Diseño e implementación de un prototipo de enchufe inteligente mediante la placa Arduino

[ES] Este trabajo detalla las diferentes etapas del desarrollo de construcción del prototipo Clever Socket, abarcando desde su análisis, a su diseño e implementación.
Clever Socket es un conjunto hardware y software que facilita el control del encendido y el apagado de los aparatos electrónicos conectados a él a través de redes de comunicación LAN y WAN. Para lograr este propósito, el artefacto se apoya en la placa de desarrollo electrónico Arduino UNO y la placa Arduino WiFi Shield –que posibilita su conexión inalámbrica a la red–.
El dispositivo cuenta con cuatro bases de enchufe controladas a través de relés, que permiten la gestión de hasta cuatro dispositivos electrónicos de manera simultánea.
 En el lado del software se presentan tres componentes:
Un servicio web de bajo nivel destinado a la gestión de la placa Arduino. Permite la comunicación con la placa, la lectura y escritura de sus pines.
 Un servicio web específico del dispositivo Clever Socket. Facilita la comunicación con el prototipo hardware, permitiendo así la gestión de diferentes operaciones que se llevan a cabo sobre los aparatos conectados a sus enchufes.
 Una aplicación web. Actúa como interfaz entre el usuario y el servicio web de Clever Socket, permitiendo la gestión del dispositivo. El diseño de la aplicación es responsive, lo que posibilita su correcta visualización en todo tipo de dispositivos, tanto móviles como de escritorio.

Query Player : a component for Triskel architecture

[ES] Uno de los cinco componentes de la arquitectura triskel,  una base de datos NoSQL que trata de dar solución al problema de Big data de la web semántica, el  gran número de identificadores de recursos que se necesitarían debido al creciente número de sitios web, concretamente el motor de gestión de ejecución de patrones basados en tripletas y en la tecnología RDF. Se encarga de recoger la petición de consulta por parte del intérprete, analizar los patrones que intervienen en la consulta en busca de dependencias explotables entre ellos, y así poder realizar la consulta con mayor rapidez además de ir resolviendo los diferentes patrones contra el almacenamiento, un TripleStore, y devolver el resultado de la petición en una tabla.

Sparql Interpreter : a component for Triskel architecture

[ES] SPARQL Interpreter es uno de los cinco componentes de la Arquitectura Triskel, una arquitectura de software para una base de datos NoSQL que intenta aportar una solución al problema de Big Data en la web semántica. Este componente da solución al problema de la comunicación entre el lenguaje y el motor, interpretando las consultas que se realicen contra el almacenamiento en lenguaje SPARQL y generando una estructura de datos que los componentes inferiores puedan leer y ejecutar.

An ontology-based approach to define and manage B2B interoperability

Electronic business surely represents the new development perspective for world-wide trade. Together with the idea of ebusiness, and the exigency to exchange business messages between trading partners, the concept of business-to-business (B2B) integration arouse. B2B integration is becoming necessary to allow partners to communicate and exchange business documents, like catalogues, purchase orders, reports and invoices, overcoming architectural, applicative, and semantic differences, according to the business processes implemented by each enterprise. Business relationships can be very heterogeneous, and consequently there are variousways to integrate enterprises with each other. Moreover nowadays not only large enterprises, but also the small- and medium- enterprises are moving towards ebusiness: more than two-thirds of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) use the Internet as a business tool. One of the business areas which is actively facing the interoperability problem is that related with the supply chain management. In order to really allow the SMEs to improve their business and to fully exploit ICT technologies in their business transactions, there are three main players that must be considered and joined: the new emerging ICT technologies, the scenario and the requirements of the enterprises and the world of standards and standardisation bodies. This thesis presents the definition and the development of an interoperability framework (and the bounded standardisation intiatives) to provide the Textile/Clothing sectorwith a shared set of business documents and protocols for electronic transactions. Considering also some limitations, the thesis proposes a ontology-based approach to improve the functionalities of the developed framework and, exploiting the technologies of the semantic web, to improve the standardisation life-cycle, intended as the development, dissemination and adoption of B2B protocols for specific business domain. The use of ontologies allows the semantic modellisation of knowledge domains, upon which it is possible to develop a set of components for a better management of B2B protocols, and to ease their comprehension and adoption for the target users.

Formalizing languages for service oriented computing

Service Oriented Computing is a new programming paradigm for addressing distributed system design issues. Services are autonomous computational entities which can be dynamically discovered and composed in order to form more complex systems able to achieve different kinds of task. E-government, e-business and e-science are some examples of the IT areas where Service Oriented Computing will be exploited in the next years. At present, the most credited Service Oriented Computing technology is that of Web Services, whose specifications are enriched day by day by industrial consortia without following a precise and rigorous approach. This PhD thesis aims, on the one hand, at modelling Service Oriented Computing in a formal way in order to precisely define the main concepts it is based upon and, on the other hand, at defining a new approach, called bipolar approach, for addressing system design issues by synergically exploiting choreography and orchestration languages related by means of a mathematical relation called conformance. Choreography allows us to describe systems of services from a global view point whereas orchestration supplies a means for addressing such an issue from a local perspective. In this work we present SOCK, a process algebra based language inspired by the Web Service orchestration language WS-BPEL which catches the essentials of Service Oriented Computing. From the definition of SOCK we will able to define a general model for dealing with Service Oriented Computing where services and systems of services are related to the design of finite state automata and process algebra concurrent systems, respectively. Furthermore, we introduce a formal language for dealing with choreography. Such a language is equipped with a formal semantics and it forms, together with a subset of the SOCK calculus, the bipolar framework. Finally, we present JOLIE which is a Java implentation of a subset of the SOCK calculus and it is part of the bipolar framework we intend to promote.

EXAM-S: an Analysis tool for Multi-Domain Policy Sets

As distributed collaborative applications and architectures are adopting policy based management for tasks such as access control, network security and data privacy, the management and consolidation of a large number of policies is becoming a crucial component of such policy based systems. In large-scale distributed collaborative applications like web services, there is the need of analyzing policy interactions and integrating policies. In this thesis, we propose and implement EXAM-S, a comprehensive environment for policy analysis and management, which can be used to perform a variety of functions such as policy property analyses, policy similarity analysis, policy integration etc. As part of this environment, we have proposed and implemented new techniques for the analysis of policies that rely on a deep study of state of the art techniques. Moreover, we propose an approach for solving heterogeneity problems that usually arise when considering the analysis of policies belonging to different domains. Our work focuses on analysis of access control policies written in the dialect of XACML (Extensible Access Control Markup Language). We consider XACML policies because XACML is a rich language which can represent many policies of interest to real world applications and is gaining widespread adoption in the industry.

Implementazione di un modulo HTTPS in JOLIE per l'orchestrazione dei servizi

La tesi è relativa all'implementazione di un modulo per la comunicazione sicura tramite SSL/TLS sviluppato in JAVA che aggiunge il supporto del protocollo HTTPS a JOLIE. Le politiche di SSL/TLS vengono applicate mediante l'utilizzo dell'API SSLEngine, che viene descritta accuratamente. La tesi contiene inoltre un caso d'uso in cui viene utilizzato JOLIE per sviluppare un servizio di autenticazione integrata (single sign-on) tra l'ELMS Webstore del programma Microsoft MSDNAA e l'Università di Bologna.

Frame-driven Extraction of Linked Data and Ontologies from Text

Ontology design and population -core aspects of semantic technologies- re- cently have become fields of great interest due to the increasing need of domain-specific knowledge bases that can boost the use of Semantic Web. For building such knowledge resources, the state of the art tools for ontology design require a lot of human work. Producing meaningful schemas and populating them with domain-specific data is in fact a very difficult and time-consuming task. Even more if the task consists in modelling knowledge at a web scale. The primary aim of this work is to investigate a novel and flexible method- ology for automatically learning ontology from textual data, lightening the human workload required for conceptualizing domain-specific knowledge and populating an extracted schema with real data, speeding up the whole ontology production process. Here computational linguistics plays a fundamental role, from automati- cally identifying facts from natural language and extracting frame of relations among recognized entities, to producing linked data with which extending existing knowledge bases or creating new ones. In the state of the art, automatic ontology learning systems are mainly based on plain-pipelined linguistics classifiers performing tasks such as Named Entity recognition, Entity resolution, Taxonomy and Relation extraction [11]. These approaches present some weaknesses, specially in capturing struc- tures through which the meaning of complex concepts is expressed [24]. Humans, in fact, tend to organize knowledge in well-defined patterns, which include participant entities and meaningful relations linking entities with each other. In literature, these structures have been called Semantic Frames by Fill- 6 Introduction more [20], or more recently as Knowledge Patterns [23]. Some NLP studies has recently shown the possibility of performing more accurate deep parsing with the ability of logically understanding the structure of discourse [7]. In this work, some of these technologies have been investigated and em- ployed to produce accurate ontology schemas. The long-term goal is to collect large amounts of semantically structured information from the web of crowds, through an automated process, in order to identify and investigate the cognitive patterns used by human to organize their knowledge.

Analyse von Middleware-Technologien bzgl. Performanz und ihrer Eignung für lose und eng gekoppelte verteilte Anwendungen

Die vorliegende Dissertation analysiert die Middleware- Technologien CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture), COM/DCOM (Component Object Model/Distributed Component Object Model), J2EE (Java-2-Enterprise Edition) und Web Services (inklusive .NET) auf ihre Eignung bzgl. eng und lose gekoppelten verteilten Anwendungen. Zusätzlich werden primär für CORBA die dynamischen CORBA-Komponenten DII (Dynamic Invocation Interface), IFR (Interface Repository) und die generischen Datentypen Any und DynAny (dynamisches Any) im Detail untersucht. Ziel ist es, a. konkrete Aussagen über diese Komponenten zu erzielen, und festzustellen, in welchem Umfeld diese generischen Ansätze ihre Berechtigung finden. b. das zeitliche Verhalten der dynamischen Komponenten bzgl. der Informationsgewinnung über die unbekannten Objekte zu analysieren. c. das zeitliche Verhalten der dynamischen Komponenten bzgl. ihrer Kommunikation zu messen. d. das zeitliche Verhalten bzgl. der Erzeugung von generischen Datentypen und das Einstellen von Daten zu messen und zu analysieren. e. das zeitliche Verhalten bzgl. des Erstellens von unbekannten, d. h. nicht in IDL beschriebenen Datentypen zur Laufzeit zu messen und zu analysieren. f. die Vorzüge/Nachteile der dynamischen Komponenten aufzuzeigen, ihre Einsatzgebiete zu definieren und mit anderen Technologien wie COM/DCOM, J2EE und den Web Services bzgl. ihrer Möglichkeiten zu vergleichen. g. Aussagen bzgl. enger und loser Koppelung zu tätigen. CORBA wird als standardisierte und vollständige Verteilungsplattform ausgewählt, um die o. a. Problemstellungen zu untersuchen. Bzgl. seines dynamischen Verhaltens, das zum Zeitpunkt dieser Ausarbeitung noch nicht oder nur unzureichend untersucht wurde, sind CORBA und die Web Services richtungsweisend bzgl. a. Arbeiten mit unbekannten Objekten. Dies kann durchaus Implikationen bzgl. der Entwicklung intelligenter Softwareagenten haben. b. der Integration von Legacy-Applikationen. c. der Möglichkeiten im Zusammenhang mit B2B (Business-to-Business). Diese Problemstellungen beinhalten auch allgemeine Fragen zum Marshalling/Unmarshalling von Daten und welche Aufwände hierfür notwendig sind, ebenso wie allgemeine Aussagen bzgl. der Echtzeitfähigkeit von CORBA-basierten, verteilten Anwendungen. Die Ergebnisse werden anschließend auf andere Technologien wie COM/DCOM, J2EE und den Web Services, soweit es zulässig ist, übertragen. Die Vergleiche CORBA mit DCOM, CORBA mit J2EE und CORBA mit Web Services zeigen im Detail die Eignung dieser Technologien bzgl. loser und enger Koppelung. Desweiteren werden aus den erzielten Resultaten allgemeine Konzepte bzgl. der Architektur und der Optimierung der Kommunikation abgeleitet. Diese Empfehlungen gelten uneingeschränkt für alle untersuchten Technologien im Zusammenhang mit verteilter Verarbeitung.

Trasformazione di un ambiente fisico in Cyber-Physical Ecosystem

Obiettivo di questo lavoro di tesi è il perfezionamento di un sistema di Health Smart Home, ovvero un ambiente fisico (ad esempio un'abitazione) che incorpora una rete di comunicazione in grado di connettere apparecchi elettronici e servizi controllabili da remoto, con l'obiettivo di facilitare la vita ad anziani, malati o disabili nelle loro case. Questo lavoro di tesi mostrerà come è stato possibile realizzare tale sistema partendo dalle teorie e dalle tecnologie sviluppate per il Web Semantico, al fine di trasformare l'ambiente fisico in un Cyber Physical (Eco)System perfettamente funzionante.

Cloud Computing: analisi dei modelli architetturali e delle tecnologie per lo sviluppo di applicazioni

Uno dei temi più discussi ed interessanti nel mondo dell’informatica al giorno d’oggi è sicuramente il Cloud Computing. Nuove organizzazioni che offrono servizi di questo tipo stanno nascendo ovunque e molte aziende oggi desiderano imparare ad utilizzarli, migrando i loro centri di dati e le loro applicazioni nel Cloud. Ciò sta avvenendo anche grazie alla spinta sempre più forte che stanno imprimendo le grandi compagnie nella comunità informatica: Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple e tante altre ancora parlano sempre più frequentemente di Cloud Computing e si stanno a loro volta ristrutturando profondamente per poter offrire servizi Cloud adeguandosi così a questo grande cambiamento che sta avvenendo nel settore dell’informatica. Tuttavia il grande movimento di energie, capitali, investimenti ed interesse che l’avvento del Cloud Computing sta causando non aiuta a comprendere in realtà che cosa esso sia, al punto tale che oggi non ne esiste ancora una definizione univoca e condivisa. La grande pressione inoltre che esso subisce da parte del mondo del mercato fa sì che molte delle sue più peculiari caratteristiche, dal punto di vista dell’ingegneria del software, vengano nascoste e soverchiate da altre sue proprietà, architetturalmente meno importanti, ma con un più grande impatto sul pubblico di potenziali clienti. L’obbiettivo che ci poniamo con questa tesi è quindi quello di esplorare il nascente mondo del Cloud Computing, cercando di comprenderne a fondo le principali caratteristiche architetturali e focalizzando l’attenzione in particolare sullo sviluppo di applicazioni in ambiente Cloud, processo che sotto alcuni aspetti si differenzia molto dallo sviluppo orientato ad ambienti più classici. La tesi è così strutturata: nel primo capitolo verrà fornita una panoramica sul Cloud Computing nella quale saranno date anche le prime definizioni e verranno esposti tutti i temi fondamentali sviluppati nei capitoli successivi. Il secondo capitolo costituisce un approfondimento su un argomento specifico, quello dei Cloud Operating System, componenti fondamentali che permettono di trasformare una qualunque infrastruttura informatica in un’infrastruttura Cloud. Essi verranno presentati anche per mezzo di molte analogie con i classici sistemi operativi desktop. Con il terzo capitolo ci si addentra più a fondo nel cuore del Cloud Computing, studiandone il livello chiamato Infrastructure as a Service tramite un esempio concreto di Cloud provider: Amazon, che fornisce i suoi servizi nel progetto Amazon Web Services. A questo punto, più volte nel corso della trattazione di vari temi saremo stati costretti ad affrontare le problematiche relative alla gestione di enormi moli di dati, che spesso sono il punto centrale di molte applicazioni Cloud. Ci è parso quindi importante approfondire questo argomento in un capitolo appositamente dedicato, il quarto, supportando anche in questo caso la trattazione teorica con un esempio concreto: BigTable, il sistema di Google per la gestione della memorizzazione di grandi quantità di dati. Dopo questo intermezzo, la trattazione procede risalendo lungo i livelli dell’architettura Cloud, ricalcando anche quella che è stata l’evoluzione temporale del Cloud Computing: nel quinto capitolo, dal livello Infrastructure as a Service si passa quindi a quello Platform as a Service, tramite lo studio dei servizi offerti da Google Cloud Platform. Il sesto capitolo costituisce invece il punto centrale della tesi, quello che ne soddisfa l’obbiettivo principale: esso contiene infatti uno studio approfondito sullo sviluppo di applicazioni orientate all’ambiente Cloud. Infine, il settimo capitolo si pone come un ponte verso possibili sviluppi futuri, analizzando quali sono i limiti principali delle tecnologie, dei modelli e dei linguaggi che oggi supportano il Cloud Computing. In esso viene proposto come possibile soluzione il modello ad attori; inoltre viene anche presentato il framework Orleans, che Microsoft sta sviluppando negli ultimi anni con lo scopo appunto di supportare lo sviluppo di applicazioni in ambiente Cloud.

Un approccio per la concettualizzazione di insiemi di documenti

Introduzione a tecniche di web semantico e realizzazione di un approccio in grado di ricreare un ambiente familiare di un qualsiasi motore di ricerca con funzionalità semantico-lessicali e possibilità di estrazione, in base ai risultati di ricerca, dei concetti e termini chiave che costituiranno i relativi gruppi di raccolta per i vari documenti con argomenti in comune.

Interpreting Judgements using Knowledge Representation Methods and Computational Models of Argument

The goal of the present research is to define a Semantic Web framework for precedent modelling, by using knowledge extracted from text, metadata, and rules, while maintaining a strong text-to-knowledge morphism between legal text and legal concepts, in order to fill the gap between legal document and its semantics. The framework is composed of four different models that make use of standard languages from the Semantic Web stack of technologies: a document metadata structure, modelling the main parts of a judgement, and creating a bridge between a text and its semantic annotations of legal concepts; a legal core ontology, modelling abstract legal concepts and institutions contained in a rule of law; a legal domain ontology, modelling the main legal concepts in a specific domain concerned by case-law; an argumentation system, modelling the structure of argumentation. The input to the framework includes metadata associated with judicial concepts, and an ontology library representing the structure of case-law. The research relies on the previous efforts of the community in the field of legal knowledge representation and rule interchange for applications in the legal domain, in order to apply the theory to a set of real legal documents, stressing the OWL axioms definitions as much as possible in order to enable them to provide a semantically powerful representation of the legal document and a solid ground for an argumentation system using a defeasible subset of predicate logics. It appears that some new features of OWL2 unlock useful reasoning features for legal knowledge, especially if combined with defeasible rules and argumentation schemes. The main task is thus to formalize legal concepts and argumentation patterns contained in a judgement, with the following requirement: to check, validate and reuse the discourse of a judge - and the argumentation he produces - as expressed by the judicial text.

Application Platforms for the Internet of Things: Theory, Architecture, Protocols, Data Formats, and Privacy

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the next industrial revolution: we will interact naturally with real and virtual devices as a key part of our daily life. This technology shift is expected to be greater than the Web and Mobile combined. As extremely different technologies are needed to build connected devices, the Internet of Things field is a junction between electronics, telecommunications and software engineering. Internet of Things application development happens in silos, often using proprietary and closed communication protocols. There is the common belief that only if we can solve the interoperability problem we can have a real Internet of Things. After a deep analysis of the IoT protocols, we identified a set of primitives for IoT applications. We argue that each IoT protocol can be expressed in term of those primitives, thus solving the interoperability problem at the application protocol level. Moreover, the primitives are network and transport independent and make no assumption in that regard. This dissertation presents our implementation of an IoT platform: the Ponte project. Privacy issues follows the rise of the Internet of Things: it is clear that the IoT must ensure resilience to attacks, data authentication, access control and client privacy. We argue that it is not possible to solve the privacy issue without solving the interoperability problem: enforcing privacy rules implies the need to limit and filter the data delivery process. However, filtering data require knowledge of how the format and the semantics of the data: after an analysis of the possible data formats and representations for the IoT, we identify JSON-LD and the Semantic Web as the best solution for IoT applications. Then, this dissertation present our approach to increase the throughput of filtering semantic data by a factor of ten.