Microblogging services such as Twitter are important, up-to-date, and live sources of information on a multitude of topics and events. An increasing number of systems use such services to detect and analyze events in real-time as they unfold. In this context, we recently proposed ArmaTweet-a system developed in collaboration among armasuisse and the Universities of Oxford and Fribourg to support semantic event detection on Twitter streams. Our experiments have shown that ArmaTweet is successful at detecting many complex events that cannot be detected by simple keyword-based search methods alone. Building up on this work, we explore in this paper several approaches for event detection on microposts. In particular, we describe and compare four different approaches based on keyword search (Plain-Seed-Query), information retrieval (Temporal Query Expansion), Word2Vec word embeddings (Embedding), and semantic retrieval (ArmaTweet). We provide an extensive empirical evaluation of these techniques using a benchmark dataset of about 200 million tweets on six event categories that we collected. While the performance of individual systems varies depending on the event category, our results show that ArmaTweet outperforms the other approaches on five out of six categories, and that a combined approach offers highest recall without adversely affecting precision of event detection.

One important use case for (business) process technology is process compliance. We propose that managing security objects such as cryptographic keys is an application domain that can greatly benefit from using process technology because of a critical compliance requirement. To this end, we present a BPMN extension and a design of a support system for key management processes. Both were driven by a case study on a distributed application using a standard hierarchical public key infrastructure, which we also present. Our prototypical implementation of the support system shows that process compliance for security object management processes can be substantially supported with moderate effort by extending the standard process technology.

This paper examines the use of visualisations in the field of information security and in particular focuses on the practice of information security risk assessment. We examine the current roles of information security visualisations and place these roles in the wider information visualisation discourse. We present an analytic lens which divides visualisations into three categories: journalistic, scientific and critical visualisations. We then present a case study that uses these three categories of visualisations to further support information security practice.

This paper describes a search facility for systems management that was designed and implemented to simplify the management of large IT infrastructures. As the complexity of data centers or telecommunication networks increases, managing such infrastructures involves large amounts of data originating from many and diverse sources. In a typical IT management infrastructure, we find many management components such as commercial and open source products (e.g., for monitoring); custom, be-spoke software (e.g., a home-grown inventory database) as well as additional conventional (e.g., calendar) and unconventional (e.g., Web forums, blogs) data sources. The amount of information and the number of tools that are at the disposal of the system operator for management tasks are both wide-ranging and overwhelming. Finding the set of information and tools that is relevant to solve a given problem is a challenge, and typically requires expertise in how to extract data from the available data sources and how to use that extracted data effectively. A search facility that can locate data and tools is beneficial to systems management, but to maximize its impact, it needs to address the heterogeneity of data and data sources; provide task-focused, structured and enriched results, and be both scalable and cost-effective in the dynamic and changing environment of today's IT infrastructures. This paper describes such a system, called Fusio, that provides a search capability based on a loose coupling of heterogeneous, systems-management-related data in an IT environment. Fusio is based on the Semantic Web and traditional information-retrieval technologies. Tools such as Fusio are useful for system operators in carrying out tasks, such as problem resolution, where pointers to related information and tools can be quickly found to speed up the task. They are also useful for training purposes, e.g., as a reference to available data and tools. The paper describes the architecture of the search facility and the prototype implementation that is now being deployed in a test environment.

Integration of data from multiple sources makes it possible to build effective systems management solutions. Despite the expected benefits, data integration remains a challenge. Heterogeneity between data sources in terms of lack of an accepted common model, data semantics and access methods are among the difficulties. The goal of our research is to realize loosely coupled integration of data for systems management by building a lightweight mechanism to easily browse, search and query data across multiple sources without enforcing a common model across all sources. The approach is based on the emerging Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies proposed for the World Wide Web (WWW). The focus of this short paper is to report on our work on the transformation of management data sources into Linked Data providers.