With increasing growth of cloud services and the ability to choose from different cloud providers, we propose a new way to connect cooking workflows with a high security cloud storage. We use Activiti for workflow design and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) for structured data interchange with a sealed cloud storage. This approach supports cooking workflows with instructions from multimedia data (e.g. videos, pictures) for special interest groups of the cooking domain like private communities or even chronically ill patients. The paper makes a contribution to current trends in information-systems related research such as scalability and experience reuse. Further, it connects Cloud Computing with Business Process Management.
With growing globalization, information technology has become a key resource for
business success or failure. IT is often used to manage business processes in companies
and has become increasingly important, leading to a rise in new ways to organize
business processes
Business processes are modelled as a collection of activities, dependencies between
activities and are technically supported by workflows
To develop our research proposition, we concentrate our work on the implementation of workflows in the cooking domain with a special focus on applying secure cloud technology for multimedia data integration and data objects representing ingredients.
To improve the user experience, we investigate the feasibility of using multimedia data from a high security cloud storage and of integrating this data into workflows. The user advantage is that she no longer needs to store big multimedia files on her device and can execute workflows in a web interface. Secure cloud technology provides rapid Copyright © 2015 for this paper by its authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes. In Proceedings of the ICCBR 2015 Workshops. Frankfurt, Germany. scalability as well as data protection. Both are beneficial properties for using multimedia data in the cooking domain. With our proposed solution, the user is able to easily create cooking recipes on a platform and store multimedia data. Having started the workflow, the user is provided with cooking instructions including pictures or videos. Using secure cloud technology addresses private communities which e.g. do not want to publish content or appear in any videos accessible to the public, for instance chronically ill persons or allergy sufferers who do not want to share their special recipes or videos because their identity might be linked to serious diseases. For many people it is not an option to simply store the content on scalable platforms like YouTube because their children might be visible or because their employer might get knowledge about their special concerns. Our solution combines scalability with additional security and ensures that content is protected from persons who are not supposed to have access to the recipes. The technical solution is based on IDGARD which allows to separate data in different, sealed containers and to keep own videos or pictures confidential.
With this new solution we address the open challenge of the Computer Cooking Contest.
The remainder of our paper is structured as follows. At first we will provide an overview of our architecture and a sample of a workflow to ease comprehensibility. After that we will present our implementation concept and workflows from the cooking domain, which are based on cooking recipes of pasta. We conclude with a discussion of our research contribution and the new prospects for both companies and researchers. 2
A broad range of providers offer different models for services at different layers. But
most of them do not guarantee security for the clients of a cloud provider or the privacy
of the d
From a user perspective, the access to files via the internet, for instance, by using mobile devices can be risky, because some information can be spied out by unauthorized persons. If some potential attackers retrieve user information while data is sent over the wire they may gain full access to the data storage. To prevent these attacks the usage of security tokens or passcodes (received via SMS) is necessary. IDGARD provides some of these additional security mechanisms.
From the provider perspective it is also difficult to secure data and protect it from
unauthorized access or illegal sharing. Providers want to ensure that only one user or a
specific user group is able to access data with the registered devices. By sending the
unique keys to the registered devices, content providers can prevent the unauthorized
sharing of data (e.g. by using a sealed cloud). There are similar examples in the nutrition
domain where images or videos are already protected, for instance
mycoachnutrition.com
Work is often organized as a sequence of individual tasks in which the progress can
be observed
Rice
Task (cook)
As illustrated in Figure 2, the introduced architecture consists of three layers: From the perspective of the user, the first layer or sub-component is based on the so called Ninja Web-Framework, which is required in order to handle the graphical interaction with the user by initiating a workflow instance.
Below the Web Framework, the Business Process Management (BPM) platform Activiti initially receives the user commands and controls the processing of the corresponding instance. The Activity engine requests relevant information from the data source (IDGARD) and hands them over to the user.
IDGARD, as the third or bottom layer of the architecture, is not just an external database but a sealed cloud solution. Therefore, it does not only store the data but provides API functions that ensure secure retrieval.
Worklist/ User
Interaction Resource Access (Data
Interaction) Submission Handling (Flow Control)
Since the goal is to develop and execute (cooking) workflows it is required to use Business Process Management and a solution to save the corresponding multimedia data. As a result, it is pre-determined to stage a 2-Layer-Architecure at minimum. Since it is a typical demand that users have not just local access to the workflows, a browserbased solution is reasonable. This kind of functionality is not offered by the already mentioned layers and therefore asks for an additional one.
Starting from the bottom layer, there is the complex question of how to save an application’s data or where to put it. As Cloud Computing nowadays has already overcome just being a trend, it is appropriate and scientifically valuable to embed this idea into various contexts.
IDGARD´s sealed cloud is specifically designed to enhance security. Because protecting own content like graphically supported cooking steps or even whole recipes can be important, such a cloud service might be beneficial. This especially applies to companies that want to distribute such services via Internet and protect themselves against copyright infringements.
Concerning the choice of a workflow engine, there is a huge range of open source technologies available. In terms of basic functionality (e.g. integration in an IDE or graphically establishing workflows) they usually show similarities. To address our requirements properly we decided to use two different GUI’s for our project. Activiti as the modelling GUI and the Ninja Web-Framework for the user worklist. However, Activiti convinces with a distinct manual, a large community and a clear, browser based testing environment.
To provide the worklist, the Ninja Web-Framework is useful because, as an integrated software stack, it already comprises many important libraries.
By using a MongoDB database, we save standardized keywords for each possible instruction and ingredient on the one hand, as well as the recipes with already assigned processing times, instructions and information on the other hand. We are planning to use time information for the retrieval of a process in our future work. 4
An abstract class in Java defines the fundamental set of functions, i.e. basic java members and abstract methods that deal with communicating information between java and JSON, and the log file for further checks and troubleshooting. Each function has still its own unique representation for requests and responses including the corresponding JSON formats. In order to successfully connect request- and response functionality for data interchange, some middleware classes are required. For providing cloud access, we have to send login-data and a random token of the client for identification purposes. The factory pattern is used to invoke requests and their corresponding response classes. The Java classes that realize the communication with the cloud server are directly implemented in the workflows, which we use for cooking instructions.
Workflow engines for Business Process Management are abounding. Examples for
these are JBoss, jBPM or Activiti. For our workflow development, we use Activiti as
an open source workflow engine. Activiti uses BPMN 2.0 as a modelling language and
can be easily integrated with Java environments
In the example we have four individual instructions for the user. First, cook and place
in serving bowl as well as puree should be conducted in parallel. Parallelization can be
modelled using XOR-, AND- (symbolized by the plus), or LOOP-blocks
In our paper we present a novel approach to integrate a high security cloud storage (sealed cloud) in Business Process Management. We implement a new model for using a sealed cloud multimedia data storage for our workflow contents. The implementation of a case-based retrieval is not implemented yet. As a first step, we demonstrate a pastacooking workflow, which can be processed or uploaded by the user in a web form. The content is stored in the sealed cloud IDGARD of the Uniscon GmbH who provides the cloud infrastructure. The content and meta data is encrypted and protected from unauthorized provider or third-party access. By using cloud storage for our workflows we examine two main benefits: data protection and scalability. With the IDGARD solution third parties are not able to copy or even access the data.
Scalable storage provides the advantage of adapting storage up and down on-demand
without using rare data space on physical disks of computers or other devices
(
To sum up, our approach of using cloud storage for workflows in the cooking domain benefits from flexible scalability, higher privacy and data protection leading to a higher user experience especially for special interest groups of the cooking domain. The user no longer needs to use her limited, physical storage. She can store multimedia data with cooking instructions directly in the cloud. Our work also contributes to other future trends besides the cooking domain. Sealed cloud technology offers opportunities to use cloud storage without harming privacy or security regulations. This can be very important for audit companies who want to store audit-documents or other critical contents in the cloud.
We would like to acknowledge our partnership with the Uniscon GmbH who provided us with their sealed cloud service IDGARD. 8