76 research outputs found

    Web Services-Enhanced Agile Modeling and Integrating Business Processes

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    In a global business context with continuous changes, the enterprises have to enhance their operational efficiency, to react more quickly, to ensure the flexibility of their business processes, and to build new collaboration pathways with external partners. To achieve this goal, they must use e-business methods, mechanisms and techniques while capitalizing on the potential of new information and communication technologies. In this context, we propose a standards, model and Web services-based approach for modeling and integrating agile enterprise business processes. The purpose is to benefit from Web services characteristics to enhance the processes design and realize their dynamic integration. The choice of focusing on Web services is essentially justified by their broad adoption by enterprises as well as their capability to warranty interoperability between both intra and inter-enterprises systems. Thereby, we propose in this chapter a metamodel for describing business processes, and discuss their dynamic integration by addressing the Web services discovery issue. On the one hand, the proposed metamodel is in line with the W3C Web services standards, namely, WSDL, SAWSDL and WS-Policy. It considers the use of BPMN standard to describe the behavioral aspect of business processes and completes their design using UML diagrams describing their functional, non-functional and semantic aspects. On other hand, our approach for integrating processes is in line with BPEL standard recommended to orchestrate Web services. To realize executable business processes, this approach recommends the use of semantic matching and selection mechanisms in order to produce agile systems.Comment: 26 pages, 9 figures, Book chapte

    A Platform Independent Access Control Metamodel for Web Services

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    Web services provide platform independent communication through an XML-based standard family. The major software vendors released their own SOA products implementing these standards. However, the configuration of the WS-* protocols differs from product to product. Matching these configurations between different products can be a very tedious task. Security protocols are among the most complicated protocols to configure, especially if access control is also required. Although the XACML standard aims to solve this task, its rules and policies described in XML are not very user friendly, and XACML has a very poor support in the major SOA products. Therefore, we have developed a platform independent metamodel for describing distributed systems of web services. From models described in this metamodel the platform specific configurations and program codes can be easily generated for the various SOA products, increasing the productivity of the development. This article introduces an access control extension to this metamodel

    Semantic Model Annotation Tool

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    Model driven interoperability is a research field that has gotten a lot of attention and money. Several research projects over the past years such as ATHENA, SWING and MODELWARE have sought to bring solutions to this field. The latest efforts involve the use of formal semantic descriptions to ease the interoperability task. Recent technologies on a lower level, such as SAWSDL has also presented new opportunities in the field. This thesis proposes to elevate the annotation to the platform independent level (PIM), complying with the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) vision of the MDE paradigm. Doing the annotation at this level will enable us to specify mappings to and from the ontology. Further this will enable us to generate specific mappings between PIMs that are annotated by, and mapped to, the ontology. Benefits are many, especially in the fields of model integration, validation, constraint checking and the creation of a common vocabulary that the annotated models adhere to. The latter is especially an important property in a world that sees more distributed software development, where domain experts and developers often find themselves at the opposite sides of the world. This thesis puts a focus on the integration aspect and shows how a annotated model can be transformed to another representation using the annotations and its definitions of the lifting and lowering operations. The thesis aim is to show that these annotations are feasible and represents added value in the context of MDA software development. We propose, and construct, a specific tool to handle annotation, mapping and validation of models and ontologies. They are annotated through a metamodel that support relations between both. This tool is based on the Eclipse platform, and is extensible with regard to future transformation technologies. The proposal is evaluated in the context of a specific case that presents two domain models rooted in a buyer/seller context. These models are expressed as UML class diagrams. A reference ontology that is the equivalent of one of the UML models represents the common vocabulary that we want to connect the models to. We then evaluate the solution in the light of this and show that semantic annotation of models is possible and could provide assistance and concrete solutions to many problems that face developers

    Model-Driven Semantic Web Rule Engineering

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    The tutorial was given at the Conference Center of Fairmount Spring Hotel in Banff on the 10th of May, 2007 and the tutorial was scheduled for the main conference program. We approximately had 60 participants. The overall impressions of all participants were very positive about the quality of the tutorial and the information presented. Many participants stressed that they especially like how we combined three different areas (i.e., MDE, Semantic Web, and service-oriented architectures) in a very consistent and informative way, so that they were able to grasp a completely-new perspective on how these area could be combined and practically used. Our approach was especially appreciated by participants coming from industrial settings, who like the way we tried to combine novel and not widely adopted Semantic Web technologies with well-known software engineering techniques. However, our impression was that the next editions of the tutorial to be submitted to other conferences could slightly be updated, so that we can put less emphasis on the fundamental technologies (e.g., ontologies and metamodeling) and more focus on semantic service-oriented architectures and Web applications. This is due to the fact that tutorials should always have strong analysis on how some novel technologies can be transferred to industrial setting. Of course, this also depends on the conference where we are going to present the tutorial, since different research communities have different background knowledge, and thus they need more emphasis on different background knowledge, which decreases the time we can spend on advance applications. Moreover, even the audience from the same community does not have the same background knowledge and tutorial presenters should always make some trade-offs. Our plan is to revise the tutorial accordingly and submit it to other conferences such as International Semantic Web Conference and International Conference on Software Engineering. In addition to new tutorial editions, we also plan to write a paper that will be covering the tutorial subject. That paper will be submitted to an international journal such as ACM Computing Surveys and Knowledge Engineering Reviews or as a book chapter to an edited book. We hope that this paper will not only be a suitable lecture note, but it could be a relevant visionary paper for the future development of this area of integration of Semantic Web technologies into software development process. I am also happy to report that Dr. Marco Brambilla of Politecnico di Milano, who is a member of the well-known WebML research group and leading Web engineering company (WebRatio), expressed his wish to collaborate with us in the future tutorial editions and the work on the future papers covering the tutorial subject. On the grounds of the subject of this tutorial, I have already submitted a project proposal in collaboration with Prof. Marek Hatala and TELUS Communications for a NSERC strategic project grant in April 2007. This project proposal is also fully coordinated with the European consortia led by Prof. Gerd Wagner that also submitted a project proposal to EU commission for a grant within Framework Program 7. In addition, Dr. Brambilla is also very enthusiastic about setting up similar research collaboration in the future, and we made a plan on how to collaborate by trying to get involve our students to work on the subjects that are looking at the intersections of our research areas. At the conference, I had a contact with Mr. Ralf Gerstner of Springer who was the editor of the research monograph “Model-Driven Architecture and Ontology Development” where I was the led author. He invited me to write another book that will be covering the subject of this tutorial, as he was very positive about the high interest of the audience, rising importance of the subject and the feedback we got form the audience at the WWW2007. Our plan is that we should first proceed with the above-mentioned paper and also produce some more research experiments with the technology till the end of this year, and then prepare a book proposal in early 2008. My personal plan is to try to develop a new computer science course at Athabasca University that will cover the subject of this tutorial as well as to revise some of the existing ones (e.g., COMP 603 and COMP 610) that can benefit from the expertise in this area. I anticipate that the experience obtained at the WWW2007 conference will be used as a very good input for increasing the quality of that new course and potentially increase competitiveness of Athabasca University’s courses by offering challenging research subjects that are attracting a high attention of industry and which we explore collaboratively with world leading researchers. Thanks to the research reputation and presentation experience in the area covered in the tutorial, I am invited to give 3 technology lectures (2 hours altogether) at the 2nd Summer School on Generative Transformational Technologies in Software Engineering (GTTSE 2007) in Braga, Portugal from July 1st till July 7, 2007. Given that this event attracts the most renowned researchers giving talks (which will be excellent opportunity to share research experience, disseminate our research results, and collaborate with well-known researchers) and encouraged with the positive experience from WWW2007, I plan to apply for another A&PDF award to support my attendance at GTTSE 2007.Model Driven Engineering (MDE) and the Semantic Web represent two key technologies with a far-reaching vision for the future of software engineering and Web engineering. the main promise of MDE is to raise the level of abstraction from technology-platform-specific concepts to the higher levels of platform-independence and "computation-independent" modeling. The Semantic Web vision starts from another perspective: sharing data, resources and knowledge between parties that belong to different organizations, different cultures and/or different communities. Ontologies and rule play the main role in the Semantic Web for publishing community vocabularies and policies, for annotating resources and for turning Web applications into inference-enabled collaboration platforms. Although these two technology visions have been developed by two different communities, they share number of principles and goals, and there are important synergies that can be achie3ved by combining them with each other. The ontology Definition Metamodel (ODM) standard (http://ontology.omg.org) by the OMG can be viewed as a first step towards bridging MDE and the Semantic Web. Another important building block is domain-specific modeling languages suitable for describing specific domains. MDE provides a set of principles and techniques how to create domain-specific modeling languages by using metamodeling, how to transform from one type of modeling language to another, and how to change level of abstractions (e.g., from platform-specific to platform-independent and back). The most well-known initiatives in this areas are the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) by the OMG and the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF). The main goal of this tutorial is to give an introduction into state-of-the-art Web engineering methods based on the principles, models, and technologies of both MDE and the Semantic Web. The tutorial starts from the basics of the Semantic Web and MDE (e.g., ontology languages, modeling languages, mode transformations), and then explores how they can be employed in various states of Web engineering by addressing the following questions: 1) How can we develop ontologies and rules with MDE-based approaches and standards?, 2) How can we develop Semantic Web services that follow MDE recommendations?, 3) How we can build next generation Web applications that are taking advantage of both Semantic Web and MDE?Academic & Professional Development Fund (A&PDF

    An extensible application topology definition and annotation framework

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    This thesis introduces a framework for decision support during the design of applications for the cloud, or migration of existing applications to a cloud environment. For this purpose, a GENeralized Topology Language (GENTL) is introduced and mappings from existing languages to GENTL are provided. An annotation scheme for GENTL, which can capture annotations to topologies and topology elements is designed and instantiations for different annotation types are given. A framework implementing import functionalities for the topology languages Blueprint and TOSCA is presented. The framework enables the annotation of topologies with documentation annotations, references to external resources and incorporates a series of annotations which can be used to retrieve cost calculations from the external decision support system Nefolog
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