Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Enablers have the critical role of allowing the access to the resources and/or to the
modules information. In practical cases, a refinement of the enablers could be
required: the information related to a single module could not be atomic and so the
enabler could allow the access to a part of the fields, denying the access to other
fields; from a resource point of view, also resources could be not managed as atomic
components since complex access and consuming policies (similar to services) could
be applied. A concrete combination of the enablers defines, at the same time, the
rights of a concrete application on the resources and on the information, the role of
the application user as well as the privacy contract between the resource owner and
the application.
Furthermore, in order to assure a realistic exploitation plan a support for
developers is required: a set of APIs and interfaces that support the developer to
migrate and virtualize existing resources as well as the design and implementation of
new resources.
The platform is evidently the result of the convergence among cloud technologies,
virtualization techniques and semantics.
4
Next Generation Resources
A pervasive virtual environment designed according to a cloud approach can provide
a solid support for the development of a new generation of resources (e.g. services
and applications).
These resources can be developed directly on the top of the virtual layer provided
by platforms supporting a high level of abstraction (e.g. role-driven development).
As introduced in the section 3.1, the key issue is the efficient and effective
application of open models for the knowledge specification and representation.
The use of “standard” ontologies could be the most immediate solution: rich data
models could be enough expressive to represent the knowledge as well as to assure
inferred knowledge and an interesting set of interoperability capabilities. But it could
limit the advantages and benefits provided by open solutions as well as the problems
related to the knowledge convergence could not be solved or skipped.
On the other hand, a completely open model that assumes each local
system/resource described according its own ontologies could be hard to be applied in
real systems. Typical problems in multi-ontology computation (e.g. correctness and
ambiguities) both with the objective difficulty to provide a centralized management
for resources advise more realistic approaches.
The current idea is the use of shared vocabularies. These vocabularies should
provide the basic concepts making possible the definition of independent local
knowledge environments that can be globally linked and processed. In practice,
shared concepts have to be used in order to link local ontologies to the platform.
Further concepts, as well as rules and relations among them, can be provided by local
ontologies. This approach is equivalent to object extension in object-oriented
environments.
