Irene Kafeza

View-Based Contracts in an E-Service Cross-Organizational Workflow Environment

In an e-service environment, workflow involves not only a single organization but also a number of business partners. Workflow interoperability is therefore an important issue for workflow enactment in such an environment. In this paper, we introduce a novel concept of workflow views as a fundamental support for E-service workflow inter-operability and for controlled visibility by external parties. Furthermore, we develop a contract model based on workflow views and demonstrate how management of contracts can be facilitated, with an Internet start-up E-service inter-organization workflow example.

Legal Issues in Agents for Electronic Contracting

Intelligent agents are a new emerging technology that allows for machine-to-machine contract formation. Agents equipped with a set of rules instructed by humans, surf the web, discover other agents and/or humans, and take decisions forming agreements in an autonomous way. Despite recent legislations on electronic contracting, there are no legislations governing automatic agent transactions except one preliminary attempt in the USA. In this paper, we are looking into the new legal issues that arise due to intelligent agents in automatic contracting. There are few scattered opinions in the literature and are inadequate to address these issues. So, we present a legal framework to analyze these novel issues and show why even recent legislations cannot adequately address this problem. We identify many of these issues which are rooted at the authorization management in agent delegation. Therefore, we advocate solutions that consider both legal and technical aspects. Based on current legal and business practices, we develop a conceptual model for agent authorization. We propose the use of a Contract Agent Authorization Platform (CAAP) that also supports alerts and acknowledgments, and illustrate the platform with typical use cases. We attempt to investigate the ambiguities of the existing legal framework on contracting agents that emerged due to new technical developments in the field.

Legal issues in grid collaborative environments

The Grid environment is rapidly emerging as a collaborative environment for a wide range of applications. Applications that demand intense problem solving capabilities, extensive data sharing and processing, collaborative relationships among distributed participants employ grid computing. Grid environments provide efficient and scalable access to distributed computing resources among geographically distributed participants. In a grid environment virtual organizations are formulated and managed from a computing resource point of view. The grid provider allows for the dynamic discovery of computing resources, the immediate allocation and provision of the resources and the management and provision of secure access. In our work we examine the legal implications that arise in such environments. Although the security problem in grid environment is being addressed from the technological point of view, there is no work to identify the legal issues that are arising in collaborative environments.

Legal Issues in Secure Grid Computing Environments

The Grid environment is rapidly emerging as the dominant paradigm for wide area distributed application systems. The world wide business demand for intense problem solving capabilities and grid computing makes it possible to share computing resources on an unprecedented scale among geographically distributed participants. In a grid environment virtual orgamsations are formulated and managed from a computing resource point of view. The grid provider allows for the dynamic discovery of computing resources, the immediate allocation and provision of the resources, the management and provision of secure access. Although the security problem in grid environment is being addressed from the technological point of view, there is no work to identify the myriad legal issues that are arising in grid business transactions.

Contracts in Cloud Computing

In an increasingly integrated global economy the importance as well as the growing availability of Cloud Providers has provided companies, individuals and the Governmental agencies with a variety of benefits such as significant cost reduction. As the role and number of Cloud Providers has increased a novel set of issues has emerged. These novel issues refer to a variety of legal complexities from the initial choice of the proper Cloud Provider as well as the appropriate contract for the deployment of its services. This paper is concerned with the novel issues arising of the deployment of Cloud Computing contracts. It presents the related issues and discusses ways and suggestions by which the legal framework could be demystified so that the contracts conducted in the Cloud Computing environment can be conducted efficiently and in a legal manner, for the benefit of the private as well as the public sector. It is concerned that the current legal framework cannot provide solution for effective deployment of Cloud Computing contracts and drawing on this evidence, it discusses the steps that Cloud Computing participants need to take to correctly identify their contractual rights and obligations.

Adoption of information technology policies in the tourism sector in the era of WEB2.0

In this work we look at the impact of information technologies in tourism SMEs and how they can benefit from the exploitation of information technology in their operations without violating privacy, with a special focus in hotel sector. We discuss how current technologies have shaped the new era of tourism and we discuss the travel 2.0 challenges, the transformation that the Web 2.0 and social networking brought to tourism sector, their applications to the domains such as the wikitravel, travel blogs, social networking communities, as well as the underlying technologies for these applications. More specifically, we discuss how the use of internet has transformed the hotel sector and we highlight the importance of the adoption of user friendly policies for the protection of user data. Finally, we propose a model for the protection of privacy that tourism companies need to consider when adopting these technologies in order to comply with the legislation and adopt user friendly trust policies.