Nandan Paramesh

Ontology mapping for network management systems

The existence of various network equipment vendors, such as Cisco and Nortel, introduces an additional layer of complexity to the problem of integrating heterogeneous management information models that are applied in different network domains. The problem of using a mixture of different protocols, such as SNMP (simple network management protocol) and CMIP (common management information protocol), has already been attempted and solved by previous research, New interoperability issues can arise within a single domain when network specialists are required to manage network equipments using different sets of terminologies and via different interfaces. The objective of the paper is to address ontological issues that may arise in an integrated network management application. Ontology is applied first to model the semantics of vendor specific terms, and secondly, to aid in automating the mapping between the terms, in order to create a unified application information base such that management of various brands of network equipments can be performed through a single gateway.

Corporate Security Compliance in a Heterogeneous Environment

Organizations often have to audit and assess their information system security as a corporate compliance process based on a range of standards. The growing number of security standards such as CobiT, ISO17799 and BSI raises the potential interoperability problem in a heterogeneous environment. Often different standards are needed to satisfy different regional regulatory and obligatory requirements. In this paper, we present an ontology based approach to deal with the interoperability problem

Enforcing Business Rules and Information Security Policies through Compliance Audits; XISSF - A Compliance Specification Mechanism

Corporate enterprises are facing increased requirements to fulfill different regulations. Requirements such as routine compliance with security standards can provide risk mitigation and process performance benefits. However, compliance management is a manual and labor-intensive process and creates additional overheads to any businesses. To make matter worse, the growing number and constant changes of security standards such as CobiT and ISO17799 contributes to increased complexity. This paper presents XISSF, an extensible information security specification format that acts as a compliance audit mechanism for enforcing business rules and information security policies. A mechanism designed to alleviate the routine and manual task of compliance auditing and assessment as well as increasing the accuracy of audit results. The notion of checkpoints is subsequently introduced and modeled in high level finite state machines in this paper.

Multi-agent service infrastructure for cooperative management

Cooperative management is concerned with the management of virtual enterprises involving multiple groups of people (located at geographically remote places) that are performing cooperative work over enterprise networks, such as the Internet. This paper describes a methodology based on an abstract measure of cooperation (called awareness) to develop multi-agent cooperative services for virtual enterprises.

An ontology-based framework for managing semantic interoperability issues in e-health

Ontology-based approaches may be tried in e-health scenario to solve some of the interoperability problems that are non-trivial, for e.g. Anemometerpsila and dasiaSphygmomanometerpsila are two different terms but represent the blood pressure monitor in Europe and India, respectively. The semantic interoperability issue arises when similar things are meant differently to the remotely sitting agents. Given such scenario, this paper aims to describe a framework that combines A) dialogue game with B) a decision support system (DSS) leading to resolution of such types of ontological mismatches. Under dasiaDialogue gamepsila argumentation mechanisms are used for resolving certain types of ontological mismatches. While, the DSS decides on the initiation, termination, structuring and sequencing the dialogues, as these may not be properly adjudged by the dasiaDialogue gamepsila. The framework is therefore context driven in nature, where concepts can be substituted with the similar kind of concepts (may not be accurate by searching and choosing equivalent concepts. Such framework therefore offers potential for dynamic modification of participating Ontologies and provides explanation in context of diet management in diabetes with time in a more matured way.

TOWARDS AN ONTOLOGY MAPPING APPROACH FOR SECURITY MANAGEMENT

In the past decade, ontology has been actively researched in various domains. The different ontological tasks range from simple language modeling in the linguistic domain, to semantic integration in the semantic web, and recently to application-specific tasks such as financial fraud management. We follow the trend and attempt to tackle some of the ontological problems in security management. The most complicated problem out of all is the semantic interoperability problem that is evident in the existence of various types of security elements such as IDS, firewall and virus scanner. Another problem is related to the semantic modeling tasks required for autonomous and intelligent reasoning. Semantic modeling of security events is essential for automatic and intelligent event correlation tasks that analyze semantically the different sources of security information to more accurately present the holistic network security status. We present in this paper a novel and formal ontology mapping approach and security ontology for the supporting and possibly resolution of these problems.

Inter-agent dialogue for semantic mapping between domain ontologies in healthcare informatics

Domain ontologies have become very important elements in healthcare informatics. Ontological interoperability is crucial to the success of healthcare information system through semantic web[1]. As the ontologies differ, resolution of semantic differences between them is an active research area. Software agents can be deployed in various ways to automate this resolution of semantic differences. Approaches for semantic mapping of ontologies through conversation between software agents include: • Dialogue game loosely modelled on human communication [2] • Dialogue game based framework with an explicit modelling of mental states in terms of the beliefs and of the participating software agents and their goals[3]. • Use of lexicons such as worldnet to retrieve alternative forms of a concept in the ontology and use the alternate forms for mismatch resolution through ontology negotiation protocol (ONP)[4] and associated extensions [5].