To face increasing threats, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) demand high accuracy, short response time, and a never seen agility in recognizing evolving threats. This research explores Machine Learning (ML) with Deep Learning (DL) for IDS, and proposes a model based on ensemble voting among several classifiers. We perform testing on real-world data using an unbalanced database under a parallel setting with four classification algorithms: Decision Tree (DT), Random Forest (RF), K-nearest neighbors (KNN), and Multiple Layer Perceptron (MLP). The voting ensemble classification method is used to improve the accuracy of the model and to reduce the number of false positives. We also address the issue of explainability to increase trust in anomaly-based Network-IDS.

Financial crime is increasingly facilitated by technology and globalization, demanding advanced IT tools for detection. This paper presents an approach to automate the detection of suspicious activities in real time using Machine Learning (ML) techniques. The approach is designed and evaluated to operate under pragmatic operational constraints inherent to financial institutions, such as extreme class imbalance, stemming from the rarity of fraudulent events relative to legitimate transactions; evolving fraud patterns (concept drift), driven by adversarial adaptation; and significant delays in obtaining verified feedback. The paper aims to elucidate financial transaction monitoring in a data stream context and presents a developed streaming ML pipeline and an experimental testbed.

The advancement of the agricultural economic sector, which is a labour-intensive one, can benefit from robot-based systems, able to identify objects and perform complex processes in cooperation with human actors. From the technical, organizational, and job management viewpoint, cooperation in agriculture can also help facing challenges related to sustainability and climate change, and connected to aspects of the market such as global competition, labour shortages, and fluctuating costs of materials (e.g., fuel and fertilisers). Agricultural robots (agrobots) hold great promise in addressing the aforementioned challenges. Starting from ideas at the basis of our project at POLIMI on fruit farming, this paper presents a context study, and a knowledgebased approach to model smart agricultural environments, where farms use sensors and agrobots, and cooperate via Digital Twins towards the execution of complex tasks. We discuss how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can enhance the process of training humans and agrobots in cooperative tasks.

In this paper, we introduce a system designed to track the social interactions of individuals seated around a table, such as during work sessions or breaks. The system employs sensor technologies and data processing algorithms to monitor the seating arrangement and identify patterns of social engagement among participants. This represents an initial step towards developing a comprehensive system that provides deeper insights into collaborative behaviours and interpersonal connections within organizational settings.

The development of a contact-less monitoring system detecting water flow in the household and identifying the objects utilizing it, can provide support for Human Activities Recognition (HAR) and for Activities of Daily Living (ADL). This makes it particularly valuable in the context of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL). This study presents the results of an approach based on analyzing the spectrum of sounds captured in the environment. Two non-invasive solutions are examined, both utilizing a platform with a microphone placed in the environment to detect changes in sound caused by water flow noise. One method is based on spectrum analysis; the other on spectrogram analysis. We present the experiments conducted to test the two approaches in different environments. The two approaches differ in computational cost and are suitable for environments with multiple water sources, requiring no direct contact with plumbing. This makes them particularly suitable for applications related to the use of the bathroom. In particular, the spectrogram approach achieves an accuracy above 90%.

This foreword introduces a summary of themes and papers of the Web2Touch (W2T) 2021 Track at the 30th IEEE WETICE Conference held as a virtual Conference, in October 2021. W2T 2021 includes four full papers. They all address relevant issues in the field of collaborative web, semantic technologies, ontologies, knowledge engineering, linked data and internet of things applied to themes of high impact on society, such as education, social inclusion and health. These papers propose to explore affordable technologies to promote and valorize rural areas, to develop ontologies for supporting simulation-based training in Medicine, to use semantic technologies in a framework for promoting reuse and interoperability of Electronic Health Records, as well as to use these technologies to provide recommendations in an Internet of Things device migration scenario.

India is a growing country with over 1.2 billion people, out of which more than two-thirds still live in rural areas. Indian rural areas are vibrant heritage-wise. They have both a fascinating hard and soft heritage legacy. Each region has many kinds of villages, and each is characterized by specific arts and crafts skills developed over the centuries. Small settlements retain fascinating heritage, which should be acknowledged and protected. Nowadays, rural villages are slowly perishing and losing their skilled people under the pressure of migration to cities. Rural settlements are suffering the exodus of young people and losing their art and craft skilled artisans. Since these settlements have been neglected, how do we bring attention to these fascinating areas? How do we allow skilled artisans to make a living and want to remain in rural areas? How do we provide a more sustainable future for both our rural and urban settlements? WECRAFT is an initiative that addresses these concerns by combining the best of affordable technologies and humanities, planning to enhance village areas, their skilled artisans and their products. This paper focuses on the requirements we collected and designs the WECRAFT solution.

In the past few years, Android security is enhanced \nand state-of-the-art anti-malware tools have been introduced \nto counter Android malware. These tools use both static and \ndynamic analysis techniques to detect malicious applications. \nDespite these, the attack surface against Android phones has \nrisen exponentially and malware detection tools are failed to \ncounter sophisticated threats. Therefore, it is a need to audit \nand evaluate Anti Malware Solutions (AMTs). In our research, \nwe have analyzed various Android malware evasion techniques, \nalong with their pros and cons. Moreover, we conducted a detailed \ncomparison of existing anti-malware tools and measured their \nefficacy against the discussed evasion techniques. Finally, a more \nsophisticated anti-malware evasion technique is proposed that \nuses exhaustive obfuscation and remote code execution to audit \nstatic and dynamic detection capabilities of AMTs. The proposed \ntechnique is practically validated and results prove that it evades \nall known anti-malware solutions. This technique can be utilized \nby anti-malware solution providers for making their products \nmore resilient and powerful.

This foreword introduces a summary of themes and papers of the Web2Touch (W2T) 2020-21 Track at the 29th IEEE WETICE Conference held as a virtual Conference, in October 2020. W2T 2020-21 includes six full papers and four short papers. They all address relevant issues in the field of information sharing for collaboration, including, big data analytics, knowledge engineering, linked open data, applications of smart Web technologies, and smart care. The papers address a portfolio of hot issues in research and applications of semantics, smart technologies (e.g., IoT, sensors, devices for tele-monitoring, and smart contents management) with crucial topics, such as big data analysis, knowledge representation, smart enterprise management, among the others. This track shows how cooperative technologies based on knowledge representation, intelligent tools, and enhanced Web engineering can enhance collaborative work through smart service design and delivery, so it contributes to radically change the role of the semantic Web and applications.

This paper presents an approach to the recognition of human gestures in the context of the “Seamless” project. In the project, data collected by IoT sensors can be navigated through gesture recognition algorithms. The aim of recognizing human gestures in Seamless is to give commands through a wearable control device. The paper outlines the Seamless project and then concentrates on our approach to understand a set of gestures using Machine Learning. The employed model and the results are illustrated.

Health and social care services are under increasing pressure to come up with adequate solutions to manage the demand and supply equation. Integrated care is one way to deal with this wicked problem, but new approaches and service implementation strategies are necessary to realize its full value and quality of outcome. Focusing on the four relevant 'blocks of interaction' identified by Prahalad and Ramaswamy, the paper examines the key role of information and communication technology (ICT) in facilitating the integrated care effort. It then develops those insights into a set of DART-informed guiding principles of practical use to decision-makers and IS/IT developers in the design of resource integration mechanisms for the management of chronic care settings. The paper uses home care services as a blueprint.

This foreword introduces a summary of themes and papers of the Web2Touch (W2T) 2019 Track at the 28th IEEE WETICE Conference held in Capri, June 2019. W2T 2019 includes ten full papers and one short paper. They all address relevant issues in the field of information sharing for collaboration, including, big data analytics, knowledge engineering, linked open data, applications of smart Web technologies, and smart care. The papers are a portfolio of hot issues in research and applications of semantics, smart technologies (e.g., IoT, sensors, devices for tele-monitoring, and smart contents management) with crucial topics, such as big data analysis, knowledge representation, smart enterprise management, among the others. This track shows how cooperative technologies based on knowledge representation, intelligent tools, and enhanced Web engineering can enhance collaborative work through smart service design and delivery, so it contributes to radically change the role of the semantic Web and applications.

This paper presents an architecture for Big Data Analytics regarding unstructured content. The architecture is proposed as an industrial solution in a real setting. In particular, the paper focuses on BD (Big Data) for Smart Companies and on Enterprise Content Management for extraction of information from textual BD. It presents the process architecture and discusses some experiments done as part of a larger BD Analytics project.

We present Web2Touch 2018, one of the Tracks at the 27th IEEE WETICE Conference. Web2Touch 2018 includes five full papers and one short paper tackling very up-to-date issues in information sharing and collaboration, including, among others, big data analytics, development of virtual agents and assistants, privacy and security analysis and evaluation. Papers come from areas such as knowledge engineering, linked data, big data, security, safety, and web science. The overall focus is on how research on semantics coupled with crucial topics such as big data analysis, privacy, knowledge representation, and enterprise contents management, among the others, can improve services and collaboration and push forward new ways of interpreting the role of the web.

This paper shows the solutions developed in the Project "Sistema Innovativo Big Data Analytics" named SIBDA (The needs of the three involved companies are described, which led to define an overall framework in the field of Big Data through application cases. The functional and technological requirements of an integrated Big Data Architecture are given. In particular, the criteria for selecting the solutions for Document Management for one company (Microdata Service) are described. The resulting Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system architecture and the overall system architecture are given. SIBDA stands for Sistema Innovativo Big Data Analytics, a project funded by Regione Lombardia within "Accordi di Competitività", involving three ICT companies (Mail Up s.p.a, Microdata Service and LineaCom), belonging to the CRIT Consortium, Cremona, and Politecnico di Milano.

With hundreds of millions of Android phone users in around 190 countries, the global smartphone market has witnessed extraordinary and explosive growth, which is escorted with the vast number of its applications. It has an open source code platform that encourages app developers to develop Android applications and introduce them free-of-cost in the market. Applications are considered as the heart of Android phone that drive innovation, leisure, ease of availability and compatibility with the mobile devices. Embedded adware or mobile advertising is rapidly finding its ways into android applications in the form of banner ads, rich media or interstitial ads.. This paper aims to highlight risk of privacy leakage of end users by introducing an attack model and exploring attacks caused by in-application advertisements. It also presents theoretical framework by quantitative analytic approach to figure out the impact of embedded adware on Android user's privacy.

The safety of the persons in work environments is an open issue. The diffusion of smart solutions including Smart Work Environments has lead to new and enhanced approaches which consider the dynamic nature of such environments. Smart solutions use context information and adapt themselves based on the current context and needs at run-time. However, as traditional approaches have been proven to be effective, they should be extended and adapted to run-time safety management by focusing on the dynamic nature of smart environments. In this work, we propose transforming traditional safety management approaches into models that can be updated and used at run-time.

This report introduces the Web2Touch 2016, a Track at the 25th IEEE WETICE Conference. This track involves works from collaborative web knowledge research community and related themes. Web2Touch 2016 explores the state-of-the-art on users' practical experiences, as well as trends and research topics paving the way for future collaborative approaches to knowledge management. Papers come from areas such as computational analysis, management of contextual information, support to personalized information management, collaborative knowledge production, consistency, knowledge engineering and security modeling for multiple knowledge sources. The overall focus is on determining how to route, organize, and present contextual and meaningful information and services to facilitate collaboration.

This paper proposes a methodology for run-time safety management in Smart Work Environments (SWE), based on a semantic assessment of the risks, based on defined indicators. To assess SWE safety, we define a novel ontological model for representing its characteristics and introduce a metric for run-time evaluation of the SWE safety level. A description logic reasoner is used to automatically check the consistency of the proposed ontology. The novelty of the approach lies in treating safety at run-time.

This paper describes the cooperative interface of RAMIRES, a prototype web application where environmental risks are reported in a dashboard for the risk management team. It shows monitored areas, supports risk managers in understanding the risk and its consequences, and supports decision making so empowering risk managers to mitigate risks improving the environment resilience. To treat risks, RAMIRES is adaptive regarding risk and security. For risk, it adapts the information towards the environment to obtain more data about the observed area to understand the risk and its consequences. It also adapts the user interface according to the involved actor. For security, RAMIRES is adaptive in that security rules determine the data views to different actors. The tool interaction with the environment and with risk mangers is presented using storyboards of interactions.

This is the Web2Touch 2015 track report.

This paper presents the design principles for dynamic security modeling in risk-prone environments, where elements of the environment to be protected are classified in Contexts and are monitored and geo-referenced. Based on a motivating scenario, the security model elements are introduced building on the ABAC (Attribute Based Access Control) paradigm. Dynamicity is integrated into the model to make it self-adaptable to dynamic changes in the environment conditions, including the occurrence of risks and emergencies. The model aims at dynamically authorizing subjects to access diverse data and physical objects (resources) based on adaptive activation/deactivation of security rules and changes in subject or object attributes, while still preserving the need-to-know principle.

The 2014 edition of the Web2Touch (W2T) Track aims at presenting alternatives to address interoperability and distributed knowledge management problem for Web systems. In particular, it provides a view on the field of secure and knowledge-intensive Web collaboration using semantic techniques to share experiences, challenges and opportunities, and to cope with frequent evolution of knowledge during cooperative processes based on the Web collaborative platform. Consequently, this year, W2T brings together applications, engineering issues, conceptual models and methods to provide a multidisciplinary view over knowledge organization systems based on the Web.

The development and maintenance of cloud sites are often characterized by energy waste and high CO2 emissions. Energy efficiency and the decrease of the CO2 emissions in cloud-based systems can be only obtained by adopting suitable actions and techniques (e.g., utilization of green energy sources, reduction of the number of physical and virtual machines, usage of the greener machines). In order to evaluate the suitability of these different actions, it is necessary to define a measure for greenness of the whole system. For this reason, this paper defines a set of metrics to assess the greenness of a cloud infrastructure. In order to provide a detailed view of the behaviour of the system and to facilitate the identification of the causes of the energy waste, metrics have been defined at different layers of the system (i.e., application, virtualization, infrastructure layers). The monitoring infrastructure that is necessary to retrieve all the data required for the assessment of the identified set of metrics is also described.

SUMMARY The paper proposes a characterization of risks and a service‐oriented prototype to face risky situations in work environments, such as in industrial plants or building construction areas. A risk is the overture of emergencies that produce human and/or material damages. Therefore, it is particularly critical to identify and manage risks to avoid their evolution into emergencies. In this paper, we outline the technological features of a risk environment and propose a risk model and a service‐based simulation prototype aimed to improve safety in work environments. We discuss engineering issues concerning risk modeling and management. Furthermore, we propose a risk management system solution and its related implemented prototype composed of services able to detect and also to prevent the occurrence of risk conditions. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper presents a novel approach to characterise applications with respect to their energy consumption by using a set of energy-related metrics, called Green Metrics. These indicators are based on energy consumption measurements, such as indexes of computing resource usage, of environmental impact, and even of development costs required to (re)design an application in order to optimise its energy consumption footprint, or of organizational factors related to application management. Our approach is framed in the GAMES (Green Active Management of Energy in IT Service centres) EU Project1 about green IT. In this paper, we define four clusters of Green Metrics enabling to feature an application in terms of the energy it consumes at run time. Such metrics are the basis for measuring the "greenness" of an application and to detect where it consumes and wastes energy. Hints are provided to improve applications design and execution. We show within an application scenario how monitoring and evaluation of the Green Metrics helps to improve energy efficiency.

Scientific workflows and Web Services have been utilized as a means to promote cooperation among researchers in the area of e-Science. These designs execute over distributed scientific nodes and resources so as to facilitate large scale and complex scientific experiments. These distributed environments using collaborative paradigms based on Web Services and workflow technologies, have specific security requirements. Current research has focused on security requirements of a distributed scientific laboratory (e-lab), such as data confidentiality and integrity, controlled access to resources, and auditing. However, no work exists that investigates trust and reputation of the scientific nodes cooperating in the laboratory. We propose a trust and reputation scheme that operates over such a distributed e-lab environment. The trust and reputation scheme enables the process owner to assess the behavior of nodes by aggregating the number of successful activity executions and detecting malicious or unreliable behavior.

This paper proposes a self-healing approach to handle exceptions in service-based processes and to repair the faulty activities with a model-based approach. In particular, a set of repair actions is defined in the process model, and repairability of the process is assessed by analyzing the process structure and the available repair actions. During execution, when an exception arises, repair plans are generated by taking into account constraints posed by the process structure, dependencies among data, and available repair actions. The paper also describes the main features of the prototype developed to validate the proposed repair approach for composed Web services; the self-healing architecture for repair handling and the experimental results are illustrated.

In this paper, we propose an approach to face emergencies and risky situations through real-time wearable services in industrial environments. We outline the social and technological features of a wearable-based service system, which aims to improve safety in workplaces. To achieve this goal, we propose a system composed of real-time wearable services constituting a platform able to prevent the occurrence of emergency and/or unsafe conditions in work contexts. After the presentation of the related work, the paper introduces the most significant social and technological aspects of the risk management. Furthermore, attention is focused on the modeling guidelines we have identified for the architectural approach which exploits the core concepts of the service-oriented paradigm.

Acknowledged as important factors for business environments operating as virtual organizations (VOs), trust and reputation are receiving attention also in Grids devoted to scientific applications where problems of finding suitable models and architectures for flexible security management of heterogeneous resources arise. Being these resources highly heterogeneous (from individual users to whole organizations or experiment tools and workflows), this paper presents a trust and reputation framework that integrates a number of information sources to produce a comprehensive evaluation of trust and reputation by clustering resources having similar capabilities of successfully executing a specific job. Here, trust and reputation are considered as quality of service (QoS) parameters, and are asserted on the operative context of resources, a concept expressing the resources capability of providing trusted services within collaborative scientific applications. Specifically, the framework exploits the use of distributed brokers that support interaction trust and the creation of VOs from existing scientific organizations. A broker is a distributed software module launched at some node of the Grid that makes use of resources and communicates with other brokers to perform specific reputation services. In turn, each broker contributes to maintain a dynamic and adaptive reputation assessment within the Grid in a collaborative and distributed fashion. The proposed framework is empirically implemented by adopting a SOA approach and results show its effectiveness and its possible integration in a scientific Grid.

This paper presents a service-oriented model and architecture for security in multichannel information systems of public administration, where services can be delivered to citizens and enterprises on various channels, including mobile systems. The model and architecture are based on the definition of service delivery channels given in some ongoing e-government projects. In particular, the security model is framed in the field of services to e-employment, as studied in the SEEMP (Single European Employment Market Place) project, using models and tools that have been implemented in a previous project on adaptive multichannel information systems

In network-centered execution environments, client objects can transparently invoke services offered by remote server objects, according to their published interface. The object selection problem requires the evaluation of the fitness of a pool of candidate server objects on the basis of the available information about their functional and nonfunctional features. Network-centered systems usually store such information in a trader agent that can be browsed or queried by client objects. In this paper, a fuzzy data model is proposed as the basis of the design of such a trader system, taking into account synergy between objects' features. Our trader is based on a fuzzy query algebra allowing for deriving operator definitions (therefore, query execution mechanisms) at run time, on the basis of user-selected semantics.

In this paper we deal with the problem of querying, navigating and exchanging UML design artefacts, including components interfaces, conceptual schemas and the like. Our approach relies on a hierarchy of XML-based descriptors for UML components, representing both functional and non-functional features of artefacts. After presenting a “query-friendly” DTD for such descriptors, the paper illustrates issues related to querying and browsing design repositories. We show how our approach can also address connection-oriented services, such as HTTP-based Web sites.

In order to design workflows in changing and dynamic environments, a flexible, correct, and rapid realization of models of the activity flow is required. In particular, techniques are needed to design workflows capable of adapting themselves effectively when exceptional situations occur during process execution. The authors present an approach to flexible workflow design based on rules and patterns developed in the framework of the WIDE project. Rules allow a high degree of flexibility during workflow design by modeling exceptional aspects of the workflow separately from the main activity flow. Patterns model frequently occurring exceptional situations in a generalized way by providing the designer with skeletons of rules and suggestions about their instantiation, together with indications on relationships with other rules, with the activity flow, and with related information. Pattern based design relies on a pattern catalog containing patterns to be reused and on a formal basis for specializing and instantiating available patterns.

This article presents a hierarchy-aware classification schema for obje ct-oriented code, where software components are classified according to their behavioral characteristics , such as provided services, employed algorithms, and needed data. In the case of reusable application frameworks, these characteristics are constructured from their model , i.e., from the description of the abstract classes specifying both the framework structure and purpose. In conventional object libraries, the characteristics are extracted semiautomatically from class interfaces. Characteristics are term pairs, weighted to represent “how well” they describe component behavior. The set of characteristics associated with a given component forms its software descriptor . A descriptor base is presented where descriptors are organized on the basis of structured relationships, such as similarity and composition. The classification is supported by a thesaurus acting as a language-independent unified lexicon. The descriptor base is conceived for developers who, besides conventionally browsing the descriptors hierarchy, can query the system, specifying a set of desired functionalities and getting a ranked set of adaptable candidates. User feedback is taken into account in order to progressively ameliorate the quality of the descriptors according to the views of the user community. Feedback is made dependent of the user typology through a user profile . Experimental results in terms of recall and precision of the retrieval mechanism against a sample code base are reported.

This article presents a hierarchy-aware classification schema for object-oriented code, where software components are classified according to their behavioral characteristics , such as provided services, employed algorithms, and needed data. In the case of reusable application frameworks, these characteristics are constructed from their model , i.e., from the description of the abstract classes specifying both the framework structure and purpose. In conventional object libraries, the characteristics are extracted semiautomatically from class interfaces. Characteristics are term pairs, weighted to represent "how well" they describe component behavior. The set of characteristics associated with a given component forms its software descriptor . A descriptor base is presented where descriptors are organized on the basis of structured relationships, such as similarity and composition. The classification is supported by a thesaurus acting as a language-independent unified lexicon. The descriptor base is conceived for developers who, besides conventionally browsing the descriptors hierarchy, can query the system, specifying a set of desired functionalities and getting a ranked set of adaptable candidates. User feedback is taken into account in order to progressively ameliorate the quality of the descriptors according to the views of the user community. Feedback is made dependent of the user typology through a user profile . Experimental results in terms of recall and precision of the retrieval mechanism against a sample code base are reported.

Workflow design involves modeling different aspects of a business process. Among these aspects, workflow design should consider also security requirements. These relate to the authorizations for the users in the organization to execute workflow tasks

The problem of analyzing and classifying conceptual schemas is becomig increasingly important due to the availability of a large number of schemas related to existing applications. The purposes of schema analysis and classification activities can be different: to extract information on intensional properties of legacy systems in order to restructure or migrate to new architectures; to build libraries of reference conceptual components to be used in building new applications in a given domain; and to identify information flows and possible replication of data in an organization. This article proposes a set of techniques for schema analysis and classification to be used separately or in combination. The techniques allow the analyst to derive significant properties from schemas, with human intervention limited as far as possible. In particular, techniques for associating descriptors with schemas, for abstracting reference conceptual schemas based on schema clustering, and for determining schema similarity are presented. A methodology for systematic schema analysis is illustrated, with the purpose of identifying and abstracting into reference components the similar and potentially reusable parts of a set of schemas. Experiences deriving from the application of the proposed techniques and methodology on a large set of Entity-Relationship conceptual schemas of information systems in the Italian Public Administration domain are described

Global authorizations in database federations can be derived from local authorizations exported by the databases composing the federation. Particularly, when several component databases participate in the federation and a high number of users and pro

During application development under reuse, much effort is spent in retrieving suitable components. This paper presents an approach to retrieval based on software descriptions of components, and on a mechanism for computing the functional similarity of clusters of reuse candidates. Descriptions are given in a semi-formal fashion and using fuzzy weights for keywords. Algorithms for similarity computation are presented. The experimental tool for this approach manages imprecise queries posed by developers against a software repository; results about reuse of object-oriented code based on the use of the tool are presented, giving measures of recall and precision of the proposed approach.

In the office environment, the retrieval of documents is performed using the concepts contained in the documents, information about the procedural context where the documents are used, and information about the regulations and laws that discipline the life of documents within a given application domain. To fulfill the requirements of such a sophisticated retrieval, we propose a document retrieval model and system based on the representation of knowledge describing the semantic contents of documents, the way in which the documents are managed by procedures and by people in the office, and the application domain where the office operates. The article describes the knowledge representation issues needed for the document retrieval system and presents a document retrieval model that captures these issues. The effectiveness of the approach is illustrated by describing a system, named Kabiria , built on top of such model. The article describes the querying and browsing environments, and the architecture of the system.

No abstract available.

This paper describes the architecture of a document retrieval system integrating classical IR features with knowledge about the procedural and application context where documents are used.The paper focuses on the query language that allows the user to pose queries involving the analysis of both the semantic network where procedures, office agents, and events of the office context are represented as elements accessing, modifying, filing, manipulating document, and the document contents, i.e. their text.The coupling of the query system with a browser tool is also discussed.The system relies on a knowledge representation model for document and document roles developed in previous phases of the research.

Document classification and retrieval systems for office applications require knowledge management to describe the semantics of documents related to procedural and domain dependent aspects of the office work to be described: operational dependencies, documents relationships and references to regulations and laws are concepts which are not explicitly stated in the text. This paper presents a semantic model for office documents classification and retrieval based on knowledge representation of the office procedural environment and of the application domain. Navigation along knowledge networks for document retrieval and browsing is described.

Designers of office information systems, which share various features with information systems and software development, need to carefully consider special issues such as document and communication flows, user roles, user interfaces, and available technology. The ESPRIT Project, Automatic TOols for Designing Office Information Systems (TODOS), proposes an integrated environment for office design with tools for requirements collection and analysis, conceptual design, rapid prototyping, and architecture selection. Conceptual design is a central phase of office system design: It provides correct and complete functional requirements from which the office prototype will be developed and the final architecture chosen. C-TODOS, the conceptual design support tool developed within TODOS, is presented in this paper. The purpose of C-TODOS is to give the designer tools for supporting conceptual modeling activities with the goal of obtaining correct, consistent, and good quality office-functional specifications. This paper presents C-TODOS within the TODOS development environment and describes the basic features of the tool: the TODOS Conceptual Model, the Specification Database, and the Modeling, Query and Consistency Checking Modules. The use of C-TODOS, through illustration of the development of a test case, and possible future research are discussed.