Elie Abi-Lahoud

On the Road to Regulatory Ontologies

Regulatory compliance has proved to be difficult and time consuming across business domains. In Financial Services, the wide and complex spectrum of regulations calls for machine assistance in making sense of, and in consuming, the regulatory text. Semantic technologies, and Ontologies in particular, bring new solutions to the challenges in consuming financial services regulations that traditional technologies fell short in addressing. Current state-of-the-art related work is silent on the role of Legal/ Regulatory Subject-Matter-Experts in building these ontologies. This paper presents an on-going study on creating regulatory ontologies. It describes a Subject-Matter-Expert-centric approach to collaborative development of regulatory ontologies using structured natural language, Semantics of Business Vocabulary and business Rules SBVR in particular.

A Mechanism-Based Explanation of the Institutionalization of Semantic Technologies in the Financial Industry

This paper explains how the financial industry is solving its data, risk management, and associated vocabulary problems using semantic technologies. The paper is the first to examine this phenomenon and to identify the social and institutional mechanisms being applied to socially construct a standard common vocabulary using ontology-based models. This standardized ontology-based common vocabulary will underpin the design of next generation of semantically-enabled information systems (IS) for the financial industry. The mechanisms that are helping institutionalize this common vocabulary are identified using a longitudinal case study, whose embedded units of analysis focus on central agents of change—the Enterprise Data Management Council and the Object Management Group. All this has important implications for society, as it is intended that semantically-enabled IS will, for example, provide stakeholders, such as regulators, with better transparency over systemic risks to national and international financial systems, thereby mitigating or avoiding future financial crises.

A Community-based Approach for Service-based Application Composition in an Ecosystem

The design of composite applications by combining existing services with known semantics is an ongoing topic in current research. Several studies are aimed at providing service description models and standards, service discovery and matching etc. However, service composition in distributed dynamic environments such as P2P ecosystems has received little attention from research communities. In this paper we present a design framework for composing services, taking in particular into account different ways of building peercommunities based on network or services characteristics.

Semantic Queries on Service-Oriented Information Systems

The exchange of information and the cooperation of enterprise information systems play a key role in the development of applications based on merging data from a diversity of sources. Data sources can be stored in traditional databases and are increasingly available in semi-structured formats, including dynamic web pages, which can be accessed through web forms. To alleviate the inherent heterogeneity and security issues involved in merging data sources, service paradigm, particularly data-providing services, are increasingly used to extract and to share data from various sources. In this paper, we propose a service based environment for dynamically creating applications by extracting and combining data through the composition of data-providing services. Data-providing services are described by generalized tree patterns, which are used to select the sources that are relevant to query processing. We discuss how to select sets of data-providing services to semantically cover the concepts used by an application.

A Community-Based Approach for Application Composition in a Peer-to-Peer Environment

The design of composite applications by combining existing services with known semantics is an ongoing topic in current research. Several studies are aimed at providing service description models and standards, service discovery and matching etc. However, service composition in distributed dynamic environments such as P2P has received little attention from the research communities. In this paper we present a design framework for composing services, taking in particular into account different ways for building peer-communities based on network or services characteristics.