Laszlo Varga

Publications of Laszlo Varga

• Provenance in Agent-mediated Healthcare Systems

  Authors: Tamas Kifor, Laszlo Varga, Javier Vazquez-Salceda, Sergio Alvarez, Simon Miles, Luc Moreau

  Agent-oriented cooperation techniques and standardized electronic healthcare record exchange protocols can be used to combine information regarding different facets of a therapy received by a patientAgent-oriented cooperation techniques and standardized electronic healthcare record exchange protocols can be used to combine information regarding different facets of a therapy received by a patient from different healthcare providers at different locations. Provenance is an innovative approach to trace events in complex distributed processes, dependencies between such events, and associated decisions by human actors. We focus on three aspects of provenance in agent-mediated healthcare systems: first, we define the provenance concept and show how it can be applied to agent-mediated healthcare applications; second, we investigate and provide a method for independent and autonomous healthcare agents to document the processes they are involved in without directly interacting with each other; and third, we show that this method solves the privacy issues of provenance in agent-mediated healthcare systems.

• The Provenance of Electronic Data

  Authors: Luc Moreau, Paul Groth, Simon Miles, Javier Vazquez, John Ibbotson, Sheng Jiang, Steve Munroe, Omer Rana, Andreas Schreiber, Victor Tan, Laszlo Varga

  In the study of fine art, provenance refers to the documented history of some art object. Given that documented history, the object attains an authority that allows scholars to appreciate itsIn the study of fine art, provenance refers to the documented history of some art object. Given that documented history, the object attains an authority that allows scholars to appreciate its importance with respect to other works, whereas, in the absence of such history, the object may be treated with some skepticism. Our IT landscape is evolving as illustrated by applications that are open, composed dynamically, and that discover results and services on the fly. Against this challenging background, it is crucial for users to be able to have confidence in the results produced by such applications. If the provenance of data produced by computer systems could be determined as it can for some works of art, then users, in their daily applications, would be able to interpret and judge the quality of data better. We introduce a provenance lifecycle and advocate an open approach based on two key principles to support a notion of provenance in computer systems: documentation of execution and user-tailored provenance queries.

• Provenance-based Trust for Grid Computing - Position Paper

  Authors: Luc Moreau, Syd Chapman, Andreas Schreiber, Rolf Hempel, Omer Rana, Laszlo Varga, Ulises Cortes, Steven Willmott

  Current evolutions of Internet technology such as Web Services, ebXML, peer-to-peer and Grid computing all point to the development of large-scale open networks of diverse computing systemsCurrent evolutions of Internet technology such as Web Services, ebXML, peer-to-peer and Grid computing all point to the development of large-scale open networks of diverse computing systems interacting with one another to perform tasks. Grid systems (and Web Services) are exemplary in this respect and are perhaps some of the rst largescale open computing systems to see widespread use - making them an important testing ground for problems in trust management which are likely to arise. From this perspective, today's grid architectures suer from limitations, such as lack of a mechanism to trace results and lack of infrastructure to build up trust networks. These are important concerns in open grids, in which \community resources" are owned and managed by multiple stakeholders, and are dynamically organised in virtual organisations. Provenance enables users to trace how a particular result has been arrived at by identifying the individual services and the aggregation of services that produced such a particular output. Against this background, we present a research agenda to design, conceive and implement an industrial-strength open provenance architecture for grid systems. We motivate its use with three complex grid applications, namely aerospace engineering, organ transplant management and bioinformatics. Industrial-strength provenance support includes a scalable and secure architecture, an open proposal for standardising the protocols and data structures, a set of tools for conguring and using the provenance architecture, an open source reference implementation, and a deployment and validation in industrial context. The provision of such facilities will enrich grid capabilities by including new functionalities required for solving complex problems such as provenance data to provide complete audittrails of process execution and third-party analysis and auditing. As a result, we anticipate that a larger uptake of grid technology is likely to occur, since unprecedented possibilities will be oered to users and will give them a competitive edge.