Annamaria Chiasera

SLAs empowering services in the future internet

IT-supported service provisioning has become of major relevance in all industries and domains. However, the goal of reaching a truly serviceoriented economy would require that IT-based services can be flexibly traded as economic good, i.e. under well defined and dependable conditions and with clearly associated costs. With this paper we claim for the need of creating a holistic view for the management of service level agreements (SLAs) which addresses the management of services and their related SLAs through the complete service lifecycle, from engineering to decommissioning. Furthermore, we propose an SLA management framework that can become a core element for managing SLAs in the Future Internet. Last, we present early results and experiences gained in four different industrial use cases, covering the areas of Enterprise IT, ERP Hosting, Telco Service Aggregation, and eGovernment.

Engineering Privacy Requirements in Business Intelligence Applications

In this paper we discuss the problem of engineering privacy requirements for business intelligence applications, i.e., of eliciting, modeling, testing, and auditing privacy requirements imposed by the source data owner on the business intelligence applications that use these data to compute reports for analysts. We describe the peculiar challenges of this problem, propose and evaluate different solutions for eliciting and modeling such requirements, and make the case in particular for what we experienced as being the most promising and realistic approach: eliciting and modeling privacy requirements on the reports themselves, rather than on the source or as part of the data warehouse.

Access Control for Data Integration in Presence of Data Dependencies

Defining access control policies in a data integration scenario is a challenging task. In such a scenario typically each source specifies its local access control policy and cannot anticipate data inferences that can arise when data is integrated at the mediator level. Inferences, e.g., using functional dependencies, can allow malicious users to obtain, at the mediator level, prohibited information by linking multiple queries and thus violating the local policies. In this paper, we propose a framework, i.e., a methodology and a set of algorithms, to prevent such violations. First, we use a graph-based approach to identify sets of queries, called violating transactions, and then we propose an approach to forbid the execution of those transactions by identifying additional access control rules that should be added to the mediator. We also state the complexity of the algorithms and discuss a set of experiments we conducted by using both real and synthetic datasets. Tests also confirm the complexity and upper bounds in worst-case scenarios of the proposed algorithms.

Business process assignment and execution in mobile environments

Mobile devices are emerging as working equipment. Developing and maintaining mobile applications for evolving business is costly. Business Process Management technologies enable loose-coupling and composition of services to support the evolving business logic. Business Process Management becomes pervasive and more powerful when it interweaves mobile devices. However, traditional Business Process execution is inefficient in mobile environments: the computational capabilities on mobile devices are various; the movement of devices changes their connectivity. In this paper, we propose a model of mobile computational capability and connectivity. Based on that, we define the constraints of mobile environments and the requirements to execute a business process. A process assignment algorithm and its optimized version considering the cost are designed. Our approach enables more flexible and efficient business process deployment in mobile environments. Preliminary results including a graphical process designer and Android based process engine are tested in a mobile-assisted healthcare project.

Enabling Business Intelligence Functions over a Loosely Coupled Environment

Planning effective and well targeted actions to manage and improve the local and national healthcare services requires institutions to understand and analyse the real needs of the population based on reliable and timely statistical analysis on citizens’ health state. This is particularly important in developing countries in which healthcare facilities lack ICT infrastructures and network connectivity, making data collection and analysis particularly difficult with a considerable manual effort leading to potentially unreliable or incoherent information. In this scenario, we propose a generic communication infrastructure, developed in the SIS-H project for Mozambique hospitals to capture, communicate and analyse clinical events. Our solution enables the exchange of data amongst healthcare facilities over all the different aggregation levels of the hierarchical healthcare system of Mozambique regardless of the availability of communication media (e.g., compact disk, usb stick, web-internet). The plugin-based solution adopted supports reporting and Business Intelligence analysis for exploring data at different granularity levels.

Business Process Assignment and Execution from Cloud to Mobile

Connected to cloud, mobile devices enable workers to manage the business processes hosted on remote process engines. However, traditional business process execution is not tailored for mobile devices. Typically the business logic remains in the cloud, making the process execution on mobile devices vulnerable to unreliable network connection. In this paper, we propose a framework that assigns, deploys business process from cloud onto mobile devices and executes them in disconnected environments. To model the process assignment and execution on mobile devices, we extend BPMN with context constraints such as location and hardware resources. The proposed framework benefits from centralized process model management and the distributed process execution on mobile devices, regardless of the constant access to cloud. We implemented a prototype of mobile process engine with an application for blood pressure examination used by nurses in rural areas.

Establishing information system compliance: An argumentation-based framework

This paper introduces a mixed modeling and argumentation framework applied to assess the compliance of requirements with legal norms, and reports the results of its application in an industrial project in healthcare. Domain experts applied a goal-oriented modeling framework for the representation of requirements and norms, then used argumentation techniques to assess the compliance of requirements with norms, and revise requirements model to ensure compliance.

The eGovernment Use Case Scenario

The SLA@SOI framework-a solution for the automated management of services on the basis of Service Level Agreements (SLAs)-is usually applied to automated software or hardware services. The eGovernment use case aims to assess the applicability of the framework to the management of hybrid services, which involve both automated and human-based activities, as is typical in the government domain. Due the continued growth of service demand, many public organisations outsource their services to private third parties or to other public institutions. SLAs are typically adopted as a way to control the quality of provided services; however, these SLAs are typically managed manually, limiting the possible benefits. Instead, by formalising SLAs it is possible to automate a set of activities such as monitoring, negotiation, planning and adjustment. Below we describe how this can be implemented and evaluated for a specific eGovernment service.

Event-Driven Privacy Aware Infrastructure for Social and Health Systems Interoperability: CSS Platform

Assistive processes in healthcare and socio-assistive domains typically span multiple institutions which usually communicate manually with the exchange of documents. Despite the needs of cooperation it is difficult to provide an integrated solution to improve data exchange and allow comprehensive monitoring of the processes due to the complexity of the domains and the privacy issues derived by the use of sensitive data. In this demo we show how we approached the problem in designing and deploying a platform for the interoperability and monitoring of multi-organization healthcare processes in Italy. Our solution provides an event-based platform that assures privacy enforcement with a fine-grained control on the data that is distributed and minimizes the effort required to join the platform providing components that automates the data exchange.

Modeling and Composition of Environment-as-a-Service

The emergence of mobile devices brings high potential of business value. These devices include sensors, actuators, smartphones, tablets, and other complex devices. They have various computational resources, and are usually connected by wireless connections. On top of the available resources and provided services, complex tasks can be performed. Researches have focused on offloading the resource-intensive computation to stronger cloud infrastructure, or providing services on top of connected mobile devices. It remains a challenge to exploit the various resources on heterogeneous devices. In this paper, we propose a mobile environment model to describe the connected devices and study the structural and behavioral characteristics of the environments. Based on the model, we design the routing protocols and a language to support the composition of environments. We propose a framework to provide a unified, flexible and scalable service for task/process deployment and execution on top of the heterogeneous and dynamic mobile environments.