Applying KAoS Services to Ensure Policy Compliance for Semantic Web Services Workflow Composition and Enactment

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.In this paper we describe our experience in applying KAoS services to ensure policy compliance for Semantic Web Services workflow composition and enactment. We are developing these capabilities within the context of two applications: Coalition Search and Rescue (CoSAR-TS) and Semantic Firewall (SFW). We describe how this work has uncovered requirements for increasing the expressivity of policy beyond what can be done with description logic (e.g., role-value-maps), and how we are extending our representation and reasoning mechanisms in a carefully controlled manner to that end. Since KAoS employs OWL for policy representation, it fits naturally with the use of OWL-S workflow descriptions generated by the AIAI I-X planning system in the CoSARTS application. The advanced reasoning mechanisms of KAoS are based on the JTP inference engine and enable the analysis of classes and instances of processes from a policy perspective. As the result of analysis, KAoS concludes whether a particular workflow step is allowed by policy and whether the performance of this step would incur additional policy-generated obligations. Issues in the representation of processes within OWL-S are described. Besides what is done during workflow composition, aspects of policy compliance can be checked at runtime when a workflow is enacted. We illustrate these capabilities through two application examples. Finally, we outline plans for future work

Agent Systems for Coalition Search and Rescue Task Support

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.The Coalition Search and Rescue Task Support project shows cooperative agents supporting a highly dynamic mission in which AI task planning, inter-agent collaboration, workflow enactment, policy-managed services, semantic web queries, semantic web services matchmaking and knowledge-based notifications are employed

Coalition Search and Rescue - Task Support: Intelligent Task Achieving Agents on the Semantic Web

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.The Coalition Search and Rescue Task Support (CoSAR-TS) has been a DARPA DAML Program project to provide advanced capabilities linking models of organizational structures, policies, and doctrines with intelligent task support software. The project integrates AIAI’s I-X planning and collaboration technology, IHMC’s KAoS policy and domain services, and Semantic Web Services of various kinds. Search and rescue operations by nature require the kind of rapid dynamic composition of available policy-constrained services making it a good use case for Semantic Web technologies. Other participants in the application include BBN Technologies, SPAWAR, AFRL, and Carnegie Mellon University. At the beginning of the project, the joint AIAI/IHMC aims were: - Development of base technologies respectively I-X/I-Plan and KAoS Policy and Domain Services, - Deployment of the technology in a realistic CoAX agents demonstrator scenario, - Persuasion of closer integration of these two technologies with a perspective of a uniform tool release in the future. These goals were achieved in the subsequent years of the project as follows: - Year 1: Distributed multi-agent systems were developed and integrated with the semantic web in a realistic coalition search and rescue scenario. This culminated in an AAAI-2004 Intelligent Systems Demonstrator for CoSAR-TS. - Year 2: An initial web services composition and policy analysis tool for semantic web services (I-K-C) was implemented. The activity culminated in an IEEE Intelligent Systems journal article and an ISWC 2004 conference paper. Results of the project are available from several web sites including: the CoSAR-TS Project web site, the DAML-program results related SemWebCentral web site, and the I-K-C project web pages at AIAI and IHMC (please see Appendix C for details). The software developed during the project is available for download from the above-mentioned web pages. The projected also produced an impressive list of quality publications that thoroughly documented and publicized the project results in the research and military communities. The technology developed by the project is being used in a further transition effort with JFCOM/JPRA in the Co-OPR project, a seedling for DARPA’s Integrated Battle Command program (http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/co-opr/)

Policy and Contract Management for Semantic Web Services

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.This paper summarizes our efforts to develop capabilities for policy and contract management for Semantic Web Services applications. KAoS services and tools allow for the specification, management, analyzes, disclosure and enforcement of policies represented in OWL. We discuss three current Semantic Web Services applications as examples of the kinds of roles that a policy management framework can play: as an authorization service in grid computing environments, as a distributed policy specification and enforcement capability for a semantic matchmaker, and as a verification tool for services composition and contract management

From social machines to social protocols:Software engineering foundations for sociotechnical systems

The overarching vision of social machines is to facilitate social processes by having computers provide administrative support. We conceive of a social machine as a sociotechnical system (STS): a software-supported system in which autonomous principals such as humans and organizations interact to exchange information and services. Existing approaches for social machines emphasize the technical aspects and inadequately support the meanings of social processes, leaving them informally realized in human interactions. We posit that a fundamental rethinking is needed to incorporate accountability, essential for addressing the openness of the Web and the autonomy of its principals. We introduce Interaction-Oriented Software Engineering (IOSE) as a paradigm expressly suited to capturing the social basis of STSs. Motivated by promoting openness and autonomy, IOSE focuses not on implementation but on social protocols, specifying how social relationships, characterizing the accountability of the concerned parties, progress as they interact. Motivated by providing computational support, IOSE adopts the accountability representation to capture the meaning of a social machine’s states and transitions. We demonstrate IOSE via examples drawn from healthcare. We reinterpret the classical software engineering (SE) principles for the STS setting and show how IOSE is better suited than traditional software engineering for supporting social processes. The contribution of this paper is a new paradigm for STSs, evaluated via conceptual analysis

Coordination fiable de services de données à base de politiques actives

We propose an approach for adding non-functional properties (exception handling, atomicity, security, persistence) to services' coordinations. The approach is based on an Active Policy Model (AP Model) for representing services' coordinations with non-functional properties as a collection of types. In our model, a services' coordination is represented as a workflow composed of an ordered set of activities, each activity in charge of implementing a call to a service' operation. We use the type Activity for representing a workflow and its components (i.e., the workflow' activities and the order among them). A non-functional property is represented as one or several Active Policy types, each policy composed of a set of event-condition-action rules in charge of implementing an aspect of the property. Instances of active policy and activity types are considered in the model as entities that can be executed. We use the Execution Unit type for representing them as entities that go through a series of states at runtime. When an active policy is associated to one or several execution units, its rules verify whether each unit respects the implemented non-functional property by evaluating their conditions over their execution unit state, and when the property is not verified, the rules execute their actions for enforcing the property at runtime. We also proposed a proof of concept Active Policy Execution Engine for executing an active policy oriented workflow modelled using our AP Model. The engine implements an execution model that determines how AP, Rule and Activity instances interact among each other for adding non-functional properties (NFPs) to a workflow at execution time. We validated the AP Model and the Active Policy Execution Engine by defining active policy types for addressing exception handling, atomicity, state management, persistency and authentication properties. These active policy types were used for implementing reliable service oriented applications, and mashups for integrating data from services.Nous proposons une approche pour ajouter des propriétés non-fonctionnelles (traitement d'exceptions, atomicité, sécurité, persistance) à des coordinations de services. L'approche est basée sur un Modèle de Politiques Actives (AP Model) pour représenter les coordinations de services avec des propriétés non-fonctionnelles comme une collection de types. Dans notre modèle, une coordination de services est représentée comme un workflow compose d'un ensemble ordonné d'activité. Chaque activité est en charge d'implante un appel à l'opération d'un service. Nous utilisons le type Activité pour représenter le workflow et ses composants (c-à-d, les activités du workflow et l'ordre entre eux). Une propriété non-fonctionnelle est représentée comme un ou plusieurs types de politiques actives, chaque politique est compose d'un ensemble de règles événement-condition-action qui implantent un aspect d'un propriété. Les instances des entités du modèle, politique active et activité peuvent être exécutées. Nous utilisons le type unité d'exécution pour les représenter comme des entités dont l'exécution passe par des différents états d'exécution en exécution. Lorsqu'une politique active est associée à une ou plusieurs unités d'exécution, les règles vérifient si l'unité d'exécution respecte la propriété non-fonctionnelle implantée en évaluant leurs conditions sur leurs états d'exécution. Lorsqu'une propriété n'est pas vérifiée, les règles exécutant leurs actions pour renforcer les propriétés en cours d'exécution. Nous avons aussi proposé un Moteur d'exécution de politiques actives pour exécuter un workflow orientés politiques actives modélisé en utilisant notre AP Model. Le moteur implante un modèle d'exécution qui détermine comment les instances d'une AP, une règle et une activité interagissent entre elles pour ajouter des propriétés non-fonctionnelles (NFP) à un workflow en cours d'exécution. Nous avons validé le modèle AP et le moteur d'exécution de politiques actives en définissant des types de politiques actives pour adresser le traitement d'exceptions, l'atomicité, le traitement d'état, la persistance et l'authentification. Ces types de politiques actives ont été utilisés pour implanter des applications à base de services fiables, et pour intégrer les données fournies par des services à travers des mashups

Business Process Quality Management

During the past 25 years, research in the field of business process management as well as the practical adoption of corresponding methods and tools have made substantial progress. In particular, this development was driven by the insight that well-managed business processes enable organizations to better serve their stakeholders, save costs and, ultimately, realize competitive advantage. It is therefore not surprising that improving business processes ranks high on the list of priorities of organizations. In practice, this challenge is currently being addressed through approaches such as benchmarking, industry-specific best practice reference models or process reengineering heuristics. However, no systematic and generic proposition towards managing business process quality has achieved broad acceptance yet. To address this gap, this thesis contributes to the field of business process quality management with the results lined out in the following. First, it defines a concise notion of business process quality based on organizational targets, and applies it to a sample real-world case. This definition is not specific to any particular application field, and thus constitutes a vital first step towards systematic and generic business process quality management. On that basis, an approach is developed to model business objectives in the sense of the requirements that shall be fulfilled by the results of a business process. In turn, this approach enables appraising if a business process achieves its business objective as one of the core criteria relevant to business process quality. Further, this thesis proposes extensions to common business process meta-models which enable quality-aware business process modeling, and demonstrates how fundamental quality characteristics can be derived from corresponding models. At this stage, the results achieved have enabled an advanced understanding of business process quality. By means of these insights, a model of business process quality attributes with corresponding quality criteria is developed. This model complements and exceeds preceding approaches since, for the first time, it systematically derives relevant quality attributes from a business process management perspective instead of adopting these from related fields. It enables appraising business process quality independently of a particular field of application, and deriving recommendations to improve the processes assessed. To enable practical adoption of the concepts developed, the integration of procedures and functionality relevant to quality in business process management lifecycles and system landscapes is discussed next. To establish the contribution of this thesis beyond the previous state of the art, the proposed quality model is then compared to existing business process reengineering practices as well as propositions in the area of business process quality. Further, quality attributes are employed to improve a substantial real-world business process. This experience report demonstrates how quality management practices can be applied even if quality-aware system landscapes are not in place yet. It thus contributes to bridging the gap between the research results proposed in this thesis and the conditions present in practice today. Finally, remaining limitations with regard to the research objectives pursued are discussed, and challenges for future research are lined out. Addressing the latter will enable further leveraging the potentials of business process quality management

Semantic Business Process Modeling

This book presents a process-oriented business modeling framework based on semantic technologies. The framework consists of modeling languages, methods, and tools that allow for semantic modeling of business motivation, business policies and rules, and business processes. Quality of the proposed modeling framework is evaluated based on the modeling content of SAP Solution Composer and several real-world business scenarios