3428244
An Organisational Perspective on Collaborative Business Processes
Business collaboration is about coordinating the flow of information among organisations and linking their business processes. It brings great challenge to keep participating organisations as autonomous entities in integrating business processes of these organisations seamlessly. To address this issue, we develop a new perspective on business collaborations with a novel concept called relative workflow, which defines what a participating organisation can perceive in collaboration. By incorporating a visibility control mechanism, relative workflows allow each organisation to define its own collaboration structure and behaviours. In this paper, we present a formal definition of relative workflows and related algorithms for generating relative workflows, along with a discussion on how to perform tracking over relative workflows.
43250103
An Agent-Based Ontological Approach for Information Reorganisation
This paper presents a novel approach for information reorganisation which is particularly suitable for distributed computing, such as Web services. An agent-based architecture is developed to cope with service agents' on and off and provide semantic support for implementation of complex e-business applications that may span diverse enterprises. A frame-based ontology representation is discussed. The representation is well suited for representing complex relationships that are unavailable in current ontology related work. Our approach aims to support dynamic information reorganisation in the Internet based e-business applications. The obtained information can serve for the knowledge acquisition purpose.
4917474
Effective Visualisation of Workflow Enactment
Although most existing teamwork management systems support user-friendly interface to some extent, few of them have take into consideration of the special requirements of workflow visualisation. This paper realises the unique features of visualisation for run-time workflow, i.e., workflow enactment and execution. We present a detailed discussion of the emerging problems against the general aesthetic criteria for drawing the workflow layout. In order to support most essential workflow enactment facilities, the following three mechanisms are provided. Firstly, Sugiyama algorithm has been systematically incorporated into our prototype to create well structured workflow layout initially. Secondly, when the workflow process dynamically changes, we can adjust workflow layout by our force-scan algorithm to retain the mental maps created earlier among team members. Thirdly, we have also applied the technique of the fisheye view to offer a context focus mechanism for workflow users and to utilise the screen size more effectively. With these visualisation techniques, a better atmosphere may be facilitated for teamwork.
2679071
A generic operation transformation scheme for consistency maintenance in real-time cooperative editing systems
In real-time cooperative editing systems, independent operations on any part of the shared document may be generatedfrom multiple cooperatingsites. It is very important and technically challenging to ensure that the effect of executing an operation at remote sites, in the presence of concurrent execution of independent operations, achieves the same effect aa executing this operation at the local site at the time -of ita generation, thuspreaeruing its intention and maintainingsystern consistency. In this paper, we investigate the technical issues involved in preserving intentions of concurrent operuCons, explain the reaaons why traditional serialization-based concurrency control strategies and existing operational transformation strategies failed to solve these problems, and propose a generic operation transformation scheme for intention preservation and consistency maintenance in real-time cooperative editing systems. The proposed scheme has been implemented in an Internet-based prototype REDUCE (REaLtime Distributed Unconstrained Cooperative Editing) system. is quick (idealy as quick as a single-user editor) and the latency for remote user actions is low (determined by external commkkation latency only). (2) Distributed environments cooperating users may reside on different machines connected by different communication networks. (3) Unconstrained collaboration mdtiple users may concurrently and freely edit, any part of the document at any time, as advocated in [2, 8, 91.
1701823
Dynamic checking of temporal constraints for concurrent workflows
At present, workflow management systems have not sufficiently dealt with the issues of time, involving time modelling at build-time and time management at run-time. They are lack of the ability to support the checking of temporal constraints at run-time. Although some approaches have been devised to tackle this problem, they are limited to a single workflow and use only static techniques to verify temporal constraints. In reality, there are multiple workflows executing concurrently in a workflow management system. There may well exist resource constraints between these concurrent workflows, which affect significantly the verification of temporal constraints at run-time. This paper proposes a novel approach for dynamic verification of temporal constraints for concurrent workflows. We first investigate resource constraints in workflow management systems, and then define concurrent workflow executions. Based on these definitions, we propose a verification method by analysing the temporal relationship and resource constraints between activities among concurrent workflows.
14000419
Using an experimental study to develop group awareness support for real-time distributed collaborative writing
Supporting group awareness is vital for the success of real-time, distributed, collaborative writing systems. Many awareness mechanisms have been introduced, but highly effective solutions are few. The research presented in this paper focuses on the development of awareness mechanisms using an experimental study of synchronous distributed collaborative writing. Our study has made two major contributions to research on group awareness. First, the study compares the importance of different awareness elements in supporting group awareness for collaborative writing. The results of our Wilcoxon test on awareness elements identify the five most important elements, including ‘‘Being able to comment on what other users have done,’’ ‘‘Knowing what actions other users are currently taking,’’ ‘‘Providing a communication tool when audio is not available,’’ ‘‘Knowing other user’s working areas in the document,’’ and ‘‘Knowing other user’s tasks.’’ Second, the research proposes mechanisms corresponding to the above-mentioned five awareness elements. The mechanisms include Dynamic Task List (DTL), Modification Director (MD), Advanced Chat (AC) and Split Window View (SWV). These mechanisms provide support for various aspects of group awareness, and add many enhanced features to existing awareness mechanisms. For example, DTL presents high-level information about authors’ responsibilities and the correlation between their work allocations. MD notifies users instantaneously whenever their work is modified by other authors. AC enhances communication between users by allowing them to attach document objects such as text and diagrams to a conversation message. And, SWV provides the views of other authors’ working areas and viewing areas simultaneously. � 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
12472387
CLID: A general approach to validate security policies in a dynamic network
Many researchers have considered security policy management, including how to configure policies manually and even how to automatically generate security policies based on security requirements. Both can be error prone, especially when properties of the network topology change, because security requirements are usually not bound to any particular route path. Our DETER lab emulation results show that conflicts could be caused by these factors. Therefore, a systematic way to validate the correctness of the security policies is essential. This paper presents an approach, CLID (conflict and looping identification and detection), to verify whether a set of security policies (e.g. IPSec/VPN tunnels) satisfy the given security requirements, without causing any conflicts. This approach utilizes the definition of a security policy lo include network routing data as well as traffic selector information, thus it works for general network topologies. We also analyze and justify the correctness of the approach. The paper concludes with our simulation results and addresses future work.
4379994
Interdomain Routing as Social Choice
Interdomain routing is essential to both the stability and efficiency of the global Internet. However, most previous studies focus only on stability, and only on a special class of routing protocols, namely BGP-type, path-vector protocols. In this paper, we conduct a systematic analysis of interdomain routing considering optimality and implementation in strategic settings. We adopt the novel perspective that an interdomain routing system is one which defines a social choice rule that aggregates individual preferences of all of the autonomous systems (ASes) in a network to select interdomain routes with a set of desirable properties. An interdomain routing protocol, then, is a mechanism to implement the identified interdomain routing social choice rule, when the ASes can adopt strategic actions. By pointing out the incompatibility among the desirable properties of an interdomain routing system and the requirements for strategic implementation in distributed settings, we reveal fundamental tradeoffs that must be made when extending BGP or designing the next-generation interdomain routing system. We also provide new insights into BGP, by "reverseengineering" its behaviors from the perspective of social choice and implementation theory.
3895085
Network localization in partially localizable networks
Knowing the positions of the nodes in a network is essential to many next generation pervasive and sensor network functionalities. Although many network localization systems have recently been proposed and evaluated, there has been no systematic study of partially localizable networks, i.e., networks in which there exist nodes whose positions cannot be uniquely determined. There is no existing study which correctly identifies precisely which nodes in a network are uniquely localizable and which are not. This absence of a sufficient uniqueness condition permits the computation of erroneous positions that may in turn lead applications to produce flawed results. In this paper, in addition to demonstrating the relevance of networks that may not be fully localizable, we design the first framework for two dimensional network localization with an efficient component to correctly determine which nodes are localizable and which are not. Implementing this system, we conduct comprehensive evaluations of network localizability, providing guidelines for both network design and deployment. Furthermore, we study an integration of traditional geographic routing with geographic routing over virtual coordinates in the partially localizable network setting. We show that this novel cross-layer integration yields good performance, and argue that such optimizations will be likely be necessary to ensure acceptable application performance in partially localizable networks.
6583750
Building Trust in Online Rating Systems Through Signal Modeling
Online feedback-based rating systems are gaining popularity. Dealing with unfair ratings in such systems has been recognized as an important but difficult problem. This problem is challenging especially when the number of regular ratings is relatively small and the unfair ratings contribute to a significant portion of the overall ratings. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm to detect the unfair ratings that cannot be effectively prevented by existing state-of-the-art techniques. Our algorithm is particularly effective to detect malicious raters that collaboratively manipulate ratings of one or several products. The main idea of our algorithm is to use an autoregressive signal modeling technique combined with trust-enhanced rating aggregation. We are able to detect and filter out unfair ratings very accurately. Extensive experiments through simulations and real-world data have been performed to validate the proposed algorithm. The experimental results show significant improvements on detecting collaborative unfair raters over existing techniques.
1759932
Main business service dimensions in an e-commerce environment
Improving service quality has long been recognized as a key business strategy in consumer market. However, little is written in the literature about service among business organizations. The shortage of knowledge on business service (BS) poses a significant challenge in tracking and improving BS quality in today's e-commerce environment. To address this, this paper takes a first step to identify main BS dimensions in an e-commerce environment. It first provides a review on BS. Then the BS gap model and main BS dimension are identified. The paper concludes with a summary and future research suggestions.