Interconnection Of Information Systems Research Articles

Zero Trust: The Magic Bullet or Devil’s Advocate?

The concept of Zero trust was first introduced in mid 1990’s, and has gradually attracted increasing attention. This approach to building organizations’ information system infrastructures has been developed as response to increasing interaction and interconnection of information systems. Along with organizational boundaries have become less clear with the new business models where a business process exceeds the organizational boundaries, also the boundaries of information systems are no longer clear. In this interconnected world the purely perimeter-based security model defining zones of trusted entities inside the perimeter and the untrusted external world outside the perimeter no longer serves the needs of new business models. And the combination of complex technology and sophisticated attack methods it is no longer possible to be sure that all system components and actors inside the perimeter can be trusted. The Zero trust approach brings the sophisticated controls from the perimeter to the entire system. The core idea can be expressed with the four words “never trust, always verify”. No system component is by default trusted , and one-time verification is not sufficient – access to a resource must be verified at each connection attempt. Mutual authentication of the communicating parties is in the core of the approach. But does the zero trust approach have unwanted side-effects? The complexity of the system increases when new control layers are built, and system complexity can increase the possibility of configuration errors. Can there be other side-effects as well? The need for trust does not disappear even when the systems are built on the zero trust principles. When studying the zero trust approach the author started thinking what would happen in human interaction and organizational co-operation if they are based on or partly apply the zero trust approach. And the scenarios were quite gloomy. But is this only a nightmare or already at least partly present in our reality? This article describes the zero trust approach and its applicability to technical environments. The second part present scenarios of the impacts which application of zero trust principles could have – or maybe already has - in human communication and organizational relationships.

Matching Network of Ontologies: A Random Walk and Frequent Itemsets Approach

A System of Systems (SoS) is a complex set of IS (Information Systems) created by the aggregation and interconnection of ISs. SoS brings unexpected behavior and functionality during its construction to the benefit of its users and the SoS itself. The integration of SoSs is a matter of time. However, as SoSs can behave as an organization, it may be inappropriate to try to integrate individual IS members separately. On the other hand, manually integrating the SoS as a whole can be unfeasible due to its complexity. If an SoS has ontologies modeling the knowledge, the integration of SoSs can be translated into a problem of a network of ontologies alignment. However, it creates another challenge: computing each possible pair of entities inside each network’s ontology can have unfeasible execution time, even using the best matchers available. In this article, we propose to mine the data from the networks using random walks and frequent item sets algorithm and discover relevant nodes elected as candidate entities. Next, the networks are pruned by an algebraic method eliminating identical entities. The relevant nodes are reinserted in the network to avoid losing essential correspondences. After the pre-processing step, data is sent to two matchers to obtain metrics and compare the results with the pairwise brute force approach and previous work. We identified relevant nodes with recall up to 0.75. The results are promising since precision and recall are closer to the force brute, and execution time is shorter, even more, when the size of the networks and the number of ontologies to be compared increases. We validate our approach using ontologies created from the OAEI (Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative).

Thesaurus federations: loosely integrated thesauri for document retrieval in networks based on Internet technologies

As a result of the distribution of interrelated information over several different information systems, the interconnection of information systems has increased in recent years. However, a purely technical interconnection is insufficient for users who need to find their way to information they are looking for. Thesauri are a proven means to identify documents, e.g., books of interest in a library. For different domains, different thesauri are available, which can be used in information systems as well, e.g., for the indexing and retrieval of data objects. Thus, the interconnection of information systems raises the need to integrate related thesauri. Furthermore, recent advances in open interoperability technologies (World Wide Web, CORBA, and Java) offer the potential for completely new technical solutions for employing thesauri. This paper presents an approach for integrating multiple thesaurus databases. It concentrates on the integration of distributed and heterogeneous thesaurus databases and the integration of multilingual and monolingual thesauri. The software architecture takes advantage of the most advanced Internet and CORBA technology currently available in public domain and in commercial implementations.