Informatica Economica Vol. 20 No. 3/2016

Issue Topic: Semantic Processing of Text

CONTENTS

Evaluating Knowledge of Business Processes
Andra TURDASAN, Razvan PETRUSEL 5
Any organization relies on processes/procedures in order to organize the operations. Those processes can be explicit (e.g. textual descriptions of workflow steps or graphical descriptions) or implicit (e.g. employees have learned by experience the steps needed to ‘get things done’). A widely acknowledged fact is that processes change due to internal and/or external factors. How can managers make sure the employees know the last version of the process? The current practice is to test employees by multiple-choice questions. This paper proposes a novel knowledge-testing approach based on graphical and interactive questions. To validate our approach, we set up a single-factor controlled experiment with novices and experts in a faculty admission process. The results show that our approach has better results in terms of correct answers.
Keywords: Business Process Knowledge Test, Business Process Management, Evaluate Faculty Admission Process Knowledge

Secure Threat Information Exchange across the Internet of Things for Cyber Defense in a Fog Computing Environment
Mihai-Gabriel IONITA, Victor-Valeriu PATRICIU 16
Threat information exchange is a critical part of any security system. Decisions regarding security are taken with more confidence and with more results when the whole security context is known. The fog computing paradigm enhances the use cases of the already used cloud computing systems by bringing all the needed resources to the end-users towards the edge of the network. While fog decentralizes the cloud, it is very important to correlate security events which happen in branch offices around the globe for correct and timely decisions. In this article, we propose an infrastructure based on custom locally installed OSSEC agents which communicate with a central AlienVault deployment for event correlation. The agents are based on a neural network which takes actions based on risk assessment inspired by the human immune system. All of the threat information is defined by STIX expressions and a TAXII server can share this information with foreign organizations. The proposed implementation can successfully be implemented in an IoT scenario, with added security for the “brownfiled” devices.
Keywords: Cyber Defense, Neural Networks, Intelligent Threat Exchange, Internet of Things, Fog Computing

Maintenance-Ready Web Application Development
Ion IVAN, Narcis-Cosmin LUCA, Mihai Liviu DESPA, Eduard BUDACU 28
The current paper tackles the subject of developing maintenance-ready web applications. Maintenance is presented as a core stage in a web application’s lifecycle. The concept of maintenance-ready is defined in the context of web application development. Web application maintenance tasks types are enunciated and suitable task types are identified for further analysis. The research hypothesis is formulated based on a direct link between tackling maintenance in the development stage and reducing overall maintenance costs. A live maintenance-ready web application is presented and maintenance related aspects are highlighted. The web application’s features, that render it maintenance-ready, are emphasize. The cost of designing and building the web-application to be maintenance-ready are disclosed. The savings in maintenance development effort facilitated by maintenance ready features are also disclosed. Maintenance data is collected from 40 projects implemented by a web development company. Homogeneity and diversity of collected data is evaluated. A data sample is presented and the size and comprehensive nature of the entire dataset is depicted. Research hypothesis are validated and conclusions are formulated on the topic of developing maintenance-ready web applications. The limits of the research process which represented the basis for the current paper are enunciated. Future research topics are submitted for debate.
Keywords: Software maintenance, Web Development, Maintenance-ready Applications, Maintenance Cost

Vocabulary Richness Metric for Extracting Author’s Semantic Mark in English Written Literary Works
Madalina ZURINI, Alin ZAMFIROIU 37
The present paper starts from a short introduction of the major aspects debated regarding the stylometric measures used for extracting the personal signature added by a particular author to its English written works. Those measures are used in the context of indicating an author from a limited cardinality set of authors being given a set of documents or a defined indicators values which characterizes the semantic way that an author is writing its works. The paper addresses the problems of the semantic level of a work depending on the tokens that he uses in the paper, tokens that are extracted in a preprocessing step of analysis. The tokens are defined using a lexical ontology, for the English words referring to WordNet, and the automatic extracting of those tokens from the words found in the particular processed papers. The main vocabulary richness evaluation metrics are presented taking into account the major literature review and extracting the main steps into a new proposed metric that is combining the vocabulary richness with the semantic layer of a paper. The concept of author mark is described. The objective of this research paper is highlighted into the new proposed metric that is non-dependent on the main subject discussed in the analyzed paper. This objective leads to a general metric that combines documents from different subjects into a metric that can describe the vocabulary richness of a specific author depending on the works that he had written. Furthermore, the analysis is conducting into a time evolution of this metric, using the extraction of the trend of the author’s vocabulary richness indicator. Using a set of 13 years values of this indicator upon a specific author, the results are presented in this research paper. Future work refers to inserting this metric into a general description of the author mark into his specific English written works.
Keywords: Stylometry Analysis, Metrics, Author Mark, Lexical Ontology, Time-Trend Analysis, Intrinsic Plagiarism Detection

Data Content Protection for Virtual Libraries Heritage
Mihai DOINEA, Lorena BATAGAN 46
This paper presents aspects of digital content protection in virtual library systems. The legislation aspects are presented to better emphasize the need of new security mechanisms. Integrated library systems architecture is presented with focus on their main purpose, manipulating and rendering digital content to end-users. The cultural heritage stored in such systems is an important asset that needs to be protected against malicious manipulation. The characteristics of a smart virtual library, supported by an integrated library system, are analyzed and a security model is proposed for implementation, based on its particularities. The model aims to be an interface between the interactions of anonymous users with the Online Public Access Catalog of a virtual library that assures the protection of digital content. Conclusions are drawn to better support the idea of cultural persistence by the use of Information Systems.
Keywords: Security, Virtual Libraries, Smart Society, Digital Rights Management, Content Interaction

E-Voting Solutions for Digital Democracy in Knowledge Society
Marian STOICA, Bogdan GHILIC-MICU 55
Emergent technologies specific to current information and knowledge society, and social networks influence every aspect of our existence, from lucrative activities to recreational ones. There is no part of our life that is not influenced by the explosive development of general information and communication technologies. We witness a spectacular and until recently unimagined metamorphoses of work nature, business process reengineering, controversial evolution of social networks and new directions of electronic government. Over this background of changes, we take on the tasks of deepening the understanding of field that is largely unexplored, namely the electronic vote in digital democracy, without taking any side, pro or against this type of casting our electoral options. The current context encompasses technological, legislative, political, economic and social aspects. Even more, the context of electronic voting in digital democracy involves aspects regarding globalization, technical challenges concerning interoperability, data standardization and security.
Keywords: Digital Democracy, Knowledge Society, E-Voting, Cryptographic Schemes, ICT

A Novel Noise Removal Method Using Neural Networks
Catalina COCIANU, Alexandru STAN 66
In this paper is presented a new technique consisting in applying some pre-whitening and shrinkage methods followed by a neural network-based supervised approach for correlated noise removal purposed. In our work the type of noise and the covariance matrix of noise are known or can be estimated using the “white wall” method. Due to data dimensionality, a PCA-based compression technique is used to obtain a tractable solution. The local memories of the neurons are determined using a supervised learning process based on the compressed pre-processed inputs and the compressed version of the original images. The proposed method is evaluated using some of the most commonly used indicators and the results are reported in the third section of the paper. The conclusive remarks together with suggestions for further work are supplied in the final part of the paper.
Keywords: Digital Image Processing, Correlated Noise Removal, Supervised Learning, Neural Networks, Shrinkage Techniques

PhD Thesis Review: The Usage of Ontologies for the Discovery and Coupling of Learning Active Components
Ion SMEUREANU 76

Publishing Guide for Authors 78

INFOREC Association 80