Towards a flexible service integration through separation of business rules

Driven by dynamic market demands, enterprises are continuously exploring collaborations with others to add value to their services and seize new market opportunities. Achieving enterprise collaboration is facilitated by Enterprise Application Integration and Business-to-Business approaches that employ architectural paradigms like Service Oriented Architecture and incorporate technological advancements in networking and computing. However, flexibility remains a major challenge related to enterprise collaboration. How can changes in demands and opportunities be reflected in collaboration solutions with minimum time and effort and with maximum reuse of existing applications? This paper proposes an approach towards a more flexible integration of enterprise applications in the context of service mediation. We achieve this by combining goal-based, model-driven and serviceoriented approaches. In particular, we pay special attention to the separation of business rules from the business process of the integration solution. Specifying the requirements as goal models, we separate those parts which are more likely to evolve over time in terms of business rules. These business rules are then made executable by exposing them as Web services and incorporating them into the design of the business process.\ud Thus, should the business rules change, the business process remains unaffected. Finally, this paper also provides an evaluation of the flexibility of our solution in relation to the current work in business process flexibility research

Iterchanging Discrete Event Simulationprocess Interaction Modelsusing The Web Ontology Language - Owl

Discrete event simulation development requires significant investments in time and resources. Descriptions of discrete event simulation models are associated with world views, including the process interaction orientation. Historically, these models have been encoded using high-level programming languages or special purpose, typically vendor-specific, simulation languages. These approaches complicate simulation model reuse and interchange. The current document-centric World Wide Web is evolving into a Semantic Web that communicates information using ontologies. The Web Ontology Language OWL, was used to encode a Process Interaction Modeling Ontology for Discrete Event Simulations (PIMODES). The PIMODES ontology was developed using ontology engineering processes. Software was developed to demonstrate the feasibility of interchanging models from commercial simulation packages using PIMODES as an intermediate representation. The purpose of PIMODES is to provide a vendor-neutral open representation to support model interchange. Model interchange enables reuse and provides an opportunity to improve simulation quality, reduce development costs, and reduce development times

Context Aware Computing for The Internet of Things: A Survey

As we are moving towards the Internet of Things (IoT), the number of sensors deployed around the world is growing at a rapid pace. Market research has shown a significant growth of sensor deployments over the past decade and has predicted a significant increment of the growth rate in the future. These sensors continuously generate enormous amounts of data. However, in order to add value to raw sensor data we need to understand it. Collection, modelling, reasoning, and distribution of context in relation to sensor data plays critical role in this challenge. Context-aware computing has proven to be successful in understanding sensor data. In this paper, we survey context awareness from an IoT perspective. We present the necessary background by introducing the IoT paradigm and context-aware fundamentals at the beginning. Then we provide an in-depth analysis of context life cycle. We evaluate a subset of projects (50) which represent the majority of research and commercial solutions proposed in the field of context-aware computing conducted over the last decade (2001-2011) based on our own taxonomy. Finally, based on our evaluation, we highlight the lessons to be learnt from the past and some possible directions for future research. The survey addresses a broad range of techniques, methods, models, functionalities, systems, applications, and middleware solutions related to context awareness and IoT. Our goal is not only to analyse, compare and consolidate past research work but also to appreciate their findings and discuss their applicability towards the IoT.Comment: IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials Journal, 201

Ontology-based standards development: Application of OntoStanD to ebXML business process specification schema

Business-to-Business (B2B) interoperations are an important part of today's global economy. Business process standards are developed to provide a common understanding of the information shared between trading partners. These standards, however, mainly capture the syntax of the transactions and not their semantics. This paper proposes the use of ontologies as the basis for standards development and presents an ontology for the ebXML Business Process Specification Schema (ebBP) with the aim of empowering the capture and sharing of semantics embedded within B2B processes as well as enabling knowledge deduction and reasoning over the shared knowledge. The paper utilises the Ontology-based Standards Development methodology (OntoStanD) as a methodological approach for designing ontological models of standards. This research demonstrates how Semantic Web technologies can be utilised as a basis for standards development and representation in order to improve standards-based interoperability between trading partners

The role of ontology in information management

The question posed in this thesis is how the use of ontologies by information systems affects their development and their performance. Several aspects about ontologies are presented, namely design and implementation issues, representational languages, and tools for ontology manipulation. The effects of the combination of ontologies and information systems are then investigated. An ontology-based tool to identify email message features is presented, and its implementation and execution details are discussed. The use of ontologies by information systems provides a better understanding about their requirements, reduces their development time, and supports knowledge management during execution time

Artificial Intelligence: A Promised Land for Web Services

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On semantic annotation of decision models

The growth of service sector in recent years has led to renewed research interests in the design and management of service systems. Decision support systems (DSS) play an important role in supporting this endeavor, through management of organizational resources such as models and data, thus forming the “back stage” of service systems. In this article, we identify the requirements for semantically annotating decision models and propose a model representation scheme, termed Semantically Annotated Structure Modeling Markup Language (SA-SMML) that extends Structure Modeling Markup Language (SMML) by incorporating mechanisms for linking semantic models such as ontologies that represent problem domain knowledge concepts. This model representation format is also amenable to a scalable Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) for managing models in distributed environments. The proposed model representation technique leverages recent advances in the areas of semantic web, and semantic web services. Along with design considerations, we demonstrate the utility of this representation format with an illustrative usage scenarios with a particular emphasis on model discovery and composition in a distributed environment

Characterizing semantic web services

Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which data contained in the web documents are machine-understandable. On the other hand, Web Services provide a new model of the web in which sites exchange dynamic information on demand. Combination of both introduces a new concept named Semantic Web Services in which semantic information is added to the different activities involved in Web Services, such as discovering, publication, composition, etc. In this paper, we analyze several proposals implementing Semantic Web Services. In order to describe them, we create a conceptual framework characterizing the main aspects of each proposal.Eje: I - Workshop de Ingeniería de Software y Base de DatosRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI