1979687
Designing Web services with Tropos
We propose a methodology for designing Web services. The methodology is founded on Tropos (Perini et al., 2001 and Castro, et al., 2002), an agent-oriented software development technique, and supports early and late requirements analysis, as well as architectural and detailed design. An online retailer example is used for illustration of the proposed methodology. We also compare the generated design with a sample design presented in [BPT01].
2428324
ST-tool: a CASE tool for security requirements engineering
Security requirements engineering is emerging as a branch of software engineering, spurred by the realization that security must be dealt with early on during the requirements phase. We propose ST-tool, a CASE tool developed for modeling and analyzing functional and security requirements.
6610874
Detecting Conflicts of Interest
System vulnerabilities are often caused by the presence of conflicts within the organization where the system-to-be would eventually operate. In particular, conflicts of interest are very harmful since actors can exploit their positions/roles relative to the system for gaining personal advantage. Capturing and resolving such conflicts is a necessary condition for developing secure information systems. In this paper, we show how conflicts of interest can be formally detected during requirements analysis. This allows system designers to investigate the causes for which conflicts may occur in an organization. Thereby, they can better understand the organizational structure and so provide appropriate countermeasures to resolve or at least mitigate them
45301228
Agent-Oriented Software Development
The Tropos project is developing concepts, tools and techniques for building agent-oriented software. This paper presents a quick overview of the project and then focuses on a specific problem: the identification of architectural styles for multi-agent systems (MAS). The proposed styles have been adopted from the literature on organization theory and strategic alliances. The styles are represented in i*, a framework designed to model social and intentional concepts. Each proposed style is evaluated with respect to a set of agent software qualities, such as predictability, adaptability and availability. The use of the styles is illustrated and contrasted with a software architecture for mobile robot reported in the literature.
661878
Text Mining Through Semi Automatic Semantic Annotation
The Web is the greatest information source in human history. Unfortunately, mining knowledge out of this source is a laborious and error-prone task. Many researchers believe that a solution to the problem can be founded on semantic annotations that need to be inserted in web-based documents and guide information extraction and knowledge mining. In this paper, we further elaborate a tool-supported process for semantic annotation of documents based on techniques and technologies traditionally used in software analysis and reverse engineering for large-scale legacy code bases. The outcomes of the paper include an experimental evaluation framework and empirical results based on two case studies adopted from the Tourism sector. The conclusions suggest that our approach can facilitate the semi-automatic annotation of large document bases.
14238197
Data Semantics Revisited
The problem of data semantics is establishing and maintaining the correspondence between a data source and its intended subject matter. We review the long history of the problem in Databases, and contrast it with recent research on the Semantic Web. We then propose two new directions for research on the problem and sketch some open research questions.
3507397
A knowledge level software engineering methodology for agent oriented programming
Our goal in this paper is to introduce and motivate a methodology, called \emph{Tropos}, for building agent oriented software systems. Tropos is based on two key ideas. First, the notion of agent and all the related mentalistic notions (for instance: beliefs, goals, actions and plans) are used in all phases of software development, from the early analysis down to the actual implementation. Second, Tropos covers also the very early phases of requirements analysis, thus allowing for a deeper understanding of the environment where the software must operate, and of the kind of interactions that should occur between software and human agents. The methodology is illustrated with the help of a case study.
38499377
The Tropos Software Development Methodology: Processes, Models and Diagrams
Tropos is a novel agent-oriented software development methodology founded on two key features: (i) the notions of agent, goal, plan and various other knowledge level concepts are fundamental primitives used uniformly throughout the software development process; and (ii) a crucial role is assigned to requirements analysis and specification when the system-to-be is analyzed with respect to its intended environment. This paper describes the basic concepts on which Tropos is founded and the types of models one builds out of them. We also specify the analysis process through which design flows from external to system actors through a goal analysis and delegation. In addition, we provide an abstract syntax for Tropos diagrams and other linguistic constructs.
1423082
Data Management for Peer-to-Peer Computing : A Vision
We motivate special database problems introduced by peer-to-peer computing and propose the Local Relational Model (LRM) to solve some of them. As well, we summarize a formalization of LRM, present an architecture for a prototype implementation, and discuss open research questions.
3571148
Requirement Engineering Meets Security: A Case Study on Modelling Secure Electronic Transactions by VISA and Mastercard
Computer Security is one of today’s hot topic and the need for conceptual models of security features have brought up a number of proposals ranging from UML extensions to novel conceptual models. What is still missing, however, are models that focus on high-level security requirements, without forcing the modeler to immediately get down to security mechanisms. The modeling process itself should make it clear why encryption, authentication or access control are necessary, and what are the tradeoffs, if they are selected. In this paper we show that the i*/Tropos framework lacks the ability to capture these essential features and needs to be augmented. To motivate our proposal, we build upon a substantial case study – the modeling of the Secure Electronic Transactions e-commerce suites by VISA and MasterCard – to identify missing modeling features. In a nutshell, the key missing concept is the separation of the notion of offering a service (of a handling data, performing a task or fulfilling a goal) and ownership of the very same service. This separation is what makes security essential. The ability of the methodology to model a clear dependency relation between those offering a service (the merchant processing a credit card number), those requesting the service (the bank debiting the payment), and those owning the very same data (the cardholder), make security solutions emerge as a natural consequence of the modeling process.
6657466
Local Relational Model: A Logical Formalization of Database Coordination
We propose a new data model intended for peer-to-peer (P2P) databases. The model assumes that each peer has a (relational) database and exchanges data with other peers (its acquaintances). In this context, one needs a data model that views the space of available data within the P2P network as an open collection of possibly overlapping and inconsistent databases. Accordingly, the paper proposes the Local Relational Model, develops a semantics for coordination formulas. The main result of the paper generalizes Reiter's characterization of a relational database in terms of a first order theory [1], by providing a syntactic characterization of a relational space in terms of a multi-context system. This work extends earlier work by Giunchiglia and Ghidini on Local Model Semantics [2].