A conceptual model for semantically-based e-government portals

Issues of semantic interoperability and service integration for e-government portals are the domain of interest of the present paper. We propose a Conceptual Model for One-Stop e-Government Portals based on the Semantic Web Service technology. We describe our research into building the three basic ontologies and their integration with standard ontologies. The result is a project-independent reusable model. At the same time, we outline a simple methodology for applying the proposed conceptual model into a specific scenario

Web service control of component-based agile manufacturing systems

Current global business competition has resulted in significant challenges for manufacturing and production sectors focused on shorter product lifecyc1es, more diverse and customized products as well as cost pressures from competitors and customers. To remain competitive, manufacturers, particularly in automotive industry, require the next generation of manufacturing paradigms supporting flexible and reconfigurable production systems that allow quick system changeovers for various types of products. In addition, closer integration of shop floor and business systems is required as indicated by the research efforts in investigating "Agile and Collaborative Manufacturing Systems" in supporting the production unit throughout the manufacturing lifecycles. The integration of a business enterprise with its shop-floor and lifecycle supply partners is currently only achieved through complex proprietary solutions due to differences in technology, particularly between automation and business systems. The situation is further complicated by the diverse types of automation control devices employed. Recently, the emerging technology of Service Oriented Architecture's (SOA's) and Web Services (WS) has been demonstrated and proved successful in linking business applications. The adoption of this Web Services approach at the automation level, that would enable a seamless integration of business enterprise and a shop-floor system, is an active research topic within the automotive domain. If successful, reconfigurable automation systems formed by a network of collaborative autonomous and open control platform in distributed, loosely coupled manufacturing environment can be realized through a unifying platform of WS interfaces for devices communication. The adoption of SOA- Web Services on embedded automation devices can be achieved employing Device Profile for Web Services (DPWS) protocols which encapsulate device control functionality as provided services (e.g. device I/O operation, device state notification, device discovery) and business application interfaces into physical control components of machining automation. This novel approach supports the possibility of integrating pervasive enterprise applications through unifying Web Services interfaces and neutral Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) message communication between control systems and business applications over standard Ethernet-Local Area Networks (LAN's). In addition, the re-configurability of the automation system is enhanced via the utilisation of Web Services throughout an automated control, build, installation, test, maintenance and reuse system lifecycle via device self-discovery provided by the DPWS protocol...cont'd

A Geospatial Service Model and Catalog for Discovery and Orchestration

The goal of this research is to provide a supporting Web services architecture, consisting of a service model and catalog, to allow discovery and automatic orchestration of geospatial Web services. First, a methodology for supporting geospatial Web services with existing orchestration tools is presented. Geospatial services are automatically translated into SOAP/WSDL services by a portable service wrapper. Their data layers are exposed as atomic functions while WSDL extensions provide syntactic metadata. Compliant services are modeled using the descriptive logic capabilities of the Ontology Language for the Web (OWL). The resulting geospatial service model has a number of functions. It provides a basic taxonomy of geospatial Web services that is useful for templating service compositions. It also contains the necessary annotations to allow discovery of services. Importantly, the model defines a number of logical relationships between its internal concepts which allow inconsistency detection for the model as a whole and for individual service instances as they are added to the catalog. These logical relationships have the additional benefit of supporting automatic classification of geospatial services individuals when they are added to the service catalog. The geospatial service catalog is backed by the descriptive logic model. It supports queries which are more complex that those available using standard relational data models, such as the capability to query using concept hierarchies. An example orchestration system demonstrates the use of the geospatial service catalog for query evaluation in an automatic orchestration system (both fully and semi-automatic orchestration). Computational complexity analysis and experimental performance analysis identify potential performance problems in the geospatial service catalog. Solutions to these performance issues are presented in the form of partitioning service instance realization, low cost pre-filtering of service instances, and pre-processing realization. The resulting model and catalog provide an architecture to support automatic orchestration capable of complementing the multiple service composition algorithms that currently exist. Importantly, the geospatial service model and catalog go beyond simply supporting orchestration systems. By providing a general solution to the modeling and discovery of geospatial Web services they are useful in any geospastial Web service enterprise

RESTful Service Composition

The Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has become one of the most popular approaches to building large-scale network applications. The web service technologies are de facto the default implementation for SOA. Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is the key and fundamental technology of web services. Service composition is a way to deliver complex services based on existing partner services. Service orchestration with the support of Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WSBPEL) is the dominant approach of web service composition. WSBPEL-based service orchestration inherited the issue of interoperability from SOAP, and it was furthermore challenged for performance, scalability, reliability and modifiability. I present an architectural approach for service composition in this thesis to address these challenges. An architectural solution is so generic that it can be applied to a large spectrum of problems. I name the architectural style RESTful Service Composition (RSC), because many of its elements and constraints are derived from Representational State Transfer (REST). REST is an architectural style developed to describe the architectural style of the Web. The Web has demonstrated outstanding interoperability, performance, scalability, reliability and modifiability. RSC is designed for service composition on the Internet. The RSC style is composed on specific element types, including RESTful service composition client, RESTful partner proxy, composite resource, resource client, functional computation and relaying service. A service composition is partitioned into stages; each stage is represented as a computation that has a uniform identifier and a set of uniform access methods; and the transitions between stages are driven by computational batons. RSC is supplemented by a programming model that emphasizes on-demand function, map-reduce and continuation passing. An RSC-style composition does not depend on either a central conductor service or a common choreography specification, which makes it different from service orchestration or service choreography. Four scenarios are used to evaluate the performance, scalability, reliability and modifiability improvement of the RSC approach compared to orchestration. An RSC-style solution and an orchestration solution are compared side by side in every scenario. The first scenario evaluates the performance improvement of the X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) application in ScienceStudio; the second scenario evaluates the scalability improvement of the Process Variable (PV) snapshot application; the third scenario evaluates the reliability improvement of a notification application by simulation; and the fourth scenario evaluates the modifiability improvement of the XRD application in order to fulfil emerging requirements. The results show that the RSC approach outperforms the orchestration approach in every aspect

Modeling the dynamics of web-based service and resource-oriented digital ecosystems

The notion of digital species is broadened to include services and resources, special issues arise in modeling the dynamics and workflows with representations associated with these services and resources. To address these issues, this paper explores two different yet related approaches: the traditional BPEL-based workflow modeling approach and the Mashupbased Web approach. In this paper, we first demonstrate two examples of service-oriented and resource-oriented digital ecosystems on the Web. We then identify key issues pertinent to both types of DES. We discuss formal definition, specifications and issues of BPEL-based approach and Mashup-based modeling techniques with computational formalisms. Finally, we propose a hybrid approach to deal with modeling the dynamicsin processes associated with such Digital Ecosystems