Planning and managing the cost of compromise for AV retention and access

Long-term retention and access to audiovisual (AV) assets as part of a preservation strategy inevitably involve some form of compromise in order to achieve acceptable levels of cost, throughput, quality, and many other parameters. Examples include quality control and throughput in media transfer chains; data safety and accessibility in digital storage systems; and service levels for ingest and access for archive functions delivered as services. We present new software tools and frameworks developed in the PrestoPRIME project that allow these compromises to be quantitatively assessed, planned, and managed for file-based AV assets. Our focus is how to give an archive an assurance that when they design and operate a preservation strategy as a set of services, it will function as expected and will cope with the inevitable and often unpredictable variations that happen in operation. This includes being able to do cost projections, sensitivity analysis, simulation of “disaster scenarios,” and to govern preservation services using service-level agreements and policies

Taming the cloud: Safety, certification and compliance for software services - Keynote at the Workshop on Engineering Service-Oriented Applications (WESOA) 2011

The maturity of IT processes, such as software development, can be and is often certified. Current trends in the IT industry suggest that software systems in the future will be very different from their counterparts today, with an increasing adoption of the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) design pattern and the deployment of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) on Cloud infrastructures. In this talk we discuss some issues surrounding engineering Software Services for Cloud infrastructures and highlight the need for enhanced control, service-level agreement and compliance mechanisms for Software Services. Cloud Infrastructures and Service Mash-ups

IT-Services und ASP

PRINTAUSGABE: 1 CD enthalten! -- Gegenstand der hier vorgestellten Magisterarbeit sind das Design und die Erstellung eines Service-Katalogs für einen Application Service Provider (ASPs). ASPs sind IT-Dienstleister, die ihren Kunden IT-Services auf Mietbasis über das Internet zur Verfügung stellen. Service-Kataloge sind Dokumente zur Definition und Dokumentation des Leistungsspektrums einer IT-Organisation. Sie fungieren als Schnittstelle zwischen dem internen Leistungsangebot eines Service-Providers und den Anforderungen der Geschäftsprozesse seiner Kunden. Der Gebrauch eines Service-Katalogs geht mit einer Reihe von Vorteilen wie steigender Kunden- und Serviceorientierung, sowie erhöhter Flexibilität bei der Produkt- und Preisgestaltung einher. In Anlehnung an das IT-Service-Management Framework ITIL, werden im Rahmen dieser Arbeit die notwendigen Schritte zur Erstellung eines Service-Katalogs für einen ASP aus theoretischer und aus praktischer Perspektive erläutert. Zu Beginn des Theorieteils, werden auf Basis einer Analyse des ASP-Geschäftsmodells, der Wertschöpfungskette, geeigneter Software, sowie der technischen Infrastruktur, die für einen ASP benötigten IT-Services ermittelt. Anschließend werden wichtige Aspekte des IT-Service-Managements mit ITIL besprochen. Das Hauptaugenmerk liegt hierbei auf der Festlegung des Begriffs „IT-Service“ und seiner konstituierenden Elemente, sowie der Spezifikation von Struktur und Inhalt von Service-Katalogen und Service-Level-Agreements. In weiterer Folge werden Modelle zur qualitativen Abstufung der Service-Level in den Service-Level-Agreements erläutert. Der Abschluß des theoretischen Teils widmet sich der Kalkulation und Verrechnung von IT-Services. Die Herausforderung liegt hierbei in der verursachungsgerech-ten kunden- und servicebasierten Kostenermittlung. Im Praxisteil werden die zuvor erlangten Erkenntnisse anhand eines Fallbeispiels angewandt. Unter Einsatz des IT-Architektur und Service-Management Tools ADOit® wird die IT-Service-Architektur eines fiktiven ASPs modelliert und ein HTML-basierter Service-Katalog generiert. Das erstellte Service-Angebot wird in weiterer Folge einer monetären Bewertung unterzogen.This thesis addresses the design and creation of a service-catalogue for an Application Service Provider (ASP). ASPs are businesses which deliver IT-services to their customers on a rental basis over the internet. Service-catalogues are documents containing a detailed summary of the IT-services and capabilities offered by a service-provider. They serve as an interface be-tween internal IT-capabilities and business process demands of customers. Furthermore ser-vice-catalogues deliver benefits, such as ascending customer- and service-orientation and in-creasing flexibility in terms of service-developement and service-accounting. Following the instructions of the IT-service-management framework ITIL, this thesis examines the neces-sary steps for the creation of a service-catalog for an ASP from an academic and from a prac-tical perspective. At the beginning, the analysis of the ASP-business model, value chain, appropriate software and technical infrastructure serves as a foundation to derivate the IT-services required to run an ASP-business. Subsequently this diploma thesis illuminates various aspects of the disci-pline of IT-service management within ITIL. The main focus here is to unify the term “ser-vice”, to specify structure and contents of the service-catalogue and to assess the “service-elements” which constitute a service within the service-catalogue. Moreover the definition of varying service-levels within a service-level-agreement is beeing discussed. As a final step, the academic part attends to proceedings of costing and charging IT-services. At this, the main challange is to develope a usage-based method to determine cost per service and per customer. The practical part of this thesis applies many aspects of the findings compiled before. The architecture and service-management tool ADOit® is utilized to shape the service-architecture of a ficticious ASP and therefom automatically generate an HTML-based service-catalogue. In a further step, the services defined are beeing calculated and priced

Model Based Development of Quality-Aware Software Services

Modelling languages and development frameworks give support for functional and structural description of software architectures. But quality-aware applications require languages which allow expressing QoS as a first-class concept during architecture design and service composition, and to extend existing tools and infrastructures adding support for modelling, evaluating, managing and monitoring QoS aspects. In addition to its functional behaviour and internal structure, the developer of each service must consider the fulfilment of its quality requirements. If the service is flexible, the output quality depends both on input quality and available resources (e.g., amounts of CPU execution time and memory). From the software engineering point of view, modelling of quality-aware requirements and architectures require modelling support for the description of quality concepts, support for the analysis of quality properties (e.g. model checking and consistencies of quality constraints, assembly of quality), tool support for the transition from quality requirements to quality-aware architectures, and from quality-aware architecture to service run-time infrastructures. Quality management in run-time service infrastructures must give support for handling quality concepts dynamically. QoS-aware modeling frameworks and QoS-aware runtime management infrastructures require a common evolution to get their integration

HaIRST: Harvesting Institutional Resources in Scotland Testbed. Final Project Report

The HaIRST project conducted research into the design, implementation and deployment of a pilot service for UK-wide access of autonomously created institutional resources in Scotland, the aim being to investigate and advise on some of the technical, cultural, and organisational requirements associated with the deposit, disclosure, and discovery of institutional resources in the JISC Information Environment. The project involved a consortium of Scottish higher and further education institutions, with significant assistance from the Scottish Library and Information Council. The project investigated the use of technologies based on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), including the implementation of OAI-compatible repositories for metadata which describe and link to institutional digital resources, the use of the OAI protocol for metadata harvesting (OAI-PMH) to automatically copy the metadata from multiple repositories to a central repository, and the creation of a service to search and identify resources described in the central repository. An important aim of the project was to identify issues of metadata interoperability arising from the requirements of individual institutional repositories and their impact on services based on the aggregation of metadata through harvesting. The project also sought to investigate issues in using these technologies for a wide range of resources including learning, teaching and administrative materials as well as the research and scholarly communication materials considered by many of the other projects in the JISC Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme, of which HaIRST was a part. The project tested and implemented a number of open source software packages supporting OAI, and was successful in creating a pilot service which provides effective information retrieval of a range of resources created by the project consortium institutions. The pilot service has been extended to cover research and scholarly communication materials produced by other Scottish universities, and administrative materials produced by a non-educational institution in Scotland. It is an effective testbed for further research and development in these areas. The project has worked extensively with a new OAI standard for 'static repositories' which offers a low-barrier, low-cost mechanism for participation in OAI-based consortia by smaller institutions with a low volume of resources. The project identified and successfully tested tools for transforming pre-existing metadata into a format compliant with OAI standards. The project identified and assessed OAI-related documentation in English from around the world, and has produced metadata for retrieving and accessing it. The project created a Web-based advisory service for institutions and consortia. The OAI Scotland Information Service (OAISIS) provides links to related standards, guidance and documentation, and discusses the findings of HaIRST relating to interoperability and the pilot harvesting service. The project found that open source packages relating to OAI can be installed and made to interoperate to create a viable method of sharing institutional resources within a consortium. HaIRST identified issues affecting the interoperability of shared metadata and suggested ways of resolving them to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of shared information retrieval environments based on OAI. The project demonstrated that application of OAI technologies to administrative materials is an effective way for institutions to meet obligations under Freedom of Information legislation

Autonomous Agents for Business Process Management

Traditional approaches to managing business processes are often inadequate for large-scale organisation-wide, dynamic settings. However, since Internet and Intranet technologies have become widespread, an increasing number of business processes exhibit these properties. Therefore, a new approach is needed. To this end, we describe the motivation, conceptualization, design, and implementation of a novel agent-based business process management system. The key advance of our system is that responsibility for enacting various components of the business process is delegated to a number of autonomous problem solving agents. To enact their role, these agents typically interact and negotiate with other agents in order to coordinate their actions and to buy in the services they require. This approach leads to a system that is significantly more agile and robust than its traditional counterparts. To help demonstrate these benefits, a companion paper describes the application of our system to a real-world problem faced by British Telecom