Semantic Technologies for Services and Policies

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Overview

Current Applications

Personnel

Partnership Opportunities

Selected Publications

Project Openings

Sponsors

Mobile Commerce Lab

e-Supply Chain Management Lab

School of Computer Science

CyLab

Overview
This project focuses on the development of semantic technologies aimed at enhancing trust, dependability and re-use in the context of both consumer and enterprise applications. A central theme is the development of semantic web technologies for service-oriented architectures and pervasive computing environments. This includes developing infrastructures for enforcing a variety of policies, from security and privacy policies to corporate and even regulatory policies. Rather than assuming that ontologies and annotations are available from the start, we are also attempting to address the chicken-and-egg problem often associated with the deployment of semantic web technologies. In particular, our work on service-oriented architectures includes mixed initiative frameworks for service composition, focusing on the development of user-oriented services that work from day one even in the presence of incomplete and possibly inconsistent ontologies and annotations.

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Current Applications

  • MyCampus: A mobile and pervasive computing environment based on a semantic web service architecture to support the rapid prototyping of context aware applications. Contextual attributes are modeled as web services with rich semantic profiles that can be discovered and access subject to rich privacy and security policies.

  • Enforcing Rich Context-sensitive Policies: A service oriented architecture for enforcing complex policies, including security policies as well as other corporate and regulatory policies. The architecture relies on customizable Policy Enforcing Agents (PEA) that are capable of dynamically identifying relevant sources of information (modeled as web services with semantic annotations) to enforce rich, context-sensitive policies.

  • Mixed Initiative Environment for Semantic Web Service Composition: This technology has been demonstrated in the context of SAP's Guided Procedures framework, a key element of SAP's Enterprise Service Architecture (ESA)

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Personnel

Project Leader

Dr. Norman M. Sadeh
Associate Professor

 

Key Personnel

Dr. Jinghai Rao
Project Scientist

Dr. Alberto Sardinha
Post-Doctoral Fellow

Dr. Fabien Gandon
Visiting Scientist

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Partnership Opportunities

We are looking for companies interested in partnering with us in our research or in licensing our technology. For further details, please contact Norman M. Sadeh

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Selected Publications

  1. J. Rao, D. Dimitrov, P. Hofmann and N. Sadeh, "A Mixed Initiative Semantic Web Framework for Process Composition", Proc. of the 5th International Semantic Web Conference, Nov. 2006.
  2. Jinghai Rao and Norman Sadeh. "Interleaving Semantic Web Reasoning and Service Discovery to Enforce Context-Sensitive Security and Privacy Policies ", Proc. of the International Conference on Rules and Rule Markup Languages for the Semantic Web, Nov. 2005 (RuleML-2005)
  3. Norman Sadeh, Fabien Gandon and Oh Buyng Kwon, “Ambient Intelligence: The MyCampus Experience”, Chapter in "Ambient Intelligence and Pervasive Computing", Eds. T. Vasilakos and W. Pedrycz, ArTech House, 2006. (Also available as Tech. Report CMU-ISRI-05-123, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University)
  4. A. Sardinha, J. Rao, N. Sadeh," Enforcing Context-Sensitive Policies in Collaborative Business Environments" Submitted. December 2006.
  5. Gandon, F. and Sadeh, N., “Semantic Web Technologies to Reconcile Privacy and Context Awareness”, Web Semantics Journal. Vol. 1, No. 3, 2004.
  6. J. Rao. Semantic Web Service Composition via Logic-based Program Synthesis. PhD Thesis. December 10, 2004.

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Project Openings

This project has openings for graduate and undergraduate students as well as for a postdoc.

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Sponsors

DARPA, US National Science Foundation (ITR initiative), ARO/CyLab, SAP, and France Telecom. Our NSF work involves a collaboration with the EU IST TrustCom project.

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