Proof-of-Concept Application - Annual Report Year 1

In this document the Cat-COVITE Application for use in the CATNETS Project is introduced and motivated. Furthermore an introduction to the catallactic middleware and Web Services Agreement (WS-Agreement) concepts is given as a basis for the future work. Requirements for the application of Cat-COVITE with in catallactic systems are analysed. Finally the integration of the Cat-COVITE application and the catallactic middleware is described. --Grid Computing

Staging Transformations for Multimodal Web Interaction Management

Multimodal interfaces are becoming increasingly ubiquitous with the advent of mobile devices, accessibility considerations, and novel software technologies that combine diverse interaction media. In addition to improving access and delivery capabilities, such interfaces enable flexible and personalized dialogs with websites, much like a conversation between humans. In this paper, we present a software framework for multimodal web interaction management that supports mixed-initiative dialogs between users and websites. A mixed-initiative dialog is one where the user and the website take turns changing the flow of interaction. The framework supports the functional specification and realization of such dialogs using staging transformations -- a theory for representing and reasoning about dialogs based on partial input. It supports multiple interaction interfaces, and offers sessioning, caching, and co-ordination functions through the use of an interaction manager. Two case studies are presented to illustrate the promise of this approach.Comment: Describes framework and software architecture for multimodal web interaction managemen

A formal architecture-centric and model driven approach for the engineering of science gateways

From n-Tier client/server applications, to more complex academic Grids, or even the most recent and promising industrial Clouds, the last decade has witnessed significant developments in distributed computing. In spite of this conceptual heterogeneity, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) seems to have emerged as the common and underlying abstraction paradigm, even though different standards and technologies are applied across application domains. Suitable access to data and algorithms resident in SOAs via so-called ‘Science Gateways’ has thus become a pressing need in order to realize the benefits of distributed computing infrastructures.In an attempt to inform service-oriented systems design and developments in Grid-based biomedical research infrastructures, the applicant has consolidated work from three complementary experiences in European projects, which have developed and deployed large-scale production quality infrastructures and more recently Science Gateways to support research in breast cancer, pediatric diseases and neurodegenerative pathologies respectively. In analyzing the requirements from these biomedical applications the applicant was able to elaborate on commonly faced issues in Grid development and deployment, while proposing an adapted and extensible engineering framework. Grids implement a number of protocols, applications, standards and attempt to virtualize and harmonize accesses to them. Most Grid implementations therefore are instantiated as superposed software layers, often resulting in a low quality of services and quality of applications, thus making design and development increasingly complex, and rendering classical software engineering approaches unsuitable for Grid developments.The applicant proposes the application of a formal Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) approach to service-oriented developments, making it possible to define Grid-based architectures and Science Gateways that satisfy quality of service requirements, execution platform and distribution criteria at design time. An novel investigation is thus presented on the applicability of the resulting grid MDE (gMDE) to specific examples and conclusions are drawn on the benefits of this approach and its possible application to other areas, in particular that of Distributed Computing Infrastructures (DCI) interoperability, Science Gateways and Cloud architectures developments

AtomServ architecture: Towards internet-scaled service, publish, subscription, and discovery

With the surge of SOA-based infrastructure and applications, increasingly end users and small-medium-enterprises directly participate in the service publish and discovery across the Internet. The recent shutdown of public UDDI exposes critical problems of existing Internet-based service discovery. Hence, public service discovery becomes a central SOA issue. In this paper, we present a light weight service discovery architecture built upon widely-adopted WWW technologies and proven software architectural styles. Firstly, it provides a handy discovery facility for personal web services providers and consumers, who would not be expected to able to use complex UDDI specifications with dedicated endpoint computing capability. Secondly, it widens the adoption of service discovery by allowing simple and uniform web user interfaces (e.g. Internet Explorer7.0 and Firefox1.1) to subscribe and access frequently changing business services. This undoubtedly lowers the entry barrier for end users to play the role of service providers or consumers in a sheer Service-Oriented Environment across the Internet

Hot Swapping Protocol Implementations in the OPNET Modeler Development Environment

This research effort demonstrates hot swapping protocol implementations in OPNET via the building of a dependency injection testing framework. The thesis demonstrates the externalization (compiling as stand-alone code) of OPNET process models, and their inclusion into custom DLL\u27s (Dynamically Linked Libraries). A framework then utilizes these process model DLL\u27s, to specify, or “inject,” process implementations post-compile time into an OPNET simulation. Two separate applications demonstrate this mechanism. The first application is a toolkit that allows for the testing of multiple routing related protocols in various combinations without code re-compilation or scenario re-generation. The toolkit produced similar results as the same simulation generated manually with OPNET. The second application demonstrates the viability of a unit testing mechanism for the externalized process models. The unit testing mechanism was demonstrated by integrating with CxxTest and executing xUnit style test suits