In embodiments, systems and methods may involve using a platform as disclosed herein for applications described herein where the systems and methods involve receiving a dataset in an analytic platform, the dataset including fact data and dimension data for a plurality of distinct product categories It may also involve storing the data in a flexible hierarchy, the hierarchy allowing the temporary fixing of data along a dimension and flexible querying along other dimensions of the data It may also involve pre-aggregating certain combinations of data to facilitate rapid querying, the pre-aggregation based on the nature of common queries It may also involve facilitating the presentation of a cross-category view of an analytic query of the dataset In embodiments, the temporarily fixed dimension can be rendered flexible upon an action by the user

Cross-category view of a dataset using an analytic platform

The paper proposes a novel distributed service discovery protocol for pervasive environments. The protocol is based on the concepts of peer-to-peer caching of service advertisements and group-based intelligent forwarding of service requests. It does not require a service to be registered with a registry or lookup server. Services are described using the Web Ontology Language (OWL). We exploit the semantic class/subClass hierarchy of OWL to describe service groups and use this semantic information to selectively forward service requests. OWL-based service description also enables increased flexibility in service matching. We present simulation results that show that our protocol achieves increased efficiency in discovering services (compared to traditional broadcast-based mechanisms) by efficiently utilizing bandwidth via controlled forwarding of service requests.

/pdf/toward-distributed-service-discovery-in-pervasive-computing-1yme0sc3i7.pdf

Toward Distributed service discovery in pervasive computing environments

Welcome to the CHI 2006 Extended Abstracts. We hope that you will enjoy this year's extended abstracts and the changes that we have made. For the first time this year, we encouraged submissions from six different sub-communities of the human-computer interaction (HCI) field: design; education; engineering; management; research and usability. The intent was to make sure that the technical program included elements that would be of interest to the broad HCI world. We especially sought Experience Reports, Panels, SIGs, and HCI Overviews. Submissions to each of these were carefully reviewed by the Conference Committee and their respective Community Chairs. These Extended Abstracts include these new or modified venues as well as materials from other traditional CHI venues.

CHI '06 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Wireless connectivity and widespread diffusion of portable devices offer novel opportunities for users to share resources anywhere and anytime, and to form ad-hoc coalitions. Resource access control is crucial to leverage these ad-hoc collaborations. In pervasive scenarios, however, collaborating entities cannot be predetermined and resource availability frequently varies, even unpredictably, due to user/device mobility, thus complicating resource access control. Access control policies cannot be defined based on entity’s identities/roles, as in traditional access control solutions, or be specified a priori to face any operative run time condition, but require continuous adjustments to adapt to the current situation. To address these issues, this paper advocates the adoption of novel access control policy models that follow two main design guidelines: context-awareness to control resource access on the basis of context visibility and to enable dynamic adaptation of policies depending on context changes, and semantic technologies for context/policy specification to allow high-level description and reasoning about context and policies. The paper also describes the design of a semantic context-aware policy model that adopts ontologies and rules to express context and context-aware access control policies and supports policy adaptation.

/pdf/a-semantic-context-aware-access-control-framework-for-secure-1v9m0dzjg4.pdf

A semantic context-aware access control framework for secure collaborations in pervasive computing environments

Techniques for managing identities are provided. In some examples, identity management, authentication, authorization, and token exchange frameworks may be provided for use with mobile devices, mobile applications, cloud applications, and/or other web-based applications. For example a mobile client may request to perform one or more identity management operations associated with an account of a service provider. Based at least in part on the requested operation and/or the particular service provider, an application programming interface (API) may be utilized to generate and/or perform one or more instructions and/or method calls for managing identity information of the service provider.

Mobile application, identity interface

Tuple spaces offer a coordination infrastructure for communication between autonomous entities by providing a logically shared memory along with data persistence, transactional security as well as temporal and spatial decoupling - properties that make it desirable in distributed systems for e-commerce and pervasive computing applications. In most tuple space implementations, tuples are retrieved by employing type-value matching of ordered tuples, object-based polymorphic matching, or XML-style pattern matching. In a heterogeneous environment, this can pose several limitations. This paper discusses the architecture and implementation of a prototype semantic infrastructure, which uses semantic Web technologies to represent and retrieve tuples from a tuple space. Semantic tuple spaces (sTuples) overcomes limitations of the JavaSpaces tuple space implementation, by making use of a Web ontology language and RACER, a description-logic reasoning engine. The sTuples infrastructure extends and integrates with Vigil, a secure framework for communication and access of intelligent services in a pervasive environment. Specialized agents, such as the tuple-recommender agent, task-execution agent and publish-subscribe agent, which have a better understanding of the environment, reside on the tuple space and play an important role in providing user-centric reasoning.

/pdf/stuples-semantic-tuple-spaces-4yaut9bkjp.pdf

sTuples: semantic tuple spaces

An approach is provided for providing separation of authentication protocols and/or authentication contexts for client-server and server-server communication in network communication. A proxy server receives a request to initiate a service session. The request includes a first authentication context. The proxy server request verification of the first authentication context from an authentication server and validates the first authentication context based, at least in part, on the verification. The proxy server implements a second authentication context based, at least in part, on the verification of the first authentication context to initiate the service session.

Method and apparatus for providing an authentication context-based session

Web services can be presented to end-users via user interfaces (UIs) that facilitate the invocation of these services. Standardized, interoperable mechanisms for describing Web service interfaces enable the generation of UIs automatically and dynamically, at least in principle; the emergence of Semantic Web services opens the possibility of improving the generation process. In this paper, we propose a scheme that extends the OWL-S ontology, an emerging standard for Semantic Web services, to better enable the creation of such dynamic interfaces.

Semantic Web services go beyond “classical” Web services in enabling enhanced discovery, invocation and composition. In our scheme, the integration of semantic descriptions of Web services with semantic models of the user's locally available data enables context-based personalization of dynamically created user interfaces, allowing us to minimize the number of necessary inputs. The need for this is compelling on mobile devices with limitations on input methods and screen size and where context data is readily available. The use of an underlying semantic model enables better accuracy than traditional form-filling techniques.

We propose an architecture for the creation and personalization of dynamic UIs from Web service descriptions. The key idea is to exploit the semantic relationships between type information of Web service input fields, and their association with information the system has about the user (such as the user's current context, PIM data, context history, usage history, corporate data etc.), in order to personalize and simplify the invocation of Web services.

/pdf/ontological-approach-to-generating-personalized-user-2iuxmqmhgj.pdf

Ontological approach to generating personalized user interfaces for web services

The use of description logics (DLs) in modeling various real-world domains, and reasoning about them, has well-known benefits. We believe that the same framework can be used for representing a user-centric view of usage contexts. A DL-reasoner can then be used for organizing context definitions, merging domain knowledge into these definitions, and performing recognition of contexts from sensor inputs. A pure DL-based approach, however, has certain limitations in a context environment; hence, a hybrid reasoning approach is proposed. To ensure syntactic and semantic interoperability, we adopt a semantic Web-compliant approach that uses the OWL-DL variant of the OWL Web ontology language. This allows us to aggregate various heterogeneous data sources, both directly in semantic Web formalisms, and indirectly via the use of a transformation framework capable of using data from legacy applications. Context and domain models, along with associated reasoners, are themselves context, user and/or organization-specific; hence multiple systems should be maintained and connected into a distributed architecture. In order to deploy this architecture in a mobile environment, an underlying SIP-based provisioning framework has been experimented with, enabling device, network and location transparency.

Contextualizing applications via semantic middleware

Web services can be presented to end-users via user interfaces (Uls) that facilitate the invocation of these services. Standardized, interoperable mechanisms for describing Web service interfaces enable the generation of UIs automatically and dynamically, at least in principle; the emergence of Semantic Web services opens the possibility of improving the generation process. In this paper, we propose a scheme that extends the OWL-S ontology, an emerging standard for Semantic Web services, to better enable the creation of such dynamic interfaces. Semantic Web services go beyond classical Web services in enabling enhanced discovery, invocation and composition. In our scheme, the integration of semantic descriptions of Web services with semantic models of the user's locally available data enables context-based personalization of dynamically created user interfaces, allowing us to minimize the number of necessary inputs. The need for this is compelling on mobile devices with limitations on input methods and screen size and where context data is readily available. The use of an underlying semantic model enables better accuracy than traditional form-filling techniques. We propose an architecture for the creation and personalization of dynamic UIs from Web service descriptions. The key idea is to exploit the semantic relationships between type information of Web service input fields, and their association with information the system has about the user (such as the user's current context, PIM data, context history, usage history, corporate data etc.), in order to personalize and simplify the invocation of Web services.

Deepali Khushraj

Papers

sTuples: semantic tuple spaces

Method and apparatus for providing an authentication context-based session

Ontological approach to generating personalized user interfaces for web services

Contextualizing applications via semantic middleware

Ontological approach to generating personalized user interfaces for web services