Ioana Ciuciu

Social network of smart-metered homes and SMEs for grid-based renewable energy exchange

This paper proposes a revolutionary approach to Smart Energy Grids which empowers communities of consumers as first-class citizens with a novel role in the management of their electricity by sharing excess electricity and therefore becoming energy producers (prosumers). The approach makes innovations on smart technologies and processes by building a demand-response decision support system on top of smart metering and social web technologies. This is achieved using a framework to connect dynamic, context-aware, heterogeneous virtual and real entities on the Internet of Smart Meters (IoSM) and by studying the behavior of communities on it. The smart electricity meters are transformed into fully-fledged intelligent computers on the IoSM, enabled to (i) securely collect data from heterogeneous meters and sensors and actuators, (ii) detect smart meters with similar goals, (iii) exchange and aggregate data from multiple autonomous physical or virtual meters, and (iv) manage the actual energy demand and ensure the achievement of demand response for the community involved. The approach is centered on the community and its respective DSOs, where each prosumer is represented as a node on the IoSM through their electricity meters, sensors and actuators. This allows for rational energy exchange between technical and non-technical participants by expressing their goals in a standardized language through hybrid ontologies.

Semantic Support for Security-Annotated Business Process Models

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) benefit from business processes (BP), which orchestrate web services (WS) and human actors in cross organizational environments. In this setting, handling the security and privacy issues while exchanging and processing personal data is essential. This lacks for secure business processes management. To achieve this, we represent security constraints descriptively by annotating process models, aiming to enforce these constraints by a secure business process management system (BPMS).To assist the process modeler in annotating process models, we introduce in this paper a tool which provides semantic interoperability during process design. By enforcing a shared conceptualization (ontology) of the security and privacy domains with an ontology base grounded in natural language this tool called knowledge annotator is able to make annotation recommendations according to knowledge stored in a knowledge base. The annotator is validated in an employability use case scenario.

Ontology-based matching of security attributes for personal data access in e-health

This paper discusses an interoperability solution (tool) for the internal management of a policy decision engine located at the level of the authorization layer of a service oriented environment. The tool aims to support federated access control in the context of distributed architectures, in which a local authorization policy is not able to recognize all the attributes in the authorization decision requests. The approach is based on an ontology-based interoperation service (OBIS) whose role is to translate security attributes (name-value pairs) from local security vocabularies into the attributes recognized by the central (Master Policy Decision Point) vocabulary based on a security ontology and its domain-specific extensions which provides semantic reasoning services. The approach is validated in an e-Health scenario for the access of patient data for diabetes patient monitoring and disease management.

Semantic Decision Support Models for Energy Efficiency in Smart-Metered Homes

A promising approach to Smart Energy Grids is to empower communities of consumers with a novel role in the management of their electricity by sharing excess electricity and therefore becoming energy producers (prosumers). We achieve it using a framework to connect dynamic, context-aware, heterogeneous virtual and real entities on the Internet of Smart Meters (IoSM). We transform the smart electricity meters into fully-fledged intelligent computers on the IoSM and enable them to securely collect data from heterogeneous meters and sensors, detect smart meters with similar goals, exchange and aggregate data from multiple autonomous physical or virtual meters, and manage the actual energy demand and ensure the achievement of demand response for the community involved. Domain ontologies are used to store the semantics of the collected data from IoSM. A problem we have encountered is how our framework can use ontologies for community-grounded decision rules, which need to be consistent based on aggregation of collected data and contexts. We use Semantic Decision Table (SDT), which is a decision table enhanced with ontology technologies, to tackle the problem. This paper records our efforts in 1) the general design of the framework; 2) decision support models, namely SDTs, for fulfilling this requirement; 3) an algorithm of creating invocational SDTs; 4) the implementation of visualizing invocational SDTs.

Assessing the User Satisfaction with an Ontology Engineering Tool Based on Social Processes

This study discusses one of the three measures defined within the usability testing, namely the user satisfaction, when evaluating an ontology engineering tool based on social processes. The motivation of our focus lays in the fact that being driven by communities through social interactions, the ontology engineering process depends on what the user does, sees and feels when using the system. The evaluation criteria proposed here are therefore developed by looking at the people involved, the processes and their outcomes, mostly taking into account the user experience, in an approach that goes beyond usability. The paper identifies the problems the users encounter when using the system, both at a technical level and psychometric level. A set of recommendations is proposed in order to overcome these problems and to improve the user experience with the system.

Ontology Based Interoperation for Securely Shared Services: Security Concept Matching for Authorization Policy Interoperability

This paper addresses the problem of access control in the context of unified distributed architectures, in which a local authorization policy is not able to recognize all the terms applicable to the authorization decision requests. The approach is based on semantic interoperability between the different services of the architecture. More specifically, we present the ontologybased interoperation service (OBIS), which calculates the matching of security concepts extracted from access requests and local authorization policies. This service is then validated in an employability use case scenario.

User Satisfaction of a Hybrid Ontology-Engineering Tool

In an effort to continuously improve a research prototype for collaborative ontology engineering, we report on the reapplication of a usability test within an ontology-engineering experiment involving 36 users. The tool offers additional functionalities and measures were taken to address the problems identified in a previous study. The evaluation criteria proposed in the study were developed by taking into account the people involved, the processes and their outcomes, focusing on the user experience, in an approach that goes beyond usability; users were asked if the tool helped them in achieving their goals. We identify the problems the users encountered while using the system and also investigate whether the measures did tackle the problems observed in the first study. A set of recommendations is proposed in order to overcome these new problems and to improve the user experience with the system.

An evaluation methodology for C-FOAM applied to web-based learning

C-FOAM (Controlled Fully Automated Ontology-based Matching Strategy) is one of the seven matching strategies of the Ontology-based Data Matching Framework (ODMF). As a composition of the matching algorithms at the levels of string, lexical and graph, C-FOAM interprets and compares the user input against the ontology graph, and produces a matching score. Based on this score, C-FOAM (1) provides the similarity score between the user knowledge and the knowledge stored in the knowledge base, which can be used to evaluate a learner; and (2) retrieves and recommends similar patterns (learning materials) from the knowledge base to the learner. This paper presents a generic evaluation methodology and discusses the evaluation results while using C-FOAM in a Web-based personalized, collaborative and intelligent learning tool in the medical domain.

Organizational Culture and Innovation: An Industrial Case Study

The paper proposes the study of the perception of the relationship between the organizational culture and innovation. More precisely, we propose to identify those features of the organizational culture that affect determine or inhibit innovation and elaborate on these observations. The methodology used in this approach is rooted in knowledge management theory and based on a questionnaire applied in the Engineering Department of a newly established multinational in the automotive industry in Romania. The observed relationship is exemplified with a real-world case study from the automotive industry.

Semantic Annotation of Service Choreographies

In a previous paper, we discussed a methodology for the extension of the service choreography model based on ontologies. The main purpose was to extract syntactically and semantically correct recommendations model annotations for the process modeler in view of model analysis and improvement. This paper presents ongoing work with a focus on the ontology used for recommendation retrieval and the way the semantic recommender captures and analyses the modelers intentions. We discuss similarity computation which is at the basis of semantic model annotation at several levels and illustrate it with examples.