A Framework to assess the value of web services

Large organizations often begin to adopt new software technologies prior to establishing appropriate value frameworks. This approach may produce sub-optimal investment decisions and technology adoption rates, and introduce excessive risk. In this thesis, a value-based framework is developed for assessing the impact of Web Services technology investments on business systems development. The value factors included in the framework are data management, application development and deployment, system integration, and response time to market opportunities

Towards improving web service repositories through semantic web techniques

The success of the Web services technology has brought topicsas software reuse and discovery once again on the agenda of software engineers. While there are several efforts towards automating Web service discovery and composition, many developers still search for services via online Web service repositories and then combine them manually. However, from our analysis of these repositories, it yields that, unlike traditional software libraries, they rely on little metadata to support service discovery. We believe that the major cause is the difficulty of automatically deriving metadata that would describe rapidly changing Web service collections. In this paper, we discuss the major shortcomings of state of the art Web service repositories and, as a solution, we report on ongoing work and ideas on how to use techniques developed in the context of the Semantic Web (ontology learning, mapping, metadata based presentation) to improve the current situation

Semantic Description, Publication and Discovery of Workflows in myGrid

The bioinformatics scientific process relies on in silico experiments, which are experiments executed in full in a computational environment. Scientists wish to encode the designs of these experiments as workflows because they provide minimal, declarative descriptions of the designs, overcoming many barriers to the sharing and re-use of these designs between scientists and enable the use of the most appropriate services available at any one time. We anticipate that the number of workflows will increase quickly as more scientists begin to make use of existing workflow construction tools to express their experiment designs. Discovery then becomes an increasingly hard problem, as it becomes more difficult for a scientist to identify the workflows relevant to their particular research goals amongst all those on offer. While many approaches exist for the publishing and discovery of services, there have been few attempts to address where and how authors of experimental designs should advertise the availability of their work or how relevant workflows can be discovered with minimal effort from the user. As the users designing and adapting experiments will not necessarily have a computer science background, we also have to consider how publishing and discovery can be achieved in such a way that they are not required to have detailed technical knowledge of workflow scripting languages. Furthermore, we believe they should be able to make use of others' expert knowledge (the semantics) of the given scientific domain. In this paper, we define the issues related to the semantic description, publishing and discovery of workflows, and demonstrate how the architecture created by the myGrid project aids scientists in this process. We give a walk-through of how users can construct, publish, annotate, discover and enact workflows via the user interfaces of the myGrid architecture; we then describe novel middleware protocols, making use of the Semantic Web technologies RDF and OWL to support workflow publishing and discovery

Towards property-based testing of RESTful web services

Developing APIs as Web Services over HTTP implies adding an extra layer to software, compared to the ones that we would need to develop an API distributed as, for example, a library. This additional layer must be included in testing too, but this implies that the software under test has an additional complexity due both to the need to use an intermediate protocol in tests and to the need to test compliance with the constraints imposed by that protocol: in this case the constraints defined by the REST architectural style. On the other hand, these requirements are common to all the Web Services, and because of that, we should be able to abstract this aspect of the testing model so that we can reuse it in testing any Web Service. In this paper, as a first step towards automating the testing of Web Services over HTTP, we describe a practical mechanism and model for testing RESTful Web Services without side effects and give an example of how we successfully adapted that mechanism to test two different existing Web Services: Storage Room by Thriventures and Google Tasks by Google. For this task we have used Erlang together with state machine models in the property-based testing tool Quviq QuickCheck, implemented using the statem module. 1

Reconfigurable web service integration in the extended logistics enterprise

Transportation and warehousing logistics are activities that require strong information systems and computer support. This requirement has grown with the advent of e-commerce. Companies such as FedEx and UPS now allow their customers to track and monitor the fulfilment of their requested services on the Internet. In order for such a system to be effective, the goods need to be handled by the one corporation, with an integrated system. This is rare in the case of Small to Medium sized Enterprise (SME). With the advent of Business to Business (B2B), and Partner to Partner (P2P) e-commerce, there has been an increasing tendency for SMEs to set up consortia that represent several players in a given field in order to contend with larger competitors. This paper deals with the concept of an extended logistics enterprise and explores the software engineering issues underlying the development of such complex systems

Web Service infrastructure for supply chain

Managing a supply chain is one of the most complicated tasks today when erratic changes in demand must be met as soon as possible for staying competitive, while dealing with multitude of business partners that are involved in the chain. It is imperative that any changes in a corporation\u27s product/service demand be immediately communicated with its suppliers and logistic service providers. This task of communication has long been overtaken by computerized systems from the telephones and fax machines. The computer technologies being used so far to connect two businesses are proving to be too rigid in today\u27s world of mergers, acquisitions, new business deals etc which bring in the task of tying the disparate computer systems of these different organizations. To solve this problem, the enterprise software industry has developed new standards and a new design for constructing inter-organization applications, collectively known as the Web Service technology. This paper demonstrates how this technology works and how it can be applied to the problem of supply chain management. This paper describes the principles of Web Services and its features like UDDI. A demonstrative supply chain infrastructure is created using the Web Service technology which shows the ease of creating new communication links with new supply chain partners without having to invest in costly computer technology resources. The paper will show that the adoption of Web Services and adoption of standard business language OAGIS will make the task of supply chain communication as easy as plug and play

Web Service Discovery Based on Past User Experience

Web service technology provides a way for simplifying interoperability among different organizations. A piece of functionality available as a web service can be involved in a new business process. Given the steadily growing number of available web services, it is hard for developers to find services appropriate for their needs. The main research efforts in this area are oriented on developing a mechanism for semantic web service description and matching. In this paper, we present an alternative approach for supporting users in web service discovery. Our system implements the implicit culture approach for recommending web services to developers based on the history of decisions made by other developers with similar needs. We explain the main ideas underlying our approach and report on experimental results

Development of a Mathematical Model for Analyzing the Performance of Operators of Web-oriented Information Systems

The issue of developing a mathematical model for estimating the dynamics of changes in the performance of operators of web-oriented information systems is considered. The relevance of these systems is shown both for the evaluation of the effectiveness of the units’ activities and for the formation of the psychological climate of the collective. The generality of the solution of this issue and the issues of revealing abnormal behavior as a sign of harmful activity is described. The applicability of this approach for assessing the quality of interface updates of the system is underlined. The proposed mathematical model and the numerical algorithm for its building are thoroughly disassembled. A description of the system for evaluating the performance of operators of the ERP system of the National Research Nuclear University MEPhI, developed on the basis of this model, is given. Conclusions are drawn about the applicability of the proposed mathematical model.       Keywords: mathematical model, employee behavior, psychological climate of the team, detection of abnormal behavior, information system, Ruby on Rails, evaluation of the quality of interfaces, monitoring of operations, performance loss factors, criminal or illegal activit

Lessons Learned from Applying Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Techniques to the Redesign of a User Interface

This research details the finding on web page design principles focusing on the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) aspect. The focus was derived from the Top Ten (10) Web Page Design Mistakes (2003) by Jakob Nielsen, a well-known guru of HCI and usability. In this technological era, there are thousands and millions of web sites and pages but how many of these pages are properly designed? Web page designers nowadays focus too much on the functionality of a system instead interface design which actually projects an application's uniqueness and key messages that creates the desired emotional response from the users involved The objectives of this research includes investigation of principles applied in HCI for web page interface design, redefinition of the erroneous web pages and formulation of domain-specific rules to ensure the effectiveness, practicality and acceptance of these techniques. Usability lab testing, questionnaires, prototype screens are done to focus on evaluation, based on the usability criteria of web pages identified from many credible sources. This research was done based on the fact that Internet users' preference and ease of browsing plays a vital role in deciding the acceptance of a web page. A powerful system would be left behind by users if it is not user friendly or designed according to the standards, principles and guidelines of HCI. The methodology used concentrates on a problem-specified framework which was developed by the author. There were six (6) processes involved namely Identification of target users, User consultation, Task analysis, Usability and accessibility assurance, Consideration of web design issues and Formulation of user interface design specification. The final result of this study is a domain specific guideline of HCI for web page design customized for profit making organizations and individuals. In conclusion, HCI principles is inseparable when it comes to web designing issues and this will continue to be vital as long as web page exist and is used by many