Zakaria Maamar

University of Doha for Science and Technology

This paper discusses and demonstrates the bundling of cloud and edge services despite their non-functional discrepancies in terms of more resources/reliability/latency for cloud and less resources/reliability/latency for edge. While existing bundling guidelines target cloud services, only, bundling edge services could tackle cloud services’ data-fr...

Despite the popularity of cloud computing among the Information and Community Technology (ICT) community, it falls short of accommodating applications that expose strict non-functional requirements on data freshness and security. Transferring data to distant clouds could render the data obsolete and/or expose the data to interception risks. This ch...

This paper sheds light on the complexity of designing Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems where a high number of things reside and thus must collaborate despite their reduced size, restricted connectivity, and constrained storage limitations. To address this complexity, a novel concept referred to as thing artifact is devised abstracting the roles...

To address the limitations of running monolithic applications, many organizations opt for microservices as a technology of choice that would make these applications agile. In addition to microservices, organizations are tapping into other technologies like cloud and edge to ensure computational, communication, and storage resource provisioning to t...

This paper presents an approach that provisions resources to a set of business processes’ tasks for consumption at run-time. However, it happens that these tasks are disrupted by other urgent tasks that require immediate resource provisioning. Besides resources’ consumption properties like limited and shareable, and tasks’ transactional properties...

The Social Internet of Things (SIoT) involves multiple IoT devices interacting and collaborating to achieve common goals, but the complexity of the composite Thing Services involved can lead to an overburdened composing process and a plethora of different variations on the same composition plan. Modeling the variability of the composition process i...

This paper discusses the design and development of cyber–physical, social systems using a set of guidelines that capture the conceptual and technical characteristics of such systems. These guidelines are packaged into a framework that resorts to the concept of artifact. Because of these characteristics, the framework’s artifacts are specialized int...

This paper presents a trust-based evolutionary game model for managing Internet-of-Things (IoT) federations. The model adopts trust-based payoff to either reward or penalize things based on the behaviors they expose. The model also resorts to monitoring these behaviors to ensure that the share of untrustworthy things in a federation does not hinder...

This paper deals with the design and development of the B2S4B platform that bridges Smart City ecosystems (the business world) and city sensors: the IoT and citizens (the IoT and the social worlds). This platform allows the reconfiguration of Smart City business processes (BPs) based on the detected events and knowledge derived over time. In suppor...

This paper presents an approach for fragmenting business processes over 2 types of complementary platforms referred to as cloud resources and edge resources. Fragmentation caters to the separate needs and requirements of business processes’ owners. Indeed, some owners prioritize the security of their fragmented processes over availability while oth...

Despite the technical and ubiquitous nature of the Internet-of-Things (IoT), it must, at some point-of-time, make a stop to acknowledge the importance of User-eXperience (UX) in the success of any IoT endeavor. Diversity and smartness of things are not the sole factors that would impact the way users would “appreciate” IoT. Owning the technical dis...

This paper aims to develop specifications for embedding time management directly into database management systems. Specifications are modeled using unified modeling language (UML) use case, sequence diagram, and class diagrams. A prototype of an SME car service department operations has been developed. Time management specifications are incorporate...

This paper examines the impact of disruptions on consumption cycles of resources. Such a cycle consists of states and transitions that depict how a resource is prepared, consumed, locked, unlocked, and withdrawn. It happens that events like last-minute upgrades and urgent fixes arise disrupting the resource’s ongoing consumption. Disruption leads t...

With the advent of the Social Internet-of-Things (SIoT), which builds upon the success of IoT, different IoT devices engage in relationships to achieve common goals calling for a composition language that would dictate who will do what, when, and where. Since the number of service interactions may become overwhelming the composition plan may have m...

We have never been so connected like nowadays. We have become more and more social by forming spontaneous relations and initiating interactions to share information with each other (even with strangers). In this keynote speech, we highlight the evolution of knowledge engineering, point out social systems’ characteristics, and then, discuss how thes...

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is a core component of multiple smart city applications. Utilizing the same WSN for multiple applications helps reduce cost. However, satisfying quality of service requirements of these independent applications is very challenging. For instance, uncoordinated path selection for data dissemination may result in the form...

In the context of Internet of Things, thingsourcing is poised to promote the collective behavior that should prevail among things despite their independent nature being confined into silos. By analogy with crowdsourcing where crowds of (sometimes anonymous) people are contacted for their expertise, thingsourcing abstracts crowds of things and provi...

Internet of Things (IoT), one of the fastest growing Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), is playing a major role in provisioning contextualized, smart services to end-users and organizations. To sustain this role, many challenges must be tackled with focus in this paper on the design and development of thing composition. The complex n...

Globalization pressure on organizations calls for new approaches to survive, grow, and compete. An approach is to allow inter-organizational business processes (IOBP) collaboration where each partner would expose its public know-how without putting its private know-how at-risk nor impeding this collaboration from happening. Private processes would...

Privacy protection has recently been in the spotlight of attention to both academia and industry. Society protects individual data privacy through complex legal frameworks. The increasing number of applications of data science and artificial intelligence has resulted in a higher demand for the ubiquitous application of the data. The privacy protect...

Internet of Things (IoT) comprises a plethora of networks of things that could be exemplified with devices like sensors and actuators. Although IoT is expected to play a major role in the development and provisioning of smart applications, things in IoT are still confined into silos making their collaboration in the context of complex composition s...

Microservices are hailed for their capabilities to tackle the challenge of breaking monolithic business systems down into small, cohesive, and loosely-coupled services. Indeed, these systems are neither easy to maintain nor to replace undermining organizations’ efforts to cope with user’s changing needs and governments’ complex regulations. Microse...

Privacy protection has recently attracted the attention of both academics and industries. Society protects individual data privacy through complex legal frameworks. This has become a topic of interest with the increasing applications of data science and artificial intelligence that have created a higher demand to the ubiquitous application of the d...

This paper looks into the availability of resources, exemplified with the cloud, in an open and dynamic environment like the Internet. A growing number of users consume resources to complete their operations requiring a better way to manage these resources in order to avoid conflicts, for example. Resource availability is defined using a set of con...

This paper discusses the necessary steps and mechanisms that would allow servitizing the Internet-of-Things (IoT). Servitization exposes functionalities as services allowing potential users to consume these functionalities regardless of the development technologies. To ensure successful use of IoT functionalities, restrictions that hinder this use...

By analogy to cells that grow, split, merge, and die, this paper applies same operations to things residing in an open Internet-of-Things (IoT) ecosystem. Despite the growing interest in IoT, things are mainly “busy” with sensing and (some) actuating, which prevents them from being responsive to changes in this ecosystem. To address this limitation...

This paper discusses the design of a business model dedicated for IoT applications that would be deployed on top of cloud and fog resources. This business model features 2 constructs, flow (specialized into data and collaboration) and placement (specialized into processing and storage). On the one hand, the flow construct is about who sends what an...

Abstract This article presents an approach to model and simulate Plug&Play social things. Confined into silos, existing (not social) things are restricted to basic operations like sensing and actuating, which deprive them from participating in the satisfaction of complex business applications. Contrarily, social things are expected to engage in col...

This two-volume set constitutes the proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering, WISE 2021, held in Melbourne, VIC, Australia, in October 2021. The 55 full, 29 short and 5 demo papers, plus 2 tutorials were carefully reviewed and selected from 229 submissions. The papers are organized in the following to...

This two-volume set constitutes the proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering, WISE 2021, held in Melbourne, VIC, Australia, in October 2021. The 55 full, 29 short and 5 demo papers, plus 2 tutorials were carefully reviewed and selected from 229 submissions. The papers are organized in the following to...

Several approaches to forecast the service quality based on its quality of service (QoS) properties are reported in the literature. However, their main disadvantage resides in their limited scalability. In fact, they elaborate a forecasting model for each quality attribute per service, which cannot scale well for large or even medium size datasets...

Like any emerging and disruptive technology, multiple obstacles are slowing down the Internet of Things (IoT) expansion for instance, multiplicity of things’ standards, users’ reluctance and sometimes rejection due to privacy invasion, and limited IoT platform interoperability. IoT expansion is also accompanied by the widespread use of mobile apps...

In the context of an Internet-of-Things (IoT) ecosystem, this paper discusses two necessary stages for managing federations of things. The first stage defines things in terms of duties and non-functional properties that define the quality of these duties. And, the second stage uses these properties to assign appropriate things to future federations...

This paper discusses the steps for developing a semantic description of things in the context of Internet-of-Things (IoT). This description is deemed necessary to discover things prior to confirming their participation in complex business scenarios. Existing approaches provide a restrictive view of how things should be semantically described overlo...

This paper discusses a novel way of making business processes and Internet of Things (IoT) work together. Indeed each “suffers” from many limitations that the other could help address them and vice versa. On the one hand, business processes are known for capturing organizations’ best practices when satisfying users’ demands but do not have the capa...

This paper presents an approach for allowing the transparent co-existence of citizens and IoT-compliant things in smart cities. Considering the particularities of each, the approach embraces two concepts known as social machines and data artifacts. On the one hand, social machines act as wrappers over applications (e.g., social media) that allow ci...

All organizations engage in ongoing maintenance of their information systems due to constant changes in users’ needs and governments’ regulations. However these systems are monolithic making this maintenance a nightmare. To address this monolithic nature different technologies like commercial-of-the-shelf, service-oriented architecture, and lately...

This paper presents a novel way to address the “silo” obstacle that is making things play a limited role in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) arena since they mainly act as data suppliers. This novel way capitalizes on the concept of storytelling to connect things together, which leads to the formation of Process-of-Things (PoT). In compliance with the...

Cloud is an increasingly popular computing paradigm that provides on-demand services to organizations for deploying their business processes over the Internet as it reduces their needs to plan ahead for provisioning resources. Cloud providers offer competitive pricing strategies (e.g., on-demand, reserved, and spot) specified based on temporal cons...

There have been significant advances in the field of Internet of Things (IoT) recently. In most IoT based systems or applications, especially those within smart-homes and smart-cities, there is a bridging point (fog computing) between a sensor network and the Internet which often just performs basic functions such as translating between the protoco...

Computing-intensive experiments in modern sciences have become increasingly data-driven illustrating perfectly the Big-Data era. These experiments are usually specified and enacted in the form of workflows that would need to manage (i.e., read, write, store, and retrieve) highly-sensitive data like persons’ medical records. We assume for this work...

River flooding is a natural phenomenon that can have a devastating effect on human life and economic losses. There have been various approaches in studying river flooding; however, insufficient understanding and limited knowledge about flooding conditions hinder the development of prevention and control measures for this natural phenomenon. This pa...

Like other software components, IoT things are likely to collaborate with each other in order to attain a desirable business goal. This sort of collaboration in a cyber-physical surrounding dictates a special transactional model that warrants further study and investigation. In this paper, we argue that the atomicity model (i.e., all or none execut...

This paper examines the impact of transactional properties, known as pivot, retriable, and compensatable, on Internet-of-Things (IoT). Despite the ever-growing number of things in today’s cyber-physical world, a limited number of studies examine this impact while considering things’ particularities in terms of reduced size, restricted connectivity,...

This paper presents a multi-criteria cloud-fog coordination model to recommend where data that things generate should be sent (either cloud, fog, or cloud & fog concurrently) and in what order (either cloud then fog, fog then cloud, or fog & cloud concurrently). The model considers end-users’ concerns such as data latency, sensitivity, and freshnes...

This paper presents a multi-criteria cloud-fog coordination model to recommend where data that things generate should be sent (either cloud, fog, or cloud & fog concurrently) and in what order (either cloud then fog, fog then cloud, or fog & cloud concurrently). The model considers end-users’ concerns such as data latency, sensitivity, and freshnes...

With the advent of Web 2.0 technologies and social media, companies are actively looking for ways to know and understand what users think and say about their products and services. Indeed, it has become the practice that users go online using social media like Facebook to raise concerns, make comments, and share recommendations. All these actions c...

Internet‐of‐Thing (IoT) is a rapid‐emerging technology that exploits the concept of inter‐network to connect things such as physical devices and objects together. A huge number of things (6.4 billion are in use in 2016) are already acting without direct human control raising a lot of concerns about the readiness and appropriateness of existing secu...

The emergence and quick adoption of social media, exemplified with Web 2.0 applications like Facebook and Instagram, have led to a new form of Business Processes (BP) called Social Business Process (SBP). An SBP encompasses aspects from both the business world and the social world. Contrarily to the business aspects, which can be captured using exi...