The DAPRECO knowledge base (D-KB) is a repository of rules written in LegalRuleML, an XML formalism designed to represent the logical content of legal documents. The rules represent the provisions of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The D-KB builds upon the Privacy Ontology (PrOnto) (Palmirani et al., 2018), which provides a model for the legal concepts involved in the GDPR, by adding a further layer of constraints in the form of if-then rules, referring either to standard first order logic implications or to deontic statements. If-then rules are formalized in reified I/O logic (Robaldo and Sun, 2017) and then codified in (LegalRuleML, 2019). To date, the D-KB is the biggest knowledge base in LegalRuleML freely available online at (Robaldo et al., 2019).

The research and industrial environments are struggling to identify practical approaches to highlight the (new) duties of controllers of personal data and foster the transition of IT-based systems, services, and tools to comply with the GDPR. In this paper, we present a solution for enhancing the modelling of business processes with facilities to help evaluate the compliance with the GDPR. The proposal is based on a model describing the constituents of the data protection domain: A structured form of the legal text, an ontology of data protection concepts, and a machine-readable translation of the GDPR provisions. An example of application is also provided.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)'s sixth principle, Integrity and Confidentiality, dictates that personal data must be protected from unauthorised or unlawful processing. To this aim, we propose a systematic approach for authoring access control policies that are by-design aligned with the provisions of the GDPR. We exemplify it by considering realistic use cases.

This paper introduces PrOnto, the privacy ontology that models the GDPR main conceptual cores: data types and documents, agents and roles, processing purposes, legal bases, processing operations, and deontic operations for modelling rights and duties. The explicit goal of PrOnto is to support legal reasoning and compliance checking by employing defeasible logic theory (i.e., the LegalRuleML standard and the SPINDle engine).

Recently, the Court of Justice of the European Union issued decision C-131/12, which was considered a major breakthrough in Internet data protection. The general public welcomed this decision as an actualization of the controversial “right to be forgotten”, which was introduced in the initial draft for a new regulation on data protection and repeatedly amended, due to objections by various Member States and major companies involved in massive processing of personal data. This paper attempts to delve into the content of that decision and examine if it indeed involves the right to be forgotten, if such a right exists at all, and to what extent it can be stated and enforced.

Web services (WSs) are the W3C-endorsed realization of the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Since they are supposed to be implementation-neutral, WSs are typically tested black-box at their interface. Such an interface is generally specified in an XML-based notation called the WS Description Language (WSDL). Conceptually, these WSDL documents are eligible for fully automated WS test generation using syntax-based testing approaches. Towards such goal, we introduce the WS-TAXI framework, in which we combine the coverage of WS operations with data-driven test generation. In this paper we present an early-stage implementation of WS-TAXI, obtained by the integration of two existing softwares: soapUI, a popular tool for WS testing, and TAXI, an application we have previously developed for the automated derivation of XML instances from a XML schema. WS-TAXI delivers a complete suite of test messages ready for execution. Test generation is driven by basic coverage criteria and by the application of some heuristics. The application of WS-TAXI to a real case study gave encouraging results.

Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) are becoming increasingly popular and powerful. Fueling that growth is the availability of independent web services that can be cost-effectively composed with other services to provide richer functionality. The reasons that make these systems easier to build, however, also make them more challenging to test. Independent web services usually provide just an interface, enough to invoke them and develop some general (black-box) tests, but insufficient for a tester to develop an adequate understanding of the integration quality between the application and independent web services. To address this lack we propose a "whitening" approach to make web services more transparent through the addition of an intermediate coverage service. The approach, named Service Oriented Coverage Testing (SOCT), provides a tester with feedback about how a whitened service, called a Testable Service, is exercised. In this paper we introduce the SOCT approach, implement an instance of it, and perform a preliminary study to show its feasibility and potential value. SOCT enables SOA white-box testing, while maintaining SOA flexibility, dynamism and loose coupling.

The development of software for complex reactive embedded systems requires automated support for the verification of functional and nonfunctional properties. Currently, a language (or a design methodology) that can provide both at the same time without incurring in excessive inefficiencies is not available and separation of concerns is the solution advocated by many. Most research and commercial languages and tools focus on providing support for the design and validation of functional properties. At a different level, models and theory have been developed for supporting the description of the threads and resources composing the software architecture, and schedulability analysis provides support for the validation of timing constraints. However, the design of the concurrent structure of the application is still done manually. The system designer has to decide the number of threads, their structure and interactions, without the possibility of evaluating the trade-off between different solutions. This paper presents a solution towards what we believe to be a key objective, that is the synthesis of the architecture-level design and the automated logical-to-architectural mapping. Our proposal tries to reduce the overheads and excessive priority inversions of existing solutions that map all functional blocks (or reactions) into a single thread or assign a thread of execution to each action or possibly to each active object. After presenting our algorithm, we compare it with existing solutions and provide a schedulability analysis of the resulting system.