jETI: ein serviceorientiertes framework zur high level Ausführung von Remote-Komponenten

Mit dem massiven Aufkommen an geschäftlichem Datenaustausch in Zeiten voranschreitender Globalisierung, dem Erfolg des Community getriebenen Web 2.0 und dem expliziten Wandel hin zur serviceorientierten Denkweise insbesondere im Kontext komplexer Geschäftsprozesse wird vor allem deutlich, dass wachsender Bedarf an einer offenen, standardisierten Technologie zur Vernetzung, Ausführung und Bereitstellung von Diensten und Prozessen besteht. Um diesen Bedarf zu decken, bestehende Probleme zu lösen und neue Aspekte der Ausführung vernetzter Dienste zu erkennen soll in dieser Arbeit eine ganzheitliche Experimentierplattform zur serviceorientierten Orchestrierung, insbesondere von verteilt agierenden Komponenten vorgestellt werden. Nutzer sollen dabei in die Lage versetzt werden, Funktionalitäten auf eine möglichst einfache Art und Weise ausprobieren, benutzen und anbieten zu können. Im Kern soll hier der Teilbereich einer integrierten Umgebung beleuchtet werden, welche die Verifikation und Handhabung von standardisierten Remote Service Komponenten als auch die Anbindung heterogener, proprietärer Dienste von Drittanbietern unterstützt. Die vorgelegte Arbeit umfasst dabei vor allem die Konzeption und Realisierung einer ganzheitlichen Service-Integrationsplattform, welche es nicht ausschließlich, aber insbesondere Domänenexperten ermöglichen soll, Funktionalitäten verteilt und effizient anbieten und nutzen zu können, was anhand komplexer und divergenter Fallstudien aus verschiedenen Fachrichtungen belegt wird. Zum Testen und evaluieren komplexer Technologien soll dabei zusätzlich eine integrierte Testumgebung dienen. Aktuelle Technologien des Semantic Web vervollständigen letztendlich das Einsatzgebiet in puncto automatischer Modellierung und Verifikation sowie dynamischer Suche von adäquat dedizierten Diensten

iSemServ : a framework for engineering intelligent semantic services

The need for modern enterprises and Web users to simply and rapidly develop and deliver platform-independent services to be accessed over the Web by the global community is growing. This is self-evident, when one considers the omnipresence of electronic services (e-services) on the Web. Accordingly, the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is commonly considered as one of the de facto standards for the provisioning of heterogeneous business functionalities on the Web. As the basis for SOA, Web Services (WS) are commonly preferred, particularly because of their ability to facilitate the integration of heterogeneous systems. However, WS only focus on syntactic descriptions when describing the functional and behavioural aspects of services. This makes it a challenge for services to be automatically discovered, selected, composed, invoked, and executed – without any human intervention. Consequently, Semantic Web Services (SWS) are emerging to deal with such a challenge. SWS represent the convergence of Semantic Web (SW) and WS concepts, in order to enable Web services that can be automatically processed and understood by machines operating with limited or no user intervention. At present, research efforts within the SWS domain are mainly concentrated on semantic services automation aspects, such as discovery, matching, selection, composition, invocation, and execution. Moreover, extensive research has been conducted on the conceptual models and formal languages used in constructing semantic services. However, in terms of the engineering of semantic services, a number of challenges are still prevalent, as demonstrated by the lack of development and use of semantic services in real-world settings. The lack of development and use could be attributed to a number of challenges, such as complex semantic services enabling technologies, leading to a steep learning curve for service developers; lack of unified service platforms for guiding and supporting simple and rapid engineering of semantic services, and the limited integration of semantic technologies with mature service-oriented technologies. vi In addition, a combination of isolated software tools is normally used to engineer semantic services. This could, however, lead to undesirable consequences, such as prolonged service development times, high service development costs, lack of services re-use, and the lack of semantics interoperability, reliability, and re-usability. Furthermore, available software platforms do not support the creation of semantic services that are intelligent beyond the application of semantic descriptions, as envisaged for the next generation of services, where the connection of knowledge is of core importance. In addressing some of the challenges highlighted, this research study adopted a qualitative research approach with the main focus on conceptual modelling. The main contribution of this study is thus a framework called iSemServ to simplify and accelerate the process of engineering intelligent semantic services. The framework has been modelled and developed, based on the principles of simplicity, rapidity, and intelligence. The key contributions of the proposed framework are: (1) An end-to-end and unified approach of engineering intelligent semantic services, thereby enabling service engineers to use one platform to realize all the modules comprising such services; (2) proposal of a model-driven approach that enables the average and expert service engineers to focus on developing intelligent semantic services in a structured, extensible, and platform-independent manner. Thereby increasing developers’ productivity and minimizing development and maintenance costs; (3) complexity hiding through the exploitation of template and rule-based automatic code generators, supporting different service architectural styles and semantic models; and (4) intelligence wrapping of services at message and knowledge levels, for the purposes of automatically processing semantic service requests, responses and reasoning over domain ontologies and semantic descriptions by keeping user intervention at a minimum. The framework was designed by following a model-driven approach and implemented using the Eclipse platform. It was evaluated using practical use case scenarios, comparative analysis, and performance and scalability experiments. In conclusion, the iSemServ framework is considered appropriate for dealing with the complexities and restrictions involved in engineering intelligent semantic services, especially because the amount of time required to generate intelligent semantic vii services using the proposed framework is smaller compared with the time that the service engineer would need to manually generate all the different artefacts comprising an intelligent semantic service. Keywords: Intelligent semantic services, Web services, Ontologies, Intelligent agents, Service engineering, Model-driven techniques, iSemServ framework.ComputingD. Phil. (Computer science

An evaluation methodology and framework for semantic web services technology

Software engineering has been driven over decades by the trend towards component based development and loose coupling. Service oriented architectures and Web Services in particular are the latest product of this long-reaching development. Semantic Web Services (SWS) apply the paradigms of the Semantic Web to Web Services to allow more flexible and dynamic service usages. Numerous frameworks to realize SWS have been put forward in recent years but their relative advantages and general maturity are not easy to assess. This dissertation presents a solution to this issue. It defines a general methodology and framework for SWS technology evaluation as well as concrete benchmarks to assess the functional scope and performance of various approaches. The presented benchmarks have been executed within international evaluation campaign. The thesis thus comprehensively covers theoretical, methodological as well as practical results regarding the evaluation and assessment of SWS technologies

Combining SOA and BPM Technologies for Cross-System Process Automation

This paper summarizes the results of an industry case study that introduced a cross-system business process automation solution based on a combination of SOA and BPM standard technologies (i.e., BPMN, BPEL, WSDL). Besides discussing major weaknesses of the existing, custom-built, solution and comparing them against experiences with the developed prototype, the paper presents a course of action for transforming the current solution into the proposed solution. This includes a general approach, consisting of four distinct steps, as well as specific action items that are to be performed for every step. The discussion also covers language and tool support and challenges arising from the transformation