Governance of Cross-Organizational Healthcare Document Exchange through Watermarking Services and Alerts

There is an increasing demand for sharing documents for process integration among organizations. Web services technology has recently been widely proposed and gradually adopted as a platform for supporting such an integration. There are no holistic solutions thus far that are able to tackle the various protection issues, specifically regarding the security and privacy protection requirements in cross-organizational progress integration. This paper proposes the exchange of documents through a Document / Image Exchange Platform (DIEP), replacing traditional ad-hoc and manual exchange practices. The authors show how the contemporary technologies of Web services under a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), together with watermarking, can help protect document exchanges with layered implementation architecture. Furthermore, to facilitate governance and regulation compliance against protection policy violation attempts, the management and the affected parties are notified with alerts for warning and possible handling. The authors discuss the applicability of the proposed platform with a physician towards security and privacy protection requirements based on the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the United States, which imposes national regulations to protect individuals’ healthcare information. The proposed approach aims at facilitating the whole governance process from technical to management level with a single unified platform.

Dynamic Business Collaborations Through Contract Services

New applications have recently emerged within the domains of e-Health, e-Science, e-Research and e-Government that require the formation of dynamic collaborations between independent, autonomous business organizations for the duration of a project designed with a specific purpose. To successfully create and manage such collaborations, there is a need of a standard way to specify: (a) what resources are required, (b) who will contribute resources, (c) the type of access required to these resources, (d) agreement and obligations of the partners within the business collaboration, with the terms and conditions specified in the agreement, and (e) how to instantiate, maintain and terminate such business collaborations easily and in a well understood manner. The authors address these issues through the creation, negotiation and execution of an agreed electronic contract. First, this paper provides a framework for an electronic contract (e-Contract) by introducing a Web Service Collaborative Context Definition Language (WS-CCDL), which was developed in the context of dynamic business collaboration. Then, the authors illustrate its use with a universal (anywhere) connectivity service for a tele-Collaboration application in the context of e-Research domain. Both architectural design and implementation considerations are provided to highlight the feasibility and complicity of the technologies.

A Service-Oriented User Interface for the Next Generation Web

The Web enters a new era where contents are to take the back seat and services will take the driver seat to form a service-oriented Web. This paper presents a service-oriented user interface design for the next generation Web. The design leverages the advances of semantic Web and service composition technologies to provide an intelligent and generic user interface to query, compose and execute Web services for a variety of user tasks. First, a simple cost model is developed for estimating the development and learning overheads of Web service interfaces for service-oriented applications as the motivation of this work. Then, the authors present the design of the service-oriented browser and discuss the enabling technologies. A prototype system is developed using existing technologies and standards as a proof of concept.

Enabling Intelligence in Web-Based Collaborative Knowledge Management System

This paper presents an approach to enhance various intelligent services of a Web-based collaborative knowledge management system. The proposed approach applies the two widely-used argumentation technologies, namely IBIS and Toulmin’s argumentation schemes, to structurally capture the deliberation and collaboration occurred during the consensual knowledge creation process. It employs RDF and OWL as its underlying knowledge representation language with well-defined semantics and reasoning mechanisms. Users can easily create knowledge using a simple corresponding graphical notation with machine-processable semantics. Derivation of implicit knowledge, similar concept discovery, as well as semantic search, are also enabled. In addition, the proposed approach incorporates the term suggestion function for assisting users in the knowledge creation process by computing the relevance score for each relevant term, and presenting the most relevant terms to users for possible term reusing or equivalence concepts mapping. To ensure the knowledge consistency, a logical mechanism for validating conflicting arguments and contradicting concepts is also developed. Founded on the proposed approach, a Web-based system, namely ciSAM, is implemented and available for public usage.

Automated Ranking of Relaxing Query Results Based on XML Structure and Content Preferences

This paper proposes a contextual preference query method of XML structural relaxation and content scoring to resolve the problem of empty or too many answers returned by XML. This paper proposes a XML contextual preference (XCP) model, where all the possible relaxing queries are determined by the users’ preferences. The XCP model allows users to express their interests on XML tree nodes, and then users assign interest scores to their interesting nodes for providing the best answers. A preference query results ranking method is proposed based on the XCP model, which includes: a Clusters_Merging algorithm to merge clusters based on the similarity of the context states, a Finding_Orders algorithm to find representative orders of the clusters, and a Top-k ranking algorithm to deal with the many answers problem. Results of preliminary user studies demonstrate that the method can provide users with most relevant and ranked query results. The efficiency and effectiveness of the approach are also demonstrated by experimental results.

Facilitating Biodefense Research with Mobile-Cloud Computing

This paper proposes the use of a mobile-cloud by combining mobile devices and the cloud together in a biodefense and emerging infectious diseases (BEI) research application scenario. A mobile-cloud framework is developed to facilitate the use of mobile devices to collect data for, and manipulate and interact with the scientific workflows running in the Cloud. In this framework, an independent trusted accountability service is used to provide data provenance and enforce compliance among the participants of a biodefense research workflow. The authors have implemented a prototype which allows the researchers to use mobile devices to design and participate in biodefense workflows. The authors evaluated the effectiveness of the mobile-cloud with a prototype and conducted performance testing with example biodefense workflows.

Service Oriented Enterprise and Contracted Profit Sharing

Service Oriented Enterprises (SOEs) outsource their functionalities via third party web services. Therefore, there is a need for a systematic approach to manage the cooperation of the services. SOEs perform their functionalities in an extremely dynamic environment. Changes that happen to a SOE are categorized in two types: top-down changes and bottom-up changes. This paper considers top-down changes which are initiated by SOE’s management. In order to manage a top-down change, the SOE’s management should consider the possible conflicting interests of the different parties. This study finds a situation in which none of the services have to incur losses. Consequently, this paper proposes ex-ante contracted profit sharing principles that can attract the services to the change. The problem is modeled and Security improvement is discussed as an example to describe this approach.

Implementing Background Net with Knowware System for Personalized Keyword Support

This article proposes a novel approach that combines user’s instant requirement described in keywords with her or his long-term knowledge background to better serve article selection based on personal preference. The knowledge background is represented as a weighted undirected graph called background net that captures the contextual association of words that appear in the articles recommended by the user through incremental learning. With a background net of user constructed, a keyword from the user is personalized to a fuzzy set that represents contextual association of the given keyword to other words involved in the user’s background net. An article evaluation with personal preference can be achieved by evaluating similarity between personalized keyword set based on user’s background net and a candidate article. The proposed approach makes it possible to construct a search engine optimizer running on the top of search engines to adjust search results, and offer the potential to be integrated with existing search engine techniques to achieve better performance. The target system of personalized article selection can be automatically constructed using Knowware System which is a development tool of KBS for convenient modeling and component reuse.

An Adaptive System for Retrieval and Composition of Learning Objects

This paper proposes a new approach to automatic retrieval and composition of Learning Objects (LOs) in an Adaptive Educational Hypermedia System (AEHS) using multidimensional learner characteristics to enhance learning effectiveness. The approach focuses on adaptive techniques in four components of AEHS: Learning Paths, LO Retrieval, LO Sequencing, and Examination Difficulty Levels. This approach has been designed to enable the adaptation of rules to become generic. Hence, the application to various domains is possible. The approach dynamically selects, sequences, and composes LOs into an individual learning package based on the use of domain ontology, learner profiles, and LO metadata. The Sharable Content Object Reference Model is employed to represent LO metadata and learning packages in order to support LO sharing. The IMS Learner Information Package Specification is used to represent learner profiles. A preliminary evaluation of the developed system indicates the system’s effectiveness in terms of learners’ satisfaction.

Flexible Provenance Tracing

The description of the origins of a piece of data and the transformations by which it arrived in a database is termed the data provenance. The importance of data provenance has already been widely recognized in database community. The two major approaches to representing provenance information use annotations and inversion. While annotation is metadata pre-computed to include the derivation history of a data product, the inversion method finds the source data based on the situation that some derivation process can be inverted. Annotations are flexible to represent diverse provenance metadata but the complete provenance data may outsize data itself. Inversion method is concise by using a single inverse query or function but the provenance needs to be computed on-the-fly. This paper proposes a new provenance representation which is a hybrid of annotation and inversion methods in order to achieve combined advantage. This representation is adaptive to the storage constraint and the response time requirement of provenance inversion on-the-fly.