Leveraging Semantic Web Service Descriptions for Validation by Automated Functional Testing

Recent years have seen the utilisation of Semantic Web Service descriptions for automating a wide range of service-related activities, with a primary focus on service discovery, composition, execution and mediation. An important area which so far has received less attention is service validation, whereby advertised services are proven to conform to required behavioural specifications. This paper proposes a method for validation of service-oriented systems through automated functional testing. The method leverages ontology-based and rule-based descriptions of service inputs, outputs, preconditions and effects (IOPE) for constructing a stateful EFSM specification. The specification is subsequently utilised for functional testing and validation using the proven Stream X-machine (SXM) testing methodology. Complete functional test sets are generated automatically at an abstract level and are then applied to concrete Web services, using test drivers created from the Web service descriptions. The testing method comes with completeness guarantees and provides a strong method for validating the behaviour of Web services

Reconciling Web service failing interactions. Toward an approach based on automatic generation of mediators

International audienceInteractions between Web services are based on interfaces which describe Web services on both structural and behavioural perspectives. It can happen that the interface provided by a service does no longer match (for instance, because of an evolution) the interface required by its partners. In this situation, and until the required interfaces are fixed, interactions cannot succeed. To address this issue, and focusing on the behavioural part of interfaces, we propose an approach based on a mediator, automatically generated, which aims to seamlessly resolve incompatibilities during service interactions

Extraction and integration of data from semi-structured documents into business applications

Cover title.Includes bibliographical references (p. 8).Ph. Bonnet & S. Bressan

Semantic-based policy engineering for autonomic systems

This paper presents some important directions in the use of ontology-based semantics in achieving the vision of Autonomic Communications. We examine the requirements of Autonomic Communication with a focus on the demanding needs of ubiquitous computing environments, with an emphasis on the requirements shared with Autonomic Computing. We observe that ontologies provide a strong mechanism for addressing the heterogeneity in user task requirements, managed resources, services and context. We then present two complimentary approaches that exploit ontology-based knowledge in support of autonomic communications: service-oriented models for policy engineering and dynamic semantic queries using content-based networks. The paper concludes with a discussion of the major research challenges such approaches raise

The presence of the analyst in Lacanian treatment

Transference implies the actualization of the analyst in the analytic encounter. Lacan developed this idea through the syntagm presence of the analyst. In the course of his seminars, however, two completely different presences emerge, with major implications for how the treatment is directed. In the light of Lacan's idea that the transference is constituted in Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary dimensions, it can be seen how in his early work the analyst's presence is a phenomenon at the crossroads between signifiers and images. From the 1960s onward, however, the analyst's presence comes to necessarily involve the Real. This means it points to the moment at which symbolization reaches its limits. The clinical implications of this later interpretation of the presence of the analyst as incorporating the Real are manifold and affect psychoanalytic practice with regard to the position and the interventions of the analyst. Specifically, interventions targeted at provoking changes in defenses against experiences of excess or senselessness are discussed and illustrated with case vignettes and a published case. With transference considered the navel of the treatment, the necessity that traumatic material will emerge in relation to the analyst becomes clear

Correctness of services and their composition

We study correctness of services and their composition and investigate how the design of correct service compositions can be systematically supported. We thereby focus on the communication protocol of the service and approach these questions using formal methods and make contributions to three scenarios of SOC.Wir studieren die Korrektheit von Services und Servicekompositionen und untersuchen, wie der Entwurf von korrekten Servicekompositionen systematisch unterstützt werden kann. Wir legen dabei den Fokus auf das Kommunikationsprotokoll der Services. Mithilfe von formalen Methoden tragen wir zu drei Szenarien von SOC bei

Application-Layer Connector Synthesis

International audienceThe heterogeneity characterizing the systems populating the Ubiquitous Computing environment prevents their seamless interoperability. Heterogeneous protocols may be willing to cooperate in order to reach some common goal even though they meet dynamically and do not have a priori knowledge of each other. Despite numerous e orts have been done in the literature, the automated and run-time interoperability is still an open challenge for such environment. We consider interoperability as the ability for two Networked Systems (NSs) to communicate and correctly coordinate to achieve their goal(s). In this chapter we report the main outcomes of our past and recent research on automatically achieving protocol interoperability via connector synthesis. We consider application-layer connectors by referring to two conceptually distinct notions of connector: coordinator and mediator. The former is used when the NSs to be connected are already able to communicate but they need to be speci cally coordinated in order to reach their goal(s). The latter goes a step forward representing a solution for both achieving correct coordination and enabling communication between highly heterogeneous NSs. In the past, most of the works in the literature described e orts to the automatic synthesis of coordinators while, in recent years the focus moved also to the automatic synthesis of mediators. Within the Connect project, by considering our past experience on automatic coordinator synthesis as a baseline, we propose a formal theory of mediators and a related method for automatically eliciting a way for the protocols to interoperate. The solution we propose is the automated synthesis of emerging mediating connectors (i.e., mediators for short)

MDDQL: an ontology driven, multi-lingual query language and system for an integrated view of heterogeneous data sources

Query languages and keywords based search engines are conventionally specified and implemented with the emphasis put on syntactic rules to which query typing and answering must be bound. MDDQL is a query language and system that operates on a semantic model in terms of a graph based ontology. As a software technology, MDDQL allows the meaning of/and associations between information to be known and processed at execution time at following levels: (a) driving the user to the construction of, as meaningful as possible, queries with an advanced concept-based search method, (b) resolving high level queries into various data source specific query statements. In addition, queries can be posed in more than one natural sub-language. The major goal behind this approach has been the simplification and scalability of both tasks: query construction, even within multi-lingual user communities, and addressing of a large number of possibly semantically heterogeneous data sources in a distributed environment