George Bryan

The e-Baby data warehouse: a case study

Neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) require equipment and facilities to assist and monitor premature (and some full-term) babies. This equipment outputs physiological and clinical data, but current research does not provide doctors with techniques for capturing this data in a format that is suitable for analysis and research. Additionally, regional hospitals provide limited NICU support, but, without access to a neonatologist, the baby must be moved to another hospital. This paper details a framework for clinical and physiological data capture, the storage structures within the e-Baby data warehouse, and information access through a secure intranet/Internet browser. The key contribution of this work is the infrastructure that provides a platform for patient information data capture, storage, display and analysis. A key benefit of this work is to provide a mechanism for neonatologists to receive information directly from a regional hospital, thereby preventing, in some cases, the immediate need to move the baby.

Modelling Trust Relationships in Distributed Environments

Trust management and trustworthy computing are becoming increasingly significant at present. Over the recent years there have been several research works that have addressed the issue of trust management in distributed systems. However a clear and comprehensive definition that can be used to capture a range of commonly understood notions of trust is still lacking. In this paper, we give a formal definition of trust relationship with a strict mathematical structure that can not only reflect many of the commonly used extreme notions of trust but also provides a taxonomy framework where a range of useful trust relationships can be expressed and compared. Then we show how the proposed structure can be used to analyze both commonly used and some unique trust notions that arise in distributed environments. This proposed trust structure is currently being used in the development of the overall methodology of life cycle of trust relationships in distributed information systems.

A Unified Framework for Trust Management

In this paper, we propose a unified framework for trust management that can cover a broad variety of trust mechanisms including reputations, credentials, local data and environment parameters. The proposed trust management framework leverages established standards and it covers a broad variety of situations in different environments. This framework can provide utilizing and enabling tools for trust management. Under this framework, different trust mechanisms can be assembled together when multiple mechanisms of trust are necessary. Here, we refer to our trust management system as TrustEngine. The TrustEngine follows the initial ideas of PolicyMaker to separate generic mechanisms of trust management from application-specific policies which are defined by each application. TrustEngine has a generic set of functions, interfaces, and data storage for trust management in distributed environments. TrustEngine is an open system and it can easily include new trust components. We describe the architecture and implementation details of TrustEngine. We provide an application scenario to illustrate the usage of TrustEngine in the real world. We believe that the development of trust management in real applications can be automated to substantially higher level based on our proposed framework

General Methodology for Analysis and Modeling of Trust Relationships in Distributed Computing

In this paper, we discuss a general methodology for analysis and modeling of trust relationships in distributed computing. We discuss the classification of trust relationships, categorize trust relationships into two layers and provide a hierarchy of trust relationships based on a formal definition of trust relationship. We provide guidelines for the analysis and modeling of trust relationships. We review operations on trust relationships and relative types of trust relationships in our previous work. We provide a set of definitions for the properties of direction and symmetry of trust relationships. In order to analyze and model the scope and diversity of trust relationship, we define trust scope label. We provide some example scenarios to illustrate the proposed definitions about properties of trust relationship. All the definitions about the properties of trust relationships are elements of the taxonomy framework of trust relationships. We discuss the lifecycle of trust relationships that includes the analysis and modeling of trust relationships, trust relationships at runtime, and change management of trust relationships. We propose a trust management architecture at high level to place the analysis and modeling of trust relationships under the background of trust management.

Analysis and modelling of trust in distributed information systems

In this paper, we consider the analysis and modelling of trust in distributed information systems. We review the relations of trust relationships in our previous work. We discuss trust layers and hierarchy based on formal definition of trust relationship. We provide a set of definitions to describe the properties of trust direction and trust symmetry under our taxonomy framework. In order to analyze and model the scope and diversity of trust relationship, we define trust scope label under our taxonomy framework. We provide some example scenarios to illustrate the proposed definitions about properties of trust relationship. The proposed definitions are new elements of the taxonomy framework for enabling the analysis and modelling of trust. We provide some discussions about the life cycle of trust relationships. The proposed trust structure and properties are currently being used in the development of the overall methodology of life cycle of trust relationships in distributed information systems.

Using XML to facilitate information management across multiple local government agencies

The main barriers to the level of electronic data interchange required to seamlessly integrate services offered by legacy systems in an Internet environment are the need for applications to share a common data definition and the non-heterogeneity in database platforms. This paper details a collaborative research initiative between the Penrith City Council, Penrith Australia and the Centre for Advanced Systems Engineering (CASE) at the University of Western Sydney. It details the development of a fully functioning XML-based prototype system that provides effective integration of services offered by a collaborating group of legacy systems. The key contribution of this work is to provide an open systems based infrastructure that allows collaborating legacy systems, based on heterogeneous database and server platforms, to offer an integrated query service over the Internet.

An enhanced hybrid range partitioning strategy for parallel database systems

Load balancing is a critical issue for parallel database systems. There are two common load balancing methods, access equalization and data equalization approaches. We present a new data equalization load balancing approach for the hybrid-range partitioning scheme. The algorithm is an extension of the conventional hybrid-range partitioning and features variable-size fragments to counter the data skew problem, which was not addressed in the conventional scheme. The algorithm load balancing costs and the performance improvements are testified by using a simple simulation.

Fair Trading Protocol with Offline Anonymous Credit Card Payment

Abstract This paper proposes a fair trading protocol. The fair trading protocol provides an overall solution for a trading process with offline anonymous credit card payments. With the exploding growth of electronic commerce on the Internet, the issue of fairness1,2 is becoming increasingly more important. Fair exchange protocols have already been broadly used for applications such as electronic transactions,3,4 electronic mails,5,6and contract signing.7 Fairness is one of the critical issues in online transactions and related electronic payment systems. Many electronic payment systems have been proposed for providing different levels of security to financial transactions, such as iKP,8SET,9 NetBill,10 and NetCheque.11 In a normal electronic commerce transaction, there is always a payer and a payee to exchange money for goods or services. At least one financial institution, normally a bank, should be present in the payment system. The financial institution plays the role of issuer for the payer and the role of acquirer for the payee. An electronic payment system must enable an honest payer to convince the payee of a legitimate payment and prevent a dishonest payer from using other unsuitable behavior. At the same time, some additional security requirements may be addressed based on the nature of trading processes and trust assumptions of the system. Payer, payee, and the financial institution have different interests and the trust between two parties should be as little as possible. In electronic commerce, the payment happens over an open network, such as the Internet, and the issue of fairness must be carefully addressed. There is no fairness for involved parties in the existing popular payment protocols. One target of this article is to address the fairness issue in the credit card payment process. In the existing credit card protocols, the financial institution that provides the credit card service plays the role of online authority and is actively involved in a payment. To avoid the involvement of financial institutions in normal transactions and to reduce running costs, some credit card-based schemes with offline financial authority have been proposed.12 Another target of this article is to avoid the online financial institution for credit card service in normal transactions.