Sustainable Operation of Information Systems to Keep Them Understandable and Controllable

We live in modern society, surrounded by countless information systems. Just within our university, there are Osaka Daigaku (University) Information Network System (ODINS), Knowledge of Osaka-university Academic Nucleus (KOAN), Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE), Email Service (OUMail), Campus Cloud Computing Service, and many more. Each of these systems has its own data, is connected to a network, and performs the necessary processing while communicating/complementing each other. When operating such information systems, we have to understand what data each system has, how they are connected, and what information is exchanged among them through what interfaces and protocols. In normal times, it may seem like things are running smoothly even if we do not understand that much, but it becomes especially problematic when a system behaves differently from its original intention due to malfunctions, human errors, or cyber attacks. We believe that by systematizing knowledge to keep information systems understandable and controllable, we can operate them sustainably with a bird's-eye view of the whole, and we are conducting research on traffic control, authentication, authorization, and other areas.