Chi-Lun Liu

Ontology-Based Conflict Analysis Method in Non-functional Requirements

Non-functional requirements are emerging as one of the most crucial factors for successful information system development in service-oriented organizations. Non-functional requirements involve not only software characteristics but also numerous organizational elements. This study proposes a conflict analysis method for non-functional requirements of information systems. This method includes ontologies, metadata, and rules. The domain independent ontology is derived from software engineering and business management field. The ontology includes software attributes, business values, and restrictions. The metadata can be filled in with concepts from ontology to model a non-functional requirement. The rules reveal the contradiction between non-functional requirements based on ontology and metadata. Finally, this study provides examples to demonstrate and validate this method. In the expectation, this method can facilitate the organization to pay attention to contradicted non-functional requirements of information systems and handle them more effectively.

Cloud service access control system based on ontologies

Cloud service is a new and distinctive business model for service providers. Access control is an emerging and challenging issue in supporting cloud service business. This work proposes a new access control mechanism called cloud service access control (CSAC). The CSAC mechanism considers payment status and service level as the two essential characteristics of cloud service. Ontology is a theoretical foundation for the CSAC mechanism. Inconsistent access control policies are detected by a set of proposed policy conflict analysis rules. Inappropriate user accesses are inhibited by access control policies according the proposed access denying rules. System architecture is designed to support the CSAC mechanism. A case study is provided to demonstrate how CSAC works. Finally, an evaluation is conducted to measure the concept explosion issue in CSAC.

A new standard of on-line customer service process: Integrating language-action into blogs

Blogging, which is a relatively new medium in personal communication and collaboration, can help enterprises overcome some difficulties in conventional customer service management. However, blog functions remain limited. This study proposes a novel standard for managing customer service processes, in which language-action is integrated into blogs to leverage blog characteristics. This standard comprises new specified dialogue patterns for collaboration, suggested customer service processes, and supporting system architecture. Furthermore, a scenario is provided that demonstrates use of this standard.

Applying ontology-based blog to detect information system post-development change requests conflicts

Post-development change requests are user requirements for information systems changes after development. Conflicts might occur as contradictive or inconsistent relationships between requests and existing system design. Detecting conflicts in post-developmenet change requests is an important task during requests management processes. To address this topic, this article proposes an ontology-based blog for automatically discovering conflicts in the extended use-case models of requests from users. This study proposed an information system maintenance process. The proposed approach applies ontologies to represent domain knowledge. A set of rules are used to detect conflicts. This study developed a prototype and invited two companies to evaluate it. Usage feedback opinions about ontology-based blog from two companies indicated the usefulness. The ontology-based blog is a relatively new approach which bridge requirements blogs with a formal and machine interpretable representational model. The automatic conflicts detection capability of the ontology-based blog can reduce the labor cost in requirements analysis phase.

CDADE: Conflict detector in activity diagram evolution based on speech act and ontology

Software system user requirements tend to change and evolve over time. The UML activity diagrams are a useful language for modeling system processes. Additionally, designers must often maintain activity diagrams incrementally. This paper presents the CDADE tool, which can help designers detect conflicts in activity diagram evolution. The CDADE tool is composed of ontologies, metadata, and conflict detection rules. Speech act theory is used to reveal evolutionary change in the activity diagrams. The CDADE prototype and a case study of electronic commerce are presented to demonstrate and validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the CDADE tool.

Process-oriented e-learning architecture in supporting mastery learning

Instructional strategy plays a prominent role in traditional classrooms, but it is not widely noticed in e-learning environments. This study adopts the widespread pedagogical method of mastery learning and proposes an e-learning system architecture that considers the concept of process management and applications of mobile device. This study also offers several scenarios to explain how to use this kind of system. The proposed system could assist teachers to manage their students more easily and it can streamline the teaching processes. It could also make personalised teaching more popular and easier.

The impact of social cues and effectiveness in check-in advertising

Purpose – Check-in based advertising is growing dramatically as the popularity of social media increases. The purpose of this paper is to explore which social cues are appropriate for check-in based advertising in social media based on media richness theory and how content effectiveness affects content generation intention based on achievement motivation theory. Design/methodology/approach – A laboratory experiment was performed to evaluate the effects of social cue strategies on content effectiveness of attitude toward the ad and self-efficacy on recall. The influence of effectiveness on content generation intention are also measured in the experiment. Findings – The results of a laboratory experiment indicated that a strategy of using plentiful social cues has high effectiveness as measured by the concept of attitude toward the ad. Content effectiveness measured by attitude toward the ad and self-efficacy on recall can directly affect user intentions to generating check-in based advertisements. Research...

CDNFRE: Conflict detector in non-functional requirement evolution based on ontologies

Abstract Analyzing conflicts in non-functional requirements is a major task in large software systems development projects. Many of the non-functional requirements that accumulate vary over time. Systems analysts often maintain non-functional requirements incrementally. Requirement information overload and employee turnover problems may complicate conflict detection in the non-functional requirement evolution process. This work proposes a conflict detector in non-functional requirement evolution (CDNFRE) system that uses ontologies as a theoretical foundation for automatically detecting conflicts. Requirement metadata and conflict detection rules and their associated requirement generation and conflict detection processes are proposed for the CDNFRE mechanism. A prototype is developed. A case study of electronic commerce in a television station company demonstrates the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed CDNFRE system.

Payment Status and Service Level Agreement Based Access Control Method in Cloud Service Business

Cloud computing for personal use is emerging as a trend in computer industries. Service providers of cloud computing needs to control user access from business perspective. the essential business characteristics of cloud computing are payment status and service level agreement. This work proposes a novel access control method for personal cloud service business. This proposed method comprises of the metadata, policy analysis rules, and access denying rules. the metadata defines the structure of access control policies and user requirement for cloud service. the policy analysis rules analyze conflicts and redundancies between access control policies. the access denying rules inhibits inappropriate access according to policies. Ontology is a theoretical foundation in this method. Payment status ontology, access permission ontology, service level ontology, and cloud ontology are used in this work to provide semantic information for rule execution. a scenario of personal data backup cloud service is also provided in this work. in the expectation, this method can provide a convenient way for cloud service providers to control user access according to changeable business and marketing strategies.

Sharing and hiding online secrets: Using social relation and tag ontology in social software access control

Purpose – This paper aims to manage access control tasks to satisfy the user privacy needs of online information resources according to social relations and tags.Design/methodology/approach – The study proposes a method for access control management in the online social context. The proposed method includes the access control policy management process, metadata of access control policies, the data of ontologies, tags, and social relations, and conflict detection rules.Findings – Online information sharing and hiding, which needs to consider social relations and mentioned topics, is a unique context and needs a novel access control mechanism. Ontologies are powerful and expressive enough to identify conflicts in access control policies. The paper provides a method using ontologies to control the access control activities based on social relations and tags on web content. The effectiveness of the methods conflict detection rules is validated through several scenarios.Research limitations/implications – To ...