An Open System for Social Computation

Part of the power of social computation comes from using the collective intelligence of humans to tame the aggregate uncertainty of (otherwise) low veracity data obtained from human and automated sources. We have witnessed a surge in development of social computing systems but, ironically, there have been few attempts to generalise across this activity so that creation of the underlying mechanisms themselves can be made more social. We describe a method for achieving this by standardising patterns of social computation via lightweight formal specifications (we call these social artifacts) that can be connected to existing internet architectures via a single model of computation. Upon this framework we build a mechanism for extracting provenance meta-data across social computations

Final CHOReOS Architectural Style and its Relation with the CHOReOS Development Process and IDRE

This is Part b of Deliverable D1.4, which specifies the final CHOReOS architectural style, that is, the types of components, connectors, and configurations that are composed within the Future Internet of services, as enabled by the CHOReOS technologies developed in WP2 to WP4 and integrated in the WP5 IDRE. The definition of the CHOReOS architectural style is especially guided by the objective of meeting the challenges posed by the Future Internet, i.e.: (i) the ultra large base of services and of consumers, (ii) the high heterogeneity of the services that get composed, from the ones offered by tiny things to the ones hosted on powerful cloud computing infrastructures, (iii) the increasing predominance of mobile consumers and services, which take over the original fixed Inter- net, and (iv) the required awareness of, and related adaptation to, the continuous environmental changes. Another critical challenge posed by the Future Internet is that of security, trust and privacy. However, the study of technologies dedicated to enforcing security, privacy and trust is beyond the scope of the CHOReOS project; instead, state of the art technologies and possibly latest results from projects focused on security solutions are built upon for the development of CHOReOS use cases -if and when needed-. The CHOReOS architectural style that is presented in this deliverable refines the definition of the early style introduced in Deliverable D1.3. Key features of the CHOReOS architectural elements are as follows: (1) The CHOReOS service-based components are technology agnostic and allow for the abstraction of the large diversity of Future Internet services, and particularly traditional Business services as well as Thing-based services; a key contribution of the component formalization lies in the inference of service abstractions that allows grouping services that are functionally similar in a systematic way, and thereby contributes to facing the ULS of the Future Internet together with dealing with system adaptation through service substitution. (2) The CHOReOS middleware-layer connectors span the variety of interaction paradigms, both discrete and continuous, which are used in today's increasingly complex distributed systems, as opposed to enforcing a single interaction paradigm that is commonly undertaken in traditional SOA; a central contribution of the connector formalization is the introduction of a multi-paradigm connector type, which not solely allows having highly heterogeneous services composed in the Future Internet but also having those heterogeneous services interoperating even if based on distinct interaction paradigms. (3) The CHOReOS coordination protocols introduce the third and last type of architectural elements char- acterizing the CHOReOS style. They specifically define the structure and behavior of service-oriented systems within the Future Internet as the fully distributed composition of services, i.e., choreographies; the key contribution of the work lies in a systematic model-based solution to choreography realizability, which synthesizes dedicated coordination delegates that govern the coordination of services

Multi-paradigm modelling for cyber–physical systems: a descriptive framework

The complexity of cyber–physical systems (CPSS) is commonly addressed through complex workflows, involving models in a plethora of different formalisms, each with their own methods, techniques, and tools. Some workflow patterns, combined with particular types of formalisms and operations on models in these formalisms, are used successfully in engineering practice. To identify and reuse them, we refer to these combinations of workflow and formalism patterns as modelling paradigms. This paper proposes a unifying (Descriptive) Framework to describe these paradigms, as well as their combinations. This work is set in the context of Multi-Paradigm Modelling (MPM), which is based on the principle to model every part and aspect of a system explicitly, at the most appropriate level(s) of abstraction, using the most appropriate modelling formalism(s) and workflows. The purpose of the Descriptive Framework presented in this paper is to serve as a basis to reason about these formalisms, workflows, and their combinations. One crucial part of the framework is the ability to capture the structural essence of a paradigm through the concept of a paradigmatic structure. This is illustrated informally by means of two example paradigms commonly used in CPS: Discrete Event Dynamic Systems and Synchronous Data Flow. The presented framework also identifies the need to establish whether a paradigm candidate follows, or qualifies as, a (given) paradigm. To illustrate the ability of the framework to support combining paradigms, the paper shows examples of both workflow and formalism combinations. The presented framework is intended as a basis for characterisation and classification of paradigms, as a starting point for a rigorous formalisation of the framework (allowing formal analyses), and as a foundation for MPM tool development