Word, sentence and document embeddings have become the cornerstone of most natural language processing-based solutions. The training of an effective embedding depends on a large corpus of relevant documents. However, such corpus is not always available, especially for specialized heavy industries such as oil, mining, or steel. To address the problem, this paper proposes a semi-supervised learning framework to create document corpus and embedding starting from an industry taxonomy, along with a very limited set of relevant positive and negative documents. Our solution organizes candidate documents into a graph and adopts different explore and exploit strategies to iteratively create the corpus and its embedding. At each iteration, two metrics, called Coverage and Context Similarity, are used as proxy to measure the quality of the results. Our experiments demonstrate how an embedding created by our solution is more effective than the one created by processing thousands of industry-specific document pages. We also explore using our embedding in downstream tasks, such as building an industry specific classification model given labeled training data, as well as classifying unlabeled documents according to industry taxonomy terms.

The complex process of adapting pre-packaged applications, such as Oracle or SAP, to an organization's needs is full of challenges. Although detailed, structured, and well-documented methods govern this process, the consulting team implementing the method must spend a huge amount of manual effort to make sure the guidelines of the method are followed as intended by the method author. MATCON breaks down the method content, documents, templates, and work products into reusable objects, and enables them to be cataloged and indexed so these objects can be easily found and reused on subsequent projects. By using models and meta-modeling the reusable methods, we automatically produce a CASE tool to apply these methods, thereby guiding consultants through this complex process. The resulting tool helps consultants create the method deliverables for the initial phases of large customization projects. Our MATCON output, referred to as Consultant Assistant, has shown significant savings in training costs, a 20 - 30% improvement in productivity, and positive results in large Oracle and SAP implementations.

New important emerging business paradigms, such as ldquoservice virtualizationrdquo can be made easy and convenient by the use of P2P systems. In these paradigms, often the owners of the services are different (and independent) from the owners of the resources used to offer such services. In comparison to centralized servers, P2P systems can conveniently offer higher availability and more bandwidth as they harness the computing and network resources of thousands of hosts in a decentralized fashion. Despite these useful features and their success in the research community, P2P systems are still not very popular in the business world. The main reason for such a skepticism is their lack of proper security. In this paper, we address this issue by motivating and explaining the benefits of adding access control in P2P systems to make them more suitable and flexible as a technical platform for providing third party services. We propose an architecture augmented with access control mechanisms to enable content delivery on a P2P system. The proposed architecture is shaped according to CDN requirements. We have also tested the feasibility of our approach with a prototype implementation and the preliminary results show that our system can scale well also in the presence of very large number of policies.

XACML is the OASIS standard language specifically aimed at the specification of authorization policies. While XACML fits well with the security requirements of a single enterprise (even if large and composed by multiple departments), it does not address the requirements of virtual enterprises in which several autonomous subjects collaborate by sharing their resources to provide better services to customers. In this article we highlight such limitation, and we propose an XACML extension, the policy integration algorithms, to address them. In the article we also present the implementation of a system that makes use of the policy integration algorithms to securely replicate information in a P2P-like environment. In our solution, the data replication process considers the policies specified by both the owners of the data shared and the peers sharing data storage.

This paper is the result of the clashing but fruitful collaboration of experts of two different cultures - Computer Science and Archaeology _ and reports on the design and development of the T.Arc.H.N.A System, a new system of accessibility towards Cultural Heritage of the Etruscan culture. The first important result of the collaboration is the rise of an interdisciplinary team of cultural operators, which emerged from the confrontation of the different experiences acquired in each proper field of common research. As a consequence of such a confrontation process, the team was in need of new tools of expression, and communication. An ontology was defined as a new medium for communication between Computer Scientists and Archeologists. New media to record the results of the archaeological researches were introduced to disseminate knowledge to a large public in a novel, context adaptive way. The setting of these media are the base for the implementation of the working seed of the T.Arc.H.N.A System. The paper presents this open and participatory system where different actors cooperate to create and disseminate knowledge about cultural assets.

A growing number of domains are adopting semantic models as a centralized gateway to heterogeneous data sources, or directly for modeling and managing relevant information. In such contexts, it is crucial to grant access to the semantic model and its data only to the authorized users. In this paper, we present a fine-grained access control model specifically tailored to semantic models. One of the relevant features of the model is the granularity of the resources that can be protected. Access control can be enforced at the level of both the model's concepts and the concepts' instances by means of a query rewriting strategy. The proposed model has been implemented adopting the XACML standard and the SeRQL query language; services exposed by the implementation can be used to trans- paretly integrate authorization into existing systems.

In this paper we present a system we have built to disseminate cultural heritage distributed across multiple museums. Our system addresses the requirements of two categories of users: the end users that need to access information according to their interests and interaction preferences, and the domain experts and museum curators that need to develop thematic tours providing end users with a better understanding of the single artefact or collection. In our approach we make use of a semantic representation of the given heritage domain in order to build multiple visual interfaces, called "Virtual Wings" (VWs). Such interfaces allow users to navigate through data available from digital archives and thematic tours and to create their own personalized virtual visits. An interactive application integrating personalized digital guides (using PDAs) and 360 panoramic images is the example of VW presented.

XACML is the OASIS standard language for the specification of authorization and entitlement policies. However, while XACML well addresses security requirements of a single enterprise (even if large and composed by multiple departments), it does not address the requirements of virtual enterprises built through collaboration of several autonomous subjects sharing their resources. In this paper we highlight such limitations and we propose an XACML extension, the policy integration algorithm, to address them. In the paper we also discuss in which respect the process of comparing two XACML policies differs from the process used to compare other business rules.

This paper presents the case study of an interactive digital narrative and real-time visualization of an Italian theatre during the 19th century. This case study illustrates how to integrate the traditional concepts of cultural heritage with Virtual Reality (VR) technologies. In this way virtual reconstructions of cultural sites are lift up to an exciting new edutainment level. Novel multimedia interaction devices and digital narrative representations combined with environment historical and architectural certified, offer to the users real-time immersive visualization where to live experiences of the past. Starting to the studies of several project strengthening the great benefits connected at the use of the VR technologies in the cultural fields, the paper illustrates the motivations that have triggered a collaboration between the department of Computer Science[1] and the department of Performing Arts of the University of Milano [2] in order to develop this educational and entertaining system.

In this paper we present a constraint-based approach for the fast prototyping of flexible hypermedia presentations. The key features of the proposed approach include: an extensive set of object types; a large variety of spatial and temporal relation types for combining objects into presentations; and relaxation techniques to automatically correct inconsistent specifications. Furthermore, our approach organizes presentations according to a multi-page model to increase reusability of presentation fragments and to support flexible content delivery to final users. The proposed approach has been implemented in the HSGS system that provides a tool for automatically generating presentations, coded in SMIL, according to the constraints specification given by presentation authors.

Workflow systems are gaining importance as an infrastructure for automating inter-organizational interactions, such as those in Electronic Commerce. In such an environment, a centralized Workflow Management System is not desirable because: (i) it can be a performance bottleneck, and (ii) the system s are inherently distributed, heterogeneous, and autonomous in nature. Decentralized execution of inter-organizational workflows may raise a number of security issues including those related to conflict-of-interest among competing organizations. In this paper, we first provide an approach to realize decentralized workflow execution, in which the workflow is divided into partitions, called self-describing workflows, and handled by a light weight workflow management component, called workflow stub, located at each organizational agent. Second, we identify the limitations of the traditional workflow model with respect to expressing the various types of join dependencies and extend the traditional workflow model suitably. Distinguishing the different types of dependencies among tasks is essential in the efficient execution of self-describing workflows. Finally, we recognize that placing the task execution agents that belong to the same conflict-of-interest class in one self-describing workflow may lead to unfair, and in some cases, undesirable results, akin to being on the wrong side of the Chinese wall. Therefore, to address the conflict-of-interest issues that arise in competitive business environments, we propose a decentralized workflow Chinese wall security model. We propose a restrictive partitioning solution to enforce the proposed model.

No abstract available.

Workflow systems are gaining importance as an infrastructure for automating inter-organizational interactions, such as those in Electronic Commerce. Execution of inter-organiz-ational workflows may raise a number of security issues including those related to conflict-of-interest among competing organizations. Moreover, in such an environment, a centralized Workflow Management System is not desirable because: (i) it can be a performance bottleneck, and (ii) the systems are inherently distributed, heterogeneous and autonomous in nature. In this paper, we propose an approach to realize decentralized workflow execution, in which the workflow is divided into partitions called self-describing workflows, and handled by a light weight workflow management component, called workflow stub, located at each organizational agent. We argue that placing the task execution agents that belong to the same conflict-of-interest class in one self-describing workflow may lead to unfair, and in some cases, undesirable results, akin to being on the wrong side of the Chinese wall. We propose a Chinese wall security model for the decentralized workflow environment to resolve such problems, and a restrictive partitioning solution to enforce the proposed model.