Web Service Discovery Based on Past User Experience

Web service technology provides a way for simplifying interoperability among different organizations. A piece of functionality available as a web service can be involved in a new business process. Given the steadily growing number of available web services, it is hard for developers to find services appropriate for their needs. The main research efforts in this area are oriented on developing a mechanism for semantic web service description and matching. In this paper, we present an alternative approach for supporting users in web service discovery. Our system implements the implicit culture approach for recommending web services to developers based on the history of decisions made by other developers with similar needs. We explain the main ideas underlying our approach and report on experimental results

EXPRESS: Resource-oriented and RESTful Semantic Web services

This thesis investigates an approach that simplifies the development of Semantic Web services (SWS) by removing the need for additional semantic descriptions.The most actively researched approaches to Semantic Web services introduce explicit semantic descriptions of services that are in addition to the existing semantic descriptions of the service domains. This increases their complexity and design overhead. The need for semantically describing the services in such approaches stems from their foundations in service-oriented computing, i.e. the extension of already existing service descriptions. This thesis demonstrates that adopting a resource-oriented approach based on REST will, in contrast to service-oriented approaches, eliminate the need for explicit semantic service descriptions and service vocabularies. This reduces the development efforts while retaining the significant functional capabilities.The approach proposed in this thesis, called EXPRESS (Expressing RESTful Semantic Services), utilises the similarities between REST and the Semantic Web, such as resource realisation, self-describing representations, and uniform interfaces. The semantics of a service is elicited from a resource’s semantic description in the domain ontology and the semantics of the uniform interface, hence eliminating the need for additional semantic descriptions. Moreover, stub-generation is a by-product of the mapping between entities in the domain ontology and resources.EXPRESS was developed to test the feasibility of eliminating explicit service descriptions and service vocabularies or ontologies, to explore the restrictions placed on domain ontologies as a result, to investigate the impact on the semantic quality of the description, and explore the benefits and costs to developers. To achieve this, an online demonstrator that allows users to generate stubs has been developed. In addition, a matchmaking experiment was conducted to show that the descriptions of the services are comparable to OWL-S in terms of their ability to be discovered, while improving the efficiency of discovery. Finally, an expert review was undertaken which provided evidence of EXPRESS’s simplicity and practicality when developing SWS from scratch

Adaptive object management for distributed systems

This thesis describes an architecture supporting the management of pluggable software components and evaluates it against the requirement for an enterprise integration platform for the manufacturing and petrochemical industries. In a distributed environment, we need mechanisms to manage objects and their interactions. At the least, we must be able to create objects in different processes on different nodes; we must be able to link them together so that they can pass messages to each other across the network; and we must deliver their messages in a timely and reliable manner. Object based environments which support these services already exist, for example ANSAware(ANSA, 1989), DEC's Objectbroker(ACA,1992), Iona's Orbix(Orbix,1994)Yet such environments provide limited support for composing applications from pluggable components. Pluggability is the ability to install and configure a component into an environment dynamically when the component is used, without specifying static dependencies between components when they are produced. Pluggability is supported to a degree by dynamic binding. Components may be programmed to import references to other components and to explore their interfaces at runtime, without using static type dependencies. Yet thus overloads the component with the responsibility to explore bindings. What is still generally missing is an efficient general-purpose binding model for managing bindings between independently produced components. In addition, existing environments provide no clear strategy for dealing with fine grained objects. The overhead of runtime binding and remote messaging will severely reduce performance where there are a lot of objects with complex patterns of interaction. We need an adaptive approach to managing configurations of pluggable components according to the needs and constraints of the environment. Management is made difficult by embedding bindings in component implementations and by relying on strong typing as the only means of verifying and validating bindings. To solve these problems we have built a set of configuration tools on top of an existing distributed support environment. Specification tools facilitate the construction of independent pluggable components. Visual composition tools facilitate the configuration of components into applications and the verification of composite behaviours. A configuration model is constructed which maintains the environmental state. Adaptive management is made possible by changing the management policy according to this state. Such policy changes affect the location of objects, their bindings, and the choice of messaging system

Design tools for ontology-based network communication protocols

Internet of Things has evolved quickly and reached to every aspect of our lives over the years. The number of new heterogeneous, distributed devices and applications connecting to the Internet is growing exponentially every day. As a result, data interoperability has become a prerequisite for IoT networks. However, the current infrastructures and communication protocols do not provide a convenient way for applications from different domains to interpret and process each other’s data, which is stored in vastly diversified, non-standardized formats. Due to this lack of common ground, in many cases, the integration overhead hinders organisations from exchanging their data to generate business values. Semantic technologies would be a promising solution for these issues, thanks to its ability to capture the high-level meaning of data. Asema is developing SmartAPI, a semantics-based API framework for sharing data between IoT systems. This thesis work is a part of SmartAPI project, focuses on designing and developing a data designer application. I build a single page web application with a modern graphical user interface, allowing users to create, organise and share data models

Models of higher-order, type-safe, distributed computation over autonomous persistent object stores

A remote procedure call (RPC) mechanism permits the calling of procedures in another address space. RPC is a simple but highly effective mechanism for interprocess communication and enjoys nowadays a great popularity as a tool for building distributed applications. This popularity is partly a result of their overall simplicity but also partly a consequence of more than 20 years of research in transpaxent distribution that have failed to deliver systems that meet the expectations of real-world application programmers. During the same 20 years, persistent systems have proved their suitability for building complex database applications by seamlessly integrating features traditionally found in database management systems into the programming language itself. Some research. effort has been invested on distributed persistent systems, but the outcomes commonly suffer from the same problems found with transparent distribution. In this thesis I claim that a higher-order persistent RPC is useful for building distributed persistent applications. The proposed mechanism is: realistic in the sense that it uses current technology and tolerates partial failures; understandable by application programmers; and general to support the development of many classes of distributed persistent applications. In order to demonstrate the validity of these claims, I propose and have implemented three models for distributed higher-order computation over autonomous persistent stores. Each model has successively exposed new problems which have then been overcome by the next model. Together, the three models provide a general yet simple higher-order persistent RPC that is able to operate in realistic environments with partial failures. The real strength of this thesis is the demonstration of realism and simplicity. A higherorder persistent RPC was not only implemented but also used by programmers without experience of programming distributed applications. Furthermore, a distributed persistent application has been built using these models which would not have been feasible with a traditional (non-persistent) programming language

SmartUnit: Empirical Evaluations for Automated Unit Testing of Embedded Software in Industry

In this paper, we aim at the automated unit coverage-based testing for embedded software. To achieve the goal, by analyzing the industrial requirements and our previous work on automated unit testing tool CAUT, we rebuild a new tool, SmartUnit, to solve the engineering requirements that take place in our partner companies. SmartUnit is a dynamic symbolic execution implementation, which supports statement, branch, boundary value and MC/DC coverage. SmartUnit has been used to test more than one million lines of code in real projects. For confidentiality motives, we select three in-house real projects for the empirical evaluations. We also carry out our evaluations on two open source database projects, SQLite and PostgreSQL, to test the scalability of our tool since the scale of the embedded software project is mostly not large, 5K-50K lines of code on average. From our experimental results, in general, more than 90% of functions in commercial embedded software achieve 100% statement, branch, MC/DC coverage, more than 80% of functions in SQLite achieve 100% MC/DC coverage, and more than 60% of functions in PostgreSQL achieve 100% MC/DC coverage. Moreover, SmartUnit is able to find the runtime exceptions at the unit testing level. We also have reported exceptions like array index out of bounds and divided-by-zero in SQLite. Furthermore, we analyze the reasons of low coverage in automated unit testing in our setting and give a survey on the situation of manual unit testing with respect to automated unit testing in industry.Comment: In Proceedings of 40th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice Track, Gothenburg, Sweden, May 27-June 3, 2018 (ICSE-SEIP '18), 10 page

Combining SOA and BPM Technologies for Cross-System Process Automation

This paper summarizes the results of an industry case study that introduced a cross-system business process automation solution based on a combination of SOA and BPM standard technologies (i.e., BPMN, BPEL, WSDL). Besides discussing major weaknesses of the existing, custom-built, solution and comparing them against experiences with the developed prototype, the paper presents a course of action for transforming the current solution into the proposed solution. This includes a general approach, consisting of four distinct steps, as well as specific action items that are to be performed for every step. The discussion also covers language and tool support and challenges arising from the transformation