An approach to relate business and application services using ISDL

This paper presents a service-oriented design approach that allows one to relate services modelled at different levels of granularity during a design process, such as business and application services. To relate these service models we claim that a 'concept gap' and an 'abstraction gap' need to be bridged. The concept gap represents the difference between the conceptual models used to construct service models by different stakeholders involved in the design process. The abstraction gap represents the difference in abstraction level at which service models are defined. Two techniques are presented that bridge these gaps. Both techniques are based on the Interaction System Design Language (ISDL). The paper illustrates the use of both techniques through an example

Transitioning Applications to Semantic Web Services: An Automated Formal Approach

Semantic Web Services have been recognized as a promising technology that exhibits huge commercial potential, and attract significant attention from both industry and the research community. Despite expectations being high, the industrial take-up of Semantic Web Service technologies has been slower than expected. One of the main reasons is that many systems have been developed without considering the potential of the web in integrating services and sharing resources. Without a systematic methodology and proper tool support, the migration from legacy systems to Semantic Web Service-based systems can be a very tedious and expensive process, which carries a definite risk of failure. There is an urgent need to provide strategies which allow the migration of legacy systems to Semantic Web Services platforms, and also tools to support such a strategy. In this paper we propose a methodology for transitioning these applications to Semantic Web Services by taking the advantage of rigorous mathematical methods. Our methodology allows users to migrate their applications to Semantic Web Services platform automatically or semi-automatically

On interoperability and conformance assessment in service composition

The process of composing a service from other services typically involves multiple models. These models may represent the service from distinct perspectives, e.g., to model the different roles of systems involved in the service, and at distinct abstraction levels, e.g., to model the service’s capability, interface or the orchestration that implements the service. The consistency among these models needs to be maintained in order to guarantee the correctness of the composition process. Two types of consistency relations are distinguished: interoperability, which concerns the ability of different roles to interoperate, and conformance, which concerns the correct implementation of an abstract model by a more concrete model. This paper discusses the need for and use of techniques to assess interoperability and conformance in a service composition process. The paper shows how these consistency relations can be described and analysed using concepts from the COSMO framework. Examples are presented to illustrate how interoperability and conformance can be assessed

Interaction systems design and the protocol- and middleware-centred paradigms in distributed application development

This paper aims at demonstrating the benefits and importance of interaction systems design in the development of distributed applications. We position interaction systems design with respect to two paradigms that have influenced the design of distributed applications: the middleware-centred and the protocol-centred paradigm. We argue that interaction systems that support application-level interactions should be explicitly designed, using the externally observable behaviour of the interaction system as a starting point in interaction systems design. This practice has two main benefits: to promote a systematic design method, in which the correctness of the design of an interaction system can be assessed against its service specification; and, to shield the design of application parts that use the interaction system from choices in the design of the supporting interaction system

Can acquisition of expertise be supported by technology?

Professional trainees in the workplace are increasingly required to demonstrate specific standards of competence. Yet, empirical evidence of how professionals acquire competence in practice is lacking. The danger, then, is that efforts to support learning processes may be misguided. We hypothesised that a systemic view of how expertise is acquired would support more timely and appropriate development of technology to support workplace learning. The aims of this study were to provide an empirically based understanding of workplace learning and explore how learning could be facilitated through suitable application of technology. We have used the medical specialist trainee as an exemplar of how professionals acquire expertise within a complex working environment. We describe our methodological approach, based on the amalgam of systems analysis and qualitative research methods. We present the development of a framework for analysis and early findings from qualitative data analysis. Based on our findings so far, we present a tentative schema representing how technology can support learning with suggestions for the types of technology that could be used

Safer in the Clouds (Extended Abstract)

We outline the design of a framework for modelling cloud computing systems.The approach is based on a declarative programming model which takes the form of a lambda-calculus enriched with suitable mechanisms to express and enforce application-level security policies governing usages of resources available in the clouds. We will focus on the server side of cloud systems, by adopting a pro-active approach, where explicit security policies regulate server's behaviour.Comment: In Proceedings ICE 2010, arXiv:1010.530

A model-based approach to service creation

This paper presents a model-based approach to support service creation. In this approach, services are assumed to be created from (available) software components. The creation process may involve multiple design steps in which the requested service is repeatedly decomposed into more detailed functional parts, until these parts can be mapped onto software components. A modelling language is used to express and enable analysis of the resulting designs, in particular the behaviour aspects. Methods are needed to verify the correctness of each design step. A technique called behaviour refinement is introduced to assess the conformance relation between an abstract behaviour and a more concrete (detailed) behaviour. This technique is based on the application of abstraction rules to determine the abstraction of the concrete behaviour such that the obtained abstraction can be compared to the original abstract behaviour. The application of this refinement technique throughout the creation process enforces the correctness of the created servic