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The Health-e-Child project aims to develop an integrated healthcare platform for European paediatrics. In order to achieve a comprehensive view of children's health, a complex integration of biomedical data, information, and knowledge is necessary. Ontologies will be used to formally define this domain knowledge and will form the basis for the medical knowledge management system. This paper introduces an innovative methodology for the vertical integration of biomedical knowledge. This approach will be largely clinician-centered and will enable the definition of ontology fragments, connections between them (semantic bridges) and enriched ontology fragments (views). The strategy for the specification and capture of fragments, bridges and views is outlined with preliminary examples demonstrated in the collection of biomedical information from hospital databases, biomedical ontologies, and biomedical public databases. Keywords: Vertical Knowledge Integration, Approximate Queries, Ontology Views, Semantic Bridges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transfusion Ontology is a simple task-based ontology developed in the emergency health care domain. Taking the assumption that ontologies are instruments for supporting exchange of information among parties, the principles governing the design of this ontology was mainly based on the identification of the interactions of messages to be exchanged among parties. This paper shows how this simple design principle is able to guide a whole ontology construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we will propose our ideas for a semantically ready competency model. The model will allow semantic enrichment on different levels, creating truly meaningful competencies. The aim of this model is to provide a flexible approach for (re)use, matching, interpretation, exchange and storage for competencies. Our competency model is based on the DOGMA ontology framework and the proposed IEEE standards RCD and SCRM. We will focus on the model itself and how semantics can be applied to it as these elements form the basis for any kind of processing on them. Keywords: competence, competency, RCD, semantics, DOGMA, e-HRM, HRM, occupation, ontology, Semantic Web. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today's mobile data applications aspire to deliver services to a user anywhere - anytime while fulfilling his Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. However, the success of the service delivery heavily relies on the QoS offered by the underlying networks. As the services operate in a heterogeneous networking environment, we argue that the generic information about the networks' offered-QoS may enable an anyhow mobile service delivery based on an intelligent (proactive) selection of ‘any' network available in the user's context (location and time). Towards this direction, we develop a QoS-predictions service provider, which includes functionality for the acquisition of generic offered-QoS information and which, via a multidimensional processing and history-based reasoning, will provide predictions of the expected offered-QoS in a reliable and timely manner. We acquire the generic QoS-information from distributed mobile services' components quantitatively (actively and passively) measuring the applicationlevel QoS, while the reasoning is based on statistical data mining and pattern recognition techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rise of RFID technology, the so called internet of things for managing supply chain events has gained increasing attention. This paper proposes a peer to peer broker network on top of existing specifications for this infrastructure. With the broker network, event based communication is enabled for the internet of things. However, the main contribution of this paper is a mechanism to optimize event queries for in-network processing of supply chain events. Here, models of supply chain processes are exploited for optimizing event queries and enabling improved mapping of query operators to the broker network. Experiments are presented which show that the proposed mechanism reduces network load compared to existing approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multimodal systems support people with different needs and different features during the interaction process making it more easy and natural. However naturalness can usually produce ambiguous interpretation. This paper discusses ambiguities in multimodal interaction proposing in particular two different examples of ambiguities: a) multimodal ambiguities produced combining un-ambiguous modal information containing contrasting concepts in multimodal dialogue, b) ambiguities arising by the propagation at multimodal level of a modal input ambiguity. Moreover, the paper proposes a formal representation of multimodal inputs using the hybrid approach that combines the attribute multi-set grammar with the linear logic. This paper starts from discussing the main features of a multimodal system and the classes of cooperation between modalities. The attribute multi-set grammar combined with the linear logic enables to highlight the multidimensionality of multimodality and allows to formally describe ambiguities that can occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the recent proliferation of documents, automatic metadata extraction from document becomes an important task. In this paper, we propose a novel template matching based method for header metadata extraction form semi-structured documents stored in PDF. In our approach, templates are defined, and the document is considered as strings with format. Templates are used to guide finite state automaton (FSA) to extract header metadata of papers. The testing results indicate that our approach can effectively extract metadata, without any training cost and available to some special situation. This approach can effectively assist the automatic index creation in lots of fields such as digital libraries, information retrieval, and data mining. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inter-organizational business cooperations can be described from different viewpoints each fulfilling a specific purpose. Since all viewpoints describe the same system they must not contradict each other, thus, must be consistent. Consistency can be checked based on common semantic concepts of the different viewpoints. This is sufficient for equal concepts, while weakly related concepts, e.g. related to runtime behavior of viewpoints, have to be considered explicitly. In this paper we identify dynamic consistency issues correlated to the runtime behavior between value and coordination viewpoints on behalf of an example. In particular, an issue class on occurrence estimations of execution options and an issue class on granularity differences in modelling are identified and illustrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we propose a Data Integration System based on an ontology as Global Representation. The paper briefly introduces the motivations and the benefits that the use of an ontology brings to a Data Integration System, which is also formally defined. The paper, in particular, focuses on the limitation of the proposed system to handle the different relations that can exist between concepts of an ontology. We divide the relations that can be defined in an ontology in two different sets: Mapped relations, which we consider atomic relations and Derived relations, which can be generated by combining mapped relations using SWRL rules. Some examples of the different kind of relations are reported to clarify the concepts and a new definition of Mapping in the Data Integration System is proposed, in order to define the atomic relations. The paper ends with considerations about the problems that still need to be considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two major problems in constructing data federations (for example, data warehouses and database federations) concern achieving and maintaining consistency and a uniform representation of the data on the global level of the federation. The first step in creating uniform representations of data is known as data extraction, whereas data reconciliation is concerned with resolving data inconsistencies. Our approach to constructing a global conceptual schema as the result of integrating a collection of (semantically) heterogeneous component schemas is based on the concept of exact views. We show that a global schema constructed in terms of exact views integrates component schemas in such a way that the global schema is populated by exactly those instances allowed by the local schemas (and in special cases, also the other way around). In this sense, the global schema is equivalent to the set of component schemas from which the global schema is derived. This paper describes a modeling framework for data federations based on the Object-Role Modeling (ORM) approach. In particular, we show that we can represent exact views within ORM, providing the means to resolve in a combined setting data extraction and reconciliation problems on the global level of the federation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is common for literature on context-awareness to focus on specific application domains or on the development of models and frameworks to facilitate context-awareness. In this study, however, we take a step back from such work in order to investigate how regular people may already be employing, or trying to employ, context-awareness in their everyday lives using existing mobile tools (such as mobile phones, paper notepads, etc.). We believe that an understanding of these existing real-world uses and needs of context-awareness will help to better inform and direct research efforts in this domain. Towards this aim we present the findings of a user study in which twelve randomly selected individuals recorded a diary on their use of mobile tools over the period of two days. The findings clearly demonstrate that people do indeed currently employ a wide variety of contexts and context-aware behaviours, albeit in a manner that is often imperfect and at a sub-conscious level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we describe a framework for the application of semantic granularities to the Semantic Web. Given a data source and an ontology formalizing qualities which describe the source, we define a dynamic granularity system for the navigation of the repository according to different levels of detail, i.e., granularities. Semantic granularities summarize the degree of informativeness of the qualities, taking into account both the individuals populating the repository, which concur in the definition of the implicit semantics, and the ontology schema, which gives the formal semantics. The method adapts and extends to ontologies existing natural language processing techniques for topics generalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing development of web-based reputation systems in the 21st century will have a powerful social and economic impact on both business entities and individual customers, because it makes transparent quality assessment on products and services to achieve customer assurance in the distributed web-based Reputation Systems. The web-based reputation systems will be the foundation for web intelligence in the future. Trust and Reputation help capture business intelligence through establishing customer trust relationships, learning consumer behavior, capturing market reaction on products and services, disseminating customer feedback, buyers' opinions and end-user recommendations. It also reveals dishonest services, unfair trading, biased assessment, discriminatory actions, fraudulent behaviors, and un-true advertising. The continuing development of these technologies will help in the improvement of professional business behavior, sales, reputation of sellers, providers, products and services. Given the importance of reputation in this paper, we propose ontology for reputation. In the business world we can consider the reputation of a product or the reputation of a service or the reputation of an agent. In this paper we propose ontology for these entities that can help us unravel the components and conceptualize the components of reputation of each of the entities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Service-Oriented computing can be characterized as the motivating force for interoperable web applications. Businesses that embark on service-oriented technology are inclined to an effective interoperation with other businesses. This interoperation not only can expand businesses' markets but also allow the provision of quality services to citizens for carrying out their everyday transactions. However for an effective utilization of service-oriented computing a variety of other technologies must be involved namely semantics, pragmatics, effective search techniques, intelligent agents and pervasive services. In this paper we focus in one of the phases of service-oriented computing, the web service discovery, and propose an effective pragmatic and pervasive methodology that will enable potential business partners to discover the web servicesThe term web services, as in this paper, is used to refer to semantic web services./processes of their interest. We are particularly emphasizing on the importance of pragmatics and their application during web service discovery, because only a pragmatic consideration can provide complete and unambiguous meaning to web service usage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When using electronic services, people are often asked to provide personal information. This raises many privacy issues. To gain the trust of the user, service providers can use privacy policy languages such as P3P to declare the purpose and usage of this personal information. User agents can compare these policies to privacy preferences of a user and warn the user if his privacy is threatened. This paper extends two languages: P3P and APPEL. It makes it possible to refer to certified data and credentials. This allows service providers to define the minimal level of assurance. It is also shown how different ways of disclosure (exact, blurred, verifiably encrypted...) can be specified to achieve more privacy friendly policies. Last, the paper describes a privacy agent that makes use of the policies to automate privacy friendly information disclosure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless PAN Mesh Network (WMN) is currently going to be standardized and enhanced to take full advantages of the flexible and heterogeneous networks. Although the standard (802.15.5) is under-construction, WMNs are expected to become popular as they have the ability to connect all kinds of current networks. So far, there is no applied architecture which is efficient enough to completely solve routing and security problems in WMN. To assist IEEE P805.15 in routing and security aspects, in this paper, we propose an adaptive algorithm for detecting bogus nodes when they attempt to intrude into the network by attacking routing protocol. In addition, a procedure to find the most optimal path between two nodes is presented along with adaptive pre-conditions for WMNs. We also show that our algorithm is robust according to the mobility of the nodes and it is easy to implement in currently proposed architectures. It can work with many kinds of wireless networks as well as can reduce computational costs. Keywords: Wireless PAN Mesh Networks, Security, Intrusion Detection, Clustering, Optimal Path, Routing, Attack on Routing Protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We welcome our workshop attendees to a very interesting collection of discussions. We received many papers and had to limit the acceptance rate to 40those papers submitted. The papers cover a range of topics from Infrastructure, Service Discovery, Personalization, Environments, Security, Privacy, to Wireless and Sensor Networks showing the scope of interests and activities represented by the PerSys participants. We would like to thank everyone who submitted a paper and believe you will all find the presentations and discussions stimulating and worthwhile. The reviewers of the papers have done a terrific job in helping authors prepare better final papers and deserve special thanks for completing the job promptly. Last, we would like to thank the organizers of the conference a sincere thanks for the hard work they have put in to providing us with the opportunity to gather, present, listen, and discuss our research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The implementation of service-oriented device architectures (SODA) suffers from restrictions that are imposed by the use of existing syntactic technologies. Related problems include data and message-level heterogeneities among interoperating services, insufficient search and discovery of exposed services and inadequate web process composition. In this paper we propose an approach for introducing semantics in a SODA environment. Specifically we examine the introduction of data, functional and behavioural semantics and the role they play in a semantically-enabled SODA (SeSODA) pervasive environment. We put special emphasis in data semantics. We present the architecture of an OSGi-based SeSODA implementation, analyse the most critical components of this architecture and discuss implementation issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a mobile system that supports young students learning history at an archaeological site. It adopts gameplay as a novel and effective technique particularly suited for learning through mobile systems (m-learning). From a technological point of view, the main novelty of our system is its slim architecture. Minimal investments are required because the system runs on the students' own cellular phones. Experimental studies indicate that gameplay is able to trigger a desire to learn more about ancient history and to make archaeological visits more exciting and learning about the past more effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been developed to enhance the integration of various systems to allow organizations to be more flexible in case of business changes. This paper will explain a top-down method in which Business Process Models can lead to a basic service orientation of business functions. This will be shown based on the principles of Model-Driven Architecture (MDA). Without model support, the translation of business needs into executable code to support IT developments is rather hard and mostly impossible. In this paper, we motivate the need for this approach as a means of focusing importance on modeling, a key enabler of communication between business analysts and IT developers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Context is typically viewed at as meta-data that supplements the ‘real' data of an application. In this paper, we contrast and compare the concepts of context in four different applications. We show that our notion of context needs to be extended and that wider and more flexible notions need to be supported. In particular, a key issue is how to provide systems that support computation in regard to any context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, WSBL (Web Service Business Library) is proposed as a solution for problems above mentioned, of any company which offers financial services, by combining agents' theory, web services and grid computing. After explaining the solution, this paper presents an example of a web service that prices a weather derivative using the computing power of a grid, but could be easily extended to any financial product. This approach would enable the bank to have only one library for pricing all products running in one grid giving service to all of the trading rooms that a bank could have around the world. These services could be sold to third-party users with the appropriate security services. Some experiments in a real grid environments will be presented to validate and verificate the utility as well as the performance of the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The creation of virtual humans capable of behaving and interacting realistically with each other requires the integration of interdisciplinary theories, methods and approaches. Although Intelligent Virtual Simulation has focused on realistic interactions of their inhabitants, it still reflects the necessity of a common framework capable of integrating all the technological advances developed separately. This paper combines some of the successful approaches carried out with the purpose of defining an openness framework that help making the development of Intelligent Virtual Agent based systems as easy as possible by the integration of these independent and different domains. The paper also presents a case study based on a virtual assistant helping a human and learning from him to use UML (Unified Modelling Language) for modelling different systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an extension of the AMBLE model, an awareness model which manage load balancing by means of a multi-agent based architecture, with the aim to establish a cooperative load balancing model for collaborative grid environments. This model, named C-AMBLE (Cooperative Awareness Model for Balancing the Load in grid Environments) applies some theoretical principles of multi-agents systems, awareness models, and third party models, to promote an efficient autonomous cooperative task delivery in grid environments. This cooperative task management, implemented using web services, has been tested in a real and heterogeneous grid infrastructure with very successful results. This paper presents some of these outcomes while emphasizing on the performance speedup of the system using this model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present an ongoing project on the concept of interaction among people via a mobile (city) application. The focus of our research lies on its usability and sociability, i.e., on all aspects that are related to community forming and development in a city context. In order to analyze them, we have developed a method that combines two techniques that are not common in usability studies: the association technique and the laddering method. We have called this combination the ‘connotation chain' technique. In this paper, we will first introduce this technique showing its advantages and disadvantages in a usability study. Then, we will present the results of applying this technique to our specific objective and, finally, we will discuss its implications for the further development of the interface of this application. Keywords: Mobile communication within a city context, Communities, Association technique, Laddering and User-centered design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several approaches for data interoperation identified by Karp have been implemented for biological databases. We extend Karp's approach for interoperation not only to protein databases but also to knowledge bases and other information sources. This paper outlines algebra for protein data source composition based on our existing work of Protein Ontology (PO). In this paper we consider the case of establishing correspondence between various protein data sources using semantic relationships over the conceptual framework of PO. Here we provide specific set of relationships over PO framework to cover data semantics for integrating data information from diverse protein data sources. These relationships help in defining semantic query algebra for PO to efficiently reason and query the instance store. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a method for query approximation in Geographical Information Systems. In our approach, queries are expressed by the Geographical Pictorial Query Language (GeoPQL), and query approximation is performed using WordNet, a lexical database for the English language available on the Internet. Due to the focus on geographical context, we address WordNetpartitiontaxonomies. If a concept contained in a query has no match in the database, the query is approximated using the immediate superconcepts and subconcepts in the WordNet taxonomy, and their related degrees of similarity. Semantic similarity is evaluated using the information content approach, which shows a higher correlation with human judgment than the traditional similarity measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes, for the case of Enterprise Java Bean components and JBoss application server, how replication for availability can be supported to tolerate application server/transaction manager failures. Replicating the state associated with the progression of a transaction (i.e., which phase of two-phase commit is enacted and the transactional resources involved) provides an opportunity to continue a transaction using a backup transaction manager if the transaction manager of the primary fails. Existing application servers do not support this functionality. The paper discusses the technical issues involved and shows how a solution can be engineered. Keywords: Availability, application servers, components, Enterprise Java Beans, fault tolerance, middleware, replication, transactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from the era of stove-piped Geographical Information Systems up to interesting mash-ups involving Internet based mapping services, the approaches of handling Geographical Information (GI) have changed significantly. This paper briefly concentrates up on the distinctive features and current implementations of Spatial Data Access Patterns. Considering the information requirements of the users in Emergency Operations Center, this paper identifies the issues and challenges in handling GI in dynamically changing environments. Two new patterns based on appropriate integration of Semantics and Grid technology are introduced, that may satisfy the identified requirements. Necessary alterations in current practices for handling GI is discussed with detail considerations for realization of these patterns on open environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An increasing number of recent information retrieval systems make use of ontologies to help the users clarify their information needs and come up with semantic representations of documents. A particular concern here is the integration of these semantic approaches with traditional search technology. The research presented in this paper examines how ontologies can be efficiently applied to large-scale search systems for the web. We describe how these systems can be enriched with adapted ontologies to provide both an in-depth understanding of the user's needs as well as an easy integration with standard vector-space retrieval systems. The ontology concepts are adapted to the domain terminology by computing a feature vector for each concept. Later, the feature vectors are used to enrich a provided query. The whole retrieval system is under development as part of a larger Semantic Web standardization project for the Norwegian oil & gas sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is part of an ongoing research effort to better understand the process of conceptual modeling. As part of this effort, we are currently developing a modeling laboratory named MoDial (Modeling Dialogues). The main contribution of this paper is a conceptual meta-model of that part of MoDial which aims to capture the elicitation aspects of the modeling process used in creating a model, rather than the model as such.The current meta-model is the result of a two-stage research process. The first stage involves theoretical input from literature and earlier results. The second stage is concerned with (modest) empirical validation in terms of interviews with modeling experts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One distinctive feature of pervasive computing environments is the common need to gather and process context information about real persons. Unfortunately, this unavoidably affects persons' privacy. Each time someone uses a cellular phone, a credit card, or surfs the web, he leaves a trace that is stored and processed. In a pervasive sensing environment, however, the amount of information collected is much larger than today and also might be used to reconstruct personal information with great accuracy. The question we address in this paper is how to control dissemination and flow of personal data across organizational, and personal boundaries, i.e., to potential addressees of privacy relevant information. This paper presents the User-Centric Privacy Framework (UCPF). It aims at protecting a user's privacy based on the enforcement of privacy preferences. They are expressed as a set of constraints over some set of context information. To achieve the goal of cross-boundary control, we introduce two novel abstractions, namely Transformations and Foreign Constraints, in order to extend the possibilities of a user to describe privacy protection criteria beyond the expressiveness usually found today. Transformations are understood as any process that the user may define over a specific piece of context. This is a main building block for obfuscating - or even plainly lying about - the context in question. Foreign Constraints are an important complementing extension because they allow for modeling conditions defined on external users that are not the tracked individual, but may influence disclosure of personal data to third parties. We are confident that these two easy-to-use abstractions together with the general privacy framework presented in this paper constitute a strong contribution to the protection of the personal privacy in pervasive computing environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the analysis phase of information systems development, it is important to have the conceptual schema validated by the business domain expert, to ensure that the schema accurately models the relevant aspects of the business domain. An effective way to facilitate this validation is to verbalize the schema in language that is both unambiguous and easily understood by the domain expert, who may be non-technical. Such verbalization has long been a major aspect of the Object-Role Modeling (ORM) approach, and basic support for verbalization exists in some ORM tools. Second generation ORM (ORM 2) significantly extends the expressibility of ORM models (e.g. deontic modalities, role value constraints, etc.). This paper discusses the automated support for verbalization of ORM 2 models provided by NORMA (Neumont ORM Architect), an open-source software tool that facilitates entry, validation, and mapping of ORM 2 models. NORMA supports verbalization patterns that go well beyond previous verbalization work. The verbalization for individual elements in the core ORM model is generated using an XSLT transform applied to an XML file that succinctly identifies different verbalization patterns and describes how phrases are combined to produce a readable verbalization. This paper discusses the XML patterns used to describe ORM constraints and the tightly coupled facilities that enable end-users to easily adapt the verbalization phrases to cater for different domain experts and native languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an experimental study for extracting a terminology from a corpus made of Curriculum Vitae (CV). This terminology is to be used for ontology acquisition. The choice of the pruning rate of the terminology is crucial relative to the quality of the ontology acquired. In this paper, we investigate this pruning rate by using several evaluation measures (precision, recall, F-measure, and ROC curve). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an extension to the Object-Role Modeling approach to support formal declaration of dynamic rules. Dynamic rules differ from static rules by pertaining to properties of state transitions, rather than to the states themselves. In this paper, application of dynamic rules is restricted to so-called single-step transactions, with an old state (the input of the transaction) and a new state (the direct result of that transaction). Such restricted rules are easier to formulate (and enforce) than a constraint applying historically over all possible states. In our approach, dynamic rules specify an elementary transaction type indicating which kind of object or fact is being added, deleted or updated, and (optionally) pre-conditions relevant to the transaction, followed by a condition stating the properties of the new state, including the relation between the new state and the old state. These dynamic rules are formulated in a syntax designed to be easily validated by non-technical domain experts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In software engineering, the notion of unit testing was successfully introduced and applied. Unit tests are easy manageable tests for small parts of a program - single units. They proved especially useful to capture unwanted changes and side effects during the maintenance of a program, and they grow with the evolution of the program. Ontologies behave quite differently than program units. As there is no information hiding in ontology engineering, and thus no black box components, at first the idea of unit testing for ontologies seems not applicable. In this paper we motivate the need for unit testing, describe the adaptation to the unit testing approach, and give use cases and examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a holistic approach to enhance human knowledge in distributed and strictly linked contexts. Current semantic web technologies focus their attention only on the machine side of the interaction process. Our approach considers both the human and the machine working together to accomplish a task, stressing the importance of adapting data, tools and interactions to the different skills, contexts and tasks of the users. Multimodal interactive systems based on Semantic Web technologies support the sharing of knowledge among co-workers in different real networked environments. We present a scenario in the building sector, in which mobile systems are needed to reduce loosing of information on technical drawings from the building yard to the office. The paper presents a specification method and its link to semantic web technologies to satisfy the emerging requirements. Keywords: Multimodal interactive system (MIS), Semantic Web technologies, Human-Computer Interaction, Knowledge Sharing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within organizations, workflow systems can automate business processes by centrally coordinating activity sequences. But outside their borders, organizations are autonomous entities that cannot be subject to centralized process control. Their internal processes are autonomously defined and controlled, and what they need is to synchronize those concurrent processes. Just like Petri nets are a valuable tool to model activity sequencing in local business processes, π-calculus becomes a useful tool to model concurrency in inter-organizational processes. After a review of the main developments in cross-organizational workflow management, this paper illustrates the use of π-calculus to model the interactions between business processes running concurrently in different organizations. These interactions range from invoking external services to more complex patterns such as contract negotiation and partner search and selection. The paper concludes with a case study that illustrates the application of the proposed approach in a more realistic business scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the domain of business-to-business (B2B) collaboration, companies are pursuing the objective of electronically linking their business processes for improving their supply chains. For creating such inter-organizational collaboration, intra- and inter-organizational knowledge workers (IKWs) function as assisting experts. However, IKWs must not constantly "reinvent the wheel" but should instead be supported by a repository that contains knowledge about how to design business processes. Thus, this paper proposes the support of IKWs by a pattern repository for the effective and efficient design of inter-organizational business processes. A pattern is conceptually formulated knowledge that is technology independent. By storing patterns in a uniform specification template of a meta model, it is possible to perform systematic reasoning. Having information readily available about the technology support of individual patterns, IKWs can quickly analyse with which intersection of pattern sets it is possible to link intra-organizational business processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the importance of software process improvement in a virtual environment where several organizations are cooperatively involved in the development of a software product, each one using its own development process. The main focus of the paper is a methodology, called Process and Project Alignment Methodology, to improve the development process of a single organization based on projects knowledge. However, the authors believe that the same fundaments can be applied in a virtual organization and discuss the extension of the presented methodology to a virtual organizational context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The direct banking business is characterized by integrated distribution channel politics and holistic sales approaches combined with multi-channel-management. Direct banks in Europe and especially in Germany are currently facing increasing market competition. The crucial factors for growth are product innovation, cost control and the flexibility to react individually to each customer in a rapidly changing business environment. In order to compete, direct banks are forced to undergo a drastic transformation of business processes as well as organizational and managerial structures. The application of new concepts in building information systems is therefore necessary in order to further support business needs and allow for the management and adaptation of systems that are dependent on the fast changing market requirements. This paper shows how the information technology (IT) landscape of one of the five leading direct banks in Germany could be optimized by means of a service-based orientation. The case outlined in this paper focuses on the customer service domain. The main goal is to concurrently reduce costs by automating business processes and to increase the quality of customer services. A reference model for these customer service processes is then introduced. Based on this model, this paper describes a business component-oriented system architecture according to identified business components, and their corresponding services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) using a certificate has already been widely used in a variety of fields for the provision of security service. Accordingly a Certification Authority (CA) that issues a certificate must securely construct a Certification Authority System and manage it. It is significantly important for a CA to ensure its service to continue to operate properly by preparing for any disaster caused by a CA's private key compromise no matter what the cause is. In this paper, we provide the definitions of PKI disaster recovery and PKI business continuity, which are more clear and specific than ever before. We also present three requirements for a PKI model preparing for a disaster. Then we propose a PKI model that ensures business continuity in the event of a disaster in which a CA key is exposed. It is easily applied to the existing PKI structure. We stress that the proposed PKI model in this paper is the first to ensure both applicability to the existing models and business continuity in the event of a disaster. Keywords: Public key infrastructure, PKI model, business continuity, forward secure signature scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a case in the development of a knowledge community support system in the context of an industrial association group in the construction sector. This system is a result of the Know-Construct project which aims at providing association sponsored SME communities of the construction sector with a sophisticated information management platform and community building tools for knowledge sharing. The paper begins by characterizing the so-called construction industry knowledge community. The Know-Construct system concept and the its general architecture are described, focusing on the semantic resources, in particular the ontologies structure. The final part of the paper depicts the approach to the actual introduction of the system in the community. An action-research approach was planned to obtain research results regarding the social acceptance of semantic resources such as the ontologies and technical classifications used in system. Keywords: enterprise sponsored virtual communities, ontology based infor-mation systems, action-research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to provoke further theorising and action by the Community Informatics community about working with Indigenous communities. In particular, we present research undertaken with the Indigenous Maori and Pakeha (European) community in Aotearoa/New Zealand as a case study to learn from. Maori are of interest because of their engagement with, and speaking out, about ICTs. We suggest that particular attention needs to be paid from an ethical perspective in working with diversity in order that research and action are undertaken that benefits both the researcher and participant community. Community Informatics would benefit from more attention to articulating its assumptions about the nature of research and action with cultural diversity in its role as a bridge between diverse communities and the design and implementation of Information and Communication Technologies. Keywords: Community technology; community informatics; Maoris and technology;Kaupapa Maori research (Indigenous Knowledge); New Zealand and technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web service composition is a distributed model to construct new web service on top of existing primitive or other composite web services. Many research efforts have been made in web services composition and coordination. In such a scenario, an important issue is how to assess the degree of trustworthiness one can have about the web service composition, especially their performance and dependability characteristics. In this paper, we propose a petri net based approach to predict the reliability of web service composition. The first step of the approach involves the transformation of web service composition specification into Stochastic Petri Nets (SPN) model. The proposed transformation is built upon BPEL. From the SPN model, we can derive the reliability and performance measure of web service composition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Real-time animation of virtual humans, capable of interacting realistically with others, requires a sophisticated architecture for the integration of different elements. A more flexible architecture for intelligent virtual agents emphasizing on the learning process should be designed to fulfil these requirements. In this paper we present an open and flexible architecture, IVAL, that has being designed to accomplish the requested necessities. IVAL is based on the Web Service principles, as well as on the fundaments of the Open Agent Architecture (OAA) and it intends to accomplish determined objectives through the cooperation with other agents that inhabit the environment. One of the main purposes is to introduce a realistic learning process based on the interaction with the environment as similar as possible to humans been doing. This paper also presents a set of languages, based on the standard Extensible Markup Language (XML), that have been designed to get a more appropriate representation of all the required information elements. Keywords: Intelligent virtual agent, learning, Web Service, XML. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

RDF is a recommended standard for describing knowledge about resources over the Web. If we talk about querying RDF, we must consider important aspects concerning Web querying: distributed information and context oriented description of resources. In this paper we propose a framework that provides better, more complete answering to RDF queries than classical answering mechanisms. This framework provides a way to combine several RDF documents in order to compute a more complete answer to a given query. The combination of RDF documents is performed under some conditions, leading to a safe combination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of inconsistency handling in ontologies has recently been attracting a lot of attention. When inconsistency occurs in an ontology, there are mainly two ways to deal with it - we either resolve it or reason with the inconsistent ontology. In this paper, we give a survey of the existing approaches for handling inconsistency in ontologies and analyze their usability. We focus on Description Logics. We give clear examples to illustrate how to use these approaches to deal with practical problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Along with an increase in the number of mentally ill people, research into all aspects of mental health has increased in recent years. In all disciplines information is the key to success but major problems adversely affect the efficiency and effectiveness that available mental health information is used. These relate to the lack of existing infrastructure to support effective access and information retrieval, and lack of tools to analyze the available information and derive useful knowledge from it. In this paper we explain how the ontology, multi-agent system and data mining technologies can be implemented within the mental health domain to effectively address these issues. The synergy of these frontier technologies may result in an intelligent information infrastructure that provides effective and efficient use of all available information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Matching of knowledge structures is generally important for scientific knowledge management, e-commerce, enterprise application integration, etc. With the desire of knowledge sharing and reuse in these fields, matching commonly occurs among different organizations on the knowledge describing the same domain. In this paper we propose a knowledge matching method which makes use of our previously developed tree mining algorithms for extracting frequent subtrees from a tree structured database. Example decision trees obtained from real world domains are used for experimentation purposes whereby some important issues that arise when extracting shared knowledge through tree mining are discussed. The potential of applying tree mining algorithms for automatic discovery of common knowledge structures is demonstrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]