Recently, development in intelligent transportation systems (ITS) requires the input of various kinds of data in real-time and from multiple sources, which imposes additional research and application challenges. Ongoing studies on Data Fusion (DF) have produced significant improvement in ITS and manifested an enormous impact on its growth. This paper reviews the implementation of DF methods in ITS to facilitate traffic flow analysis (TFA) and solutions that entail the prediction of various traffic variables such as driving behavior, travel time, speed, density, incident, and traffic flow. It attempts to identify and discuss real-time and multi-sensor data sources that are used for various traffic domains, including road/highway management, traffic states estimation, and traffic controller optimization. Moreover, it attempts to associate abstractions of data level fusion, feature level fusion, and decision level fusion on DF methods to better understand the role of DF in TFA and ITS. Consequently, the main objective of this paper is to review DF methods used for real-time and multi-sensor (heterogeneous) TFA studies. The review outcomes are (i) a guideline of constructing DF methods which involve preprocessing, filtering, decision, and evaluation as core steps, (ii) a description of the recent DF algorithms or methods that adopt real-time and multi-sensor sources data and the impact of these data sources on the improvement of TFA, (iii) an examination of the testing and evaluation methodologies and the popular datasets and (iv) an identification of several research gaps, some current challenges, and new research trends.

Nowadays, activities and decisions making in an organization is based on data and information obtained from data analysis, which provides various services for constructing reliable and accurate process. As data are significant resources in all organizations the quality of data is critical for managers and operating processes to identify related performance issues. Moreover, high quality data can increase opportunity for achieving top services in an organization. However, identifying various aspects of data quality from definition, dimensions, types, strategies, techniques are essential to equip methods and processes for improving data. This paper focuses on systematic review of data quality dimensions in order to use at proposed framework which combining data mining and statistical techniques to measure dependencies among dimensions and illustrate how extracting knowledge can increase process quality.

Until now, an effective defense method against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks is yet to be offered by security systems. Incidents of serious damage due to DDoS attacks have been increasing, thereby leading to an urgent need for new attack identification, mitigation, and prevention mechanisms. To prevent DDoS attacks, the basic features of the attacks need to be dynamically analyzed because their patterns, ports, and protocols or operation mechanisms are rapidly changed and manipulated. Most of the proposed DDoS defense methods have different types of drawbacks and limitations. Some of these methods have signature-based defense mechanisms that fail to identify new attacks and others have anomaly-based defense mechanisms that are limited to specific types of DDoS attacks and yet to be applied in open environments. Subsequently, extensive research on applying artificial intelligence and statistical techniques in the defense methods has been conducted in order to identify, mitigate, and prevent these attacks. However, the most appropriate and effective defense features, mechanisms, techniques, and methods for handling such attacks remain to be an open question. This review paper focuses on the most common defense methods against DDoS attacks that adopt artificial intelligence and statistical approaches. Additionally, the review classifies and illustrates the attack types, the testing properties, the evaluation methods and the testing datasets that are utilized in the methodology of the proposed defense methods. Finally, this review provides a guideline and possible points of encampments for developing improved solution models of defense methods against DDoS attacks.

It is now widely accepted that ontologies play a critical role in achieving the goal of machine understandable web, also known as semantic web. In order to develop ontologies, several methodologies have been proposed during the last two decades. Despite the fact, that quite a number of ontology engineering methodologies have been proposed, still the field lacks widely accepted and mature methodologies. Most methodologies lack sufficient details of techniques and activities employed in them. However, some methodologies provide sufficient details including METHONTOLOGY. This article discusses and reports a critical analysis and comparison of these methodologies. The analysis is performed based on a criterion, derived from related literature, trends and needs which evolved over the years. The results of the analysis showed that there is no completely mature methodology. Therefore, this research may act as a preliminary guide to come with a state of art ontology engineering methodology, bridging up the existing gaps and shortfalls.