Accountability Computing for E-society

Kwei-Jay Lin, Joe Zou, Yan Wang

Abstract: In the business context, accountability has become a major concern for businesses around the world in aftermath of corporate scandals and fallouts. However, accountability has not been rigorously considered in IT system technologies and solutions. The goal of this study is to provide a clear understanding of accountability concept in service-oriented computing and, more generally, e-society. We first outline the general concept of accountability and presents a review on accountability from both management and IT perspective. We also clarify the ambiguity between the accountability concern and other architectural concerns such as security, QoS, trust and reputation.We present an SOA research project, the Llama accountability framework, which is an accountable service delivery infrastructure to support the monitoring, analysis, and reconfiguration of service processes. We believe such a framework will be useful for ensuring better e-services in an e-society.