Enabling Personalized Composition and Adaptive Provisioning of Web Services

The proliferation of interconnected computing devices is fostering the emergence of environments where Web services made available to mobile users are a commodity. Unfortunately, inherent limitations of mobile devices still hinder the seamless access to Web services, and their use in supporting complex user activities. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a distributed, adaptive, and context-aware framework for personalized service composition and provisioning adapted to mobile users. Users specify their preferences by annotating existing process templates, leading to personalized service-based processes. To cater for the possibility of low bandwidth communication channels and frequent disconnections, an execution model is proposed whereby the responsibility of orchestrating personalized processes is spread across the participating services and user agents. In addition, the execution model is adaptive in the sense that the runtime environment is able to detect exceptions and react to them according to a set of rules

A generic approach to the evolution of interaction in ubiquitous systems

This dissertation addresses the challenge of the configuration of modern (ubiquitous, context-sensitive, mobile et al.) interactive systems where it is difficult or impossible to predict (i) the resources available for evolution, (ii) the criteria for judging the success of the evolution, and (iii) the degree to which human judgements must be involved in the evaluation process used to determine the configuration. In this thesis a conceptual model of interactive system configuration over time (known as interaction evolution) is presented which relies upon the follow steps; (i) identification of opportunities for change in a system, (ii) reflection on the available configuration alternatives, (iii) decision-making and (iv) implementation, and finally iteration of the process. This conceptual model underpins the development of a dynamic evolution environment based on a notion of configuration evaluation functions (hereafter referred to as evaluation functions) that provides greater flexibility than current solutions and, when supported by appropriate tools, can provide a richer set of evaluation techniques and features that are difficult or impossible to implement in current systems. Specifically this approach has support for changes to the approach, style or mode of use used for configuration - these features may result in more effective systems, less effort involved to configure them and a greater degree of control may be offered to the user. The contributions of this work include; (i) establishing the the need for configuration evolution through a literature review and a motivating case study experiment, (ii) development of a conceptual process model supporting interaction evolution, (iii) development of a model based on the notion of evaluation functions which is shown to support a wide range of interaction configuration approaches, (iv) a characterisation of the configuration evaluation space, followed by (v) an implementation of these ideas used in (vi) a series of longitudinal technology probes and investigations into the approaches

INVESTIGATION OF THE ROLE OF SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENTS IN WEB SERVICE QUALITY

Context/Background: Use of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) is crucial to provide the value added services to consumers to achieve their requirements successfully. SLAs also ensure the expected Quality of Service to consumers. Aim: This study investigates how efficient structural representation and management of SLAs can help to ensure the Quality of Service (QoS) in Web services during Web service composition. Method: Existing specifications and structures for SLAs for Web services do not fully formalize and provide support for different automatic and dynamic behavioral aspects needed for QoS calculation. This study addresses the issues on how to formalize and document the structures of SLAs for better service utilization and improved QoS results. The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is extended in this study with addition of an SLAAgent, which helps to automate the QoS calculation using Fuzzy Inference Systems, service discovery, service selection, SLA monitoring and management during service composition with the help of structured SLA documents. Results: The proposed framework improves the ways of how to structure, manage and monitor SLAs during Web service composition to achieve the better Quality of Service effectively and efficiently. Conclusions: To deal with different types of computational requirements the automation of SLAs is a challenge during Web service composition. This study shows the significance of the SLAs for better QoS during composition of services in SOA

Final report on the evaluation of RRM/CRRM algorithms

Deliverable public del projecte EVERESTThis deliverable provides a definition and a complete evaluation of the RRM/CRRM algorithms selected in D11 and D15, and evolved and refined on an iterative process. The evaluation will be carried out by means of simulations using the simulators provided at D07, and D14.Preprin

Proceedings of QG2010: The Third Workshop on Question Generation

These are the peer-reviewed proceedings of "QG2010, The Third Workshop on Question Generation". The workshop included a special track for "QGSTEC2010: The First Question Generation Shared Task and Evaluation Challenge". QG2010 was held as part of The Tenth International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS2010)