Above-ground perennial phytomass of Andalusian alfa grass steppes (7755·6 ± 1482 kg of dry matter ha (95% C.I.)) is clearly higher than phytomass density measured today in most alfa grass communities of the Maghreb because of low or inexistant present-day human-induced alterations and relatively favourable annual precipitation (370 mm) existing in these Spanish steppes. Total carbon storage mea...

In the context of software, provenance holds the key to retaining a mirror instance of the lifespan of a service, which can be replayed/reproduced from the beginning. This entails the nature of invocations that took place, how/where the data were created, modified, updated and the user’s engagement with the service. With such an encyclopedia of information, it opens up a diversity of value-adde...

Electric power consumption is dependent on weather conditions. In most of the EU countries, power distribution is often subject to failure and it is frequent for the population to suffer power blackout. Within the solutions, deployed in order to avoid or face that problem, the public notification of blackout risks for a target region and the demand for reduced consumption are both interesting a...

In the semantic web environment it is important to be able to specify access control requirements about subjects accessing the information and about resources to be accessed in terms of the rich ontologybased metadata describing them. In this paper, we outline how current standard policy languages such as XACML can be extended to address this issue. Then, we describe a reference architecture fo...

Access control and authentication systems are currently undergoing a paradigm shift towards openness and user-centricity where service providers communicate to the users what information they need to provide to gain access to a given resource. This paradigm shift is a crucial step towards allowing users to manage their identities and privacy. To ensure the service provider of the validity of th...

The eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) is an extensible and flexible XML language for the specification of access control policies. However, the richness and flexibility of the language (along with the verbose syntax of XML) come with a price: errors are easy to make and difficult to detect when policies grow in size. If these errors are not detected and rectified, they can resul...

Securing electronic data has evolved into an important requirement in domains such as health care informatics, with the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) utilized to create standards such as the Clinical Document Architecture and the Continuity of Care Record, which have led to a need for approaches to secure XML schemas and documents. In this paper, we present a method for generating eXtensible...

The advent of emerging technologies such as Web services, service-oriented architecture, and cloud computing has enabled us to perform business services more efficiently and effectively. However, we still suffer from unintended security leakages by unauthorized services while providing more convenient services to Internet users through such a cuttingedge technological growth. Furthermore, desig...

Usage Control policies have been introduced to overcome issues related to the usage of resources. Indeed, a Usage Control policy takes into account attributes of subjects and resources which change over time. Hence, the policy is continuously enforced while an action is performed on a resource, and it is re-evaluated at every context change. This permits to revoke the access to a resource as so...