Semantically Resolving Type Mismatches in Scientific Workflows

Scientists are increasingly utilizing Grids to manage large data sets and execute scientific experiments on distributed resources. Scientific workflows are used as means for modeling and enacting scientific experiments. Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) is a major component of Microsoft’s .NET technology which offers lightweight support for long-running workflows. It provides a comfortable graphical and programmatic environment for the development of extended BPEL-style workflows. WF’s visual features ease the syntactic composition of Web services into scientific workflows but do nothing to assure that information passed between services has consistent semantic types or representations or that deviant flows, errors and compensations are handled meaningfully. In this paper we introduce SAWSDL-compliant annotations for WF and use them with a semantic reasoner to guarantee semantic type correctness in scientific workflows. Examples from bioinformatics are presented

Extending OWL-S for the Composition of Web Services Generated With a Legacy Application Wrapper

Despite numerous efforts by various developers, web service composition is still a difficult problem to tackle. Lot of progressive research has been made on the development of suitable standards. These researches help to alleviate and overcome some of the web services composition issues. However, the legacy application wrappers generate nonstandard WSDL which hinder the progress. Indeed, in addition to their lack of semantics, WSDLs have sometimes different shapes because they are adapted to circumvent some technical implementation aspect. In this paper, we propose a method for the semi automatic composition of web services in the context of the NeuroLOG project. In this project the reuse of processing tools relies on a legacy application wrapper called jGASW. The paper describes the extensions to OWL-S in order to introduce and enable the composition of web services generated using the jGASW wrapper and also to implement consistency checks regarding these services.Comment: ICIW 2012, The Seventh International Conference on Internet and Web Applications and Services, Stuttgart : Germany (2012

Analysis and Verification of Service Interaction Protocols - A Brief Survey

Modeling and analysis of interactions among services is a crucial issue in Service-Oriented Computing. Composing Web services is a complicated task which requires techniques and tools to verify that the new system will behave correctly. In this paper, we first overview some formal models proposed in the literature to describe services. Second, we give a brief survey of verification techniques that can be used to analyse services and their interaction. Last, we focus on the realizability and conformance of choreographies.Comment: In Proceedings TAV-WEB 2010, arXiv:1009.330

Multilevel Contracts for Trusted Components

This article contributes to the design and the verification of trusted components and services. The contracts are declined at several levels to cover then different facets, such as component consistency, compatibility or correctness. The article introduces multilevel contracts and a design+verification process for handling and analysing these contracts in component models. The approach is implemented with the COSTO platform that supports the Kmelia component model. A case study illustrates the overall approach.Comment: In Proceedings WCSI 2010, arXiv:1010.233

Facilitating B2B E-business by IT-supported business process negotiation services

Due to the complexity of business transactions and growing business automation demands from the B2B e-business community to swiftly respond to the ever-changing environment, workflow technology has been receiving more attention recently. The increasing popularity and adoption of workflow management system (WfMS) within organisations make workflow-based B2B e-business practically viable since more and more business transactions are implemented as automated processes and executed by WfMSs. Having been viewed as services by many researchers and practitioners, process-driven B2B e-business are conducted through service discovery and runtime execution. However, if there is no existing service provided by a desired business partner that matches the requirement then such a process will have to be negotiated and then created. Unfortunately, direct people-to-people negotiation followed by manual transformation of the negotiation outcome into processdriven services can be very resource consuming. Therefore, it is identified that there is a research gap in computer-aided negotiation approach for process-driven B2B e-business. This paper introduces essentials of workflow technology and negotiation. It then describes ways of capturing elements of negotiation from an operational view point. Finally, it explains how to integrate the IT-supported negotiation services into an overall cross-organisational workflow collaboration (COWCO) supporting framework

A type system for components

In modern distributed systems, dynamic reconfiguration, i.e., changing at runtime the communication pattern of a program, is chal- lenging. Generally, it is difficult to guarantee that such modifications will not disrupt ongoing computations. In a previous paper, a solution to this problem was proposed by extending the object-oriented language ABS with a component model allowing the programmer to: i) perform up- dates on objects by means of communication ports and their rebinding; and ii) precisely specify when such updates can safely occur in an object by means of critical sections. However, improper rebind operations could still occur and lead to runtime errors. The present paper introduces a type system for this component model that extends the ABS type system with the notion of ports and a precise analysis that statically enforces that no object will attempt illegal rebinding

Approaches to Semantic Web Services: An Overview and Comparison

Abstract. The next Web generation promises to deliver Semantic Web Services (SWS); services that are self-described and amenable to automated discovery, composition and invocation. A prerequisite to this, however, is the emergence and evolution of the Semantic Web, which provides the infrastructure for the semantic interoperability of Web Services. Web Services will be augmented with rich formal descriptions of their capabilities, such that they can be utilized by applications or other services without human assistance or highly constrained agreements on interfaces or protocols. Thus, Semantic Web Services have the potential to change the way knowledge and business services are consumed and provided on the Web. In this paper, we survey the state of the art of current enabling technologies for Semantic Web Services. In addition, we characterize the infrastructure of Semantic Web Services along three orthogonal dimensions: activities, architecture and service ontology. Further, we examine and contrast three current approaches to SWS according to the proposed dimensions

IT supported business process negotiation, reconciliation and execution for cross-organisational e-business collaboration

In modern enterprises, workflow technology is commonly used for business process automation. Established business processes represent successful business practice and become a crucial part of corporate assets. In the Internet era, electronic business is chosen by more and more organisations as a preferred way of conducting business practice. In response to the increasing demands for cross-organisational business automation, especially those raised by the B2B electronic commerce community, the concept of collaboration between automated business processes, i.e. workflow collaboration, is emerging. Otherwise, automation would be confined within individual organisations and cross-organisational collaboration would still have to be carried out manually. However, much of the previous research work overlooks the acquisition of the compatible workflows at build time and simply assumes that compatibility is achieved through face-toface negotiation followed by a design from scratch approach that creates collaborative workflows based on the agreement resulted from the negotiation. The resource-intensive and error-prone approach can hardly keep up with the pace of today’s marketplace with increasing transaction volume and complexity. This thesis identifies the requirements for cross-organisational workflow collaboration (COWCO) through an integrated approach, proposes a comprehensive supporting framework, explains the key enabling techniques of the framework, and implements and evaluates them in the form of a prototype system – COWCO-Guru. With the support of such a framework, cross-organisational workflow collaboration can be managed and conducted with reduced human effort, which will further facilitate cross-organisational e-business, especially B2B e-commerce practices

Constructing secure service compositions with patterns

In service based applications, it is often necessary to construct compositions of services in order to provide required functionality in cases where this is not possible through the use of a single service. Whilst creating service compositions, it is necessary to ensure not only that the functionality required of the composition is achieved but also that certain security properties are preserved. In this paper, we describe an approach to constructing secure service compositions. Our approach is based on the use of composition patterns and rules that determine the security properties that should be preserved by the individual services that constitute a composition in order to ensure that security properties of the overall composition are also satisfied. Our approach extends a framework developed to support the runtime service discovery