-word. While there are often underlying processes in place, the real business operation typically encompasses a wider scope of actions. It includes unstructured segments of human activities, additional documents and interactions, the integration of remote systems and services, and the reactions to exceptional situations. With the case management approach, the knowledge worker in the center takes control and acts as an orchestrator of available services rather than being a part of an assembly line. This paper presents how data-centric web services can be used to build a service-oriented case management application, and how advanced analytics can leverage historical information to improve the effectiveness of business processes execution. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents literature review that covered key areas in this research such as e-Business development, Cloud Computing concept and opportunities for Malaysian SMEs. This research aims to investigate the best practices of Cloud Computing within the e-Business context for the Malaysian SMEs. This paper also discussed the qualitative and quantitative approaches that were used to gather data on how the Cloud Computing can strategically provide technology and business opportunities to the SMEs in Malaysia. Deliverable from this research will be a set of recommendations to guide the Malaysian SMEs to adopt both e-Business and Cloud Computing technologies. This paper presented a recommendation for creating awareness of Cloud Computing approach among the SMEs for their e-Business needs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the process of service provisioning, providing required service to the user without user intervention, with reduction of the cognitive over loading is a real challenge. In this paper we propose a user centred context aware collaborative service provisioning system, which make use of context along with collaboration to provide the required service to the user dynamically. The system uses a novel approach of query expansion along with interactive and rating matrix based collaboration. Performance of the system is evaluated in Mobile-Commerce environment. The results show that the system is time efficient and perform with better precision and recall in comparison with context aware system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With the rapid adoption of the concepts of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), sophisticated business processes and tasks are increasingly realized through composing distributed software components offered by different providers. Though such practices offer advantages in terms of cost-effectiveness and flexibility, those components are not immune to vulnerabilities. It is therefore important for the administrator of some composed service to evaluate the threats of such vulnerabilities accordingly within limited available information. Since almost all the existing efforts (e.g., CVSS) fail to consider specific context-aware information which is the specific character of SOA, they could not be adopted into SOA for scoring vulnerabilities. In this paper, we present VRank, a novel framework for the scoring and ranking of vulnerabilities in SOA. Different from existing efforts, for a given vulnerability, VRank not only considers its intrinsic properties (e.g., exploitability), but also takes into account the contexts of the services having this vulnerability, e.g., what roles they play in the composed service and how critical it is to the security objective of the service. The resulting scoring and ranking of vulnerabilities are thus highly relevant and meaningful to the composed service. We present the detailed design of VRank, and compare it with CVSS. Our experiments indicate VRank is able to provide much more useful ranking lists of vulnerabilities for complex composed services. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Business transaction recovery is the fundamental approach of handling exceptions during execution as well as ensuring transaction features. In this paper context is applied to recovery of the web service business transaction and exceptions are classified into four categories: network exception, physical exception, service exception and user exception. Based on the classifications we define different start points of recovery process to simplify the recovery process of business transaction. Also evaluations on contexts of exceptions are performed to extract the feasible instances of compensation paths and the sensibility weights of path costs are utilized to select the optimal compensation instance. An illustration to recovery scenarios for travel agent is presented to verify our approach and algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For several decades, software reuse has been a recognized solution to improving efficiency of software development. However, implementing reuse in practice remains challenging, and the IT community has little visibility into the state of the practice specifically as it pertains to reusing software requirements. This paper presents the results of a survey conducted in the global IT industry in 2010 and discusses the state of the practice for software requirements reuse. The survey studies reuse adoption in two different contexts, i.e., Software Product Lines and Software Maintenance. The analysis of the survey data focuses on the latter context as a more common case in practice and investigates the impact of various factors on reuse adoption and effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The advantage of combinatorial techniques over less structured approaches is supported by the experience from numerous real-world projects where a significant reduction of the number of test cases has been achieved without compromising functional coverage. However, to fully benefit from combinatorial testing, the applied techniques and tools have to satisfy the requirements and needs of testers and practitioners. In this paper we explore such requirements distilled from testing software systems for over 15 years across a wide range of projects in business and industry. Their practical implications span from mastering the combinatorial explosion over support for fault localization to understandability, changeability and maintainability. Finally, the paper illustrates how the different combinatorial techniques are able to meet these requirements. The combinatorial techniques discussed in this paper are part of the TOSCA Test suite developed by TRICENTIS. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]