Information Knowledge Systems Management

Many to many collaborative environments, often also referred to as exchanges, are becoming more and more popular on the web. Their common feature is that a business entity positions itself between demand and supply, aspiring to provide for an effective bridge. In its simplest form, the intermediary entity just provides basic supplier identification data to any requesting user, according to the criteria the user has specified. However, very often the operation modalities go well beyond this elementary functionality and may lead to much more advanced and complex business engagements. Our particular implementation of a “many to many” collaborative environment is based on a simple, yet powerful conceptual extension to the traditional client-server paradigm. It suggests a three-layer model, including, besides the clients and the servers, also a network layer, offering a set of services to the demand and supply side alike. In the literature, we have called this architecture a hyper chain. In this work a number of aspects of our architecture will be presented, mainly building upon an implementation for the furniture sector that is currently in its marketing phase as well as on other more pre-competitive exercises that we are involved in or aware of. We will start by reviewing the business rationale that underlies the approach. Then, we will review the current trends in setting up successful exchanges. To these, we will juxtapose the operational novelty of our design. Next, we will briefly survey the building blocks of the architecture and finally discuss some exploitation particularities of such a service.

We have proposed an e-mail-based information sharing system for intra-corporate coordination. The objective of this system is, by avoiding undesirable side effects due to inappropriate information transfer, to coordinate the activities of groups in a corporate organization who have different levels of authority and accountability. This paper discusses four technological developments that enable the system. The first is the concept of “titles to share information” (TSI) to reflect the fact that allowable actions of individuals to send or receive information differ depending on their organizational positions, i.e., authority and accountability. TSI are classified into four levels according to the degree of autonomous information sharing actions granted. The second is a taxonomy of information sharing based on the four-level TSI model. Defined categories are passive sharing and active sharing; active sharing is further divided into bilateral sharing and unilateral sharing. Unilateral sharing is described as the subject for intra-corporate coordination. The third is a communication means to hide actions to transmit and gather information that prevent side effects due to inappropriate information transfer. This is a combination of e-mail and databases that makes the sender/receiver relationships invisible. The fourth is a system architecture that relates information sharing activities at each TSI level to PLAN, DO, and SEE activities of corporate organizations.

Command and control of a joint air campaign are to plan, execute and control operations of a joint air campaign that may be necessary to resolve a crisis and conflict. Command and control must quickly respond to changes in a dynamic battlefield environment. This paper presents a hierarchical, object-oriented model of a joint air campaign as a dynamic system and a hierarchical, distributed architecture of command and control. The hierarchical, object-oriented model of a joint air campaign system is defined based on system engineering principles. The hierarchical, distributed architecture of command and control is established based on control theory. The model of a joint air campaign system and the architecture of command and control tighten links of C2 activities between different stages, levels and areas for coordinated, agile responses.

An intrusion into an information system tries to compromise the security of the system. Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) attempt to detect these intrusions. This paper discusses what an IDS requires from the target information system and how the IDS detects intrusions into the target information system. Specifically, we describe the architecture of a distributed host-based IDS developed at the Information and Systems Assurance Laboratory, Arizona State University. At each host machine in the information system we install an event data collector that collects and filters data of events from the host machine. The Centralized IDS Server receives the processed data and sends them to Individual Technique Servers. These Individual Technique Servers use different intrusion detection algorithms covering both anomaly detection techniques and signature recognition techniques. Each Individual Technique Server determines an intrusion warning (IW) level for each event. The Centralized IDS Server then integrates the IW levels from the Individual Technique Servers into a composite IW level, and provides it to the security administrator.