INVESTIGATION OF THE ROLE OF SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENTS IN WEB SERVICE QUALITY

Context/Background: Use of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) is crucial to provide the value added services to consumers to achieve their requirements successfully. SLAs also ensure the expected Quality of Service to consumers. Aim: This study investigates how efficient structural representation and management of SLAs can help to ensure the Quality of Service (QoS) in Web services during Web service composition. Method: Existing specifications and structures for SLAs for Web services do not fully formalize and provide support for different automatic and dynamic behavioral aspects needed for QoS calculation. This study addresses the issues on how to formalize and document the structures of SLAs for better service utilization and improved QoS results. The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is extended in this study with addition of an SLAAgent, which helps to automate the QoS calculation using Fuzzy Inference Systems, service discovery, service selection, SLA monitoring and management during service composition with the help of structured SLA documents. Results: The proposed framework improves the ways of how to structure, manage and monitor SLAs during Web service composition to achieve the better Quality of Service effectively and efficiently. Conclusions: To deal with different types of computational requirements the automation of SLAs is a challenge during Web service composition. This study shows the significance of the SLAs for better QoS during composition of services in SOA

ENERGY CONSUMPTION OF MOBILE PHONES

Battery consumption in mobile applications development is a very important aspect and has to be considered by all the developers in their applications. This study will present an analysis of different relevant concepts and parameters that may have an impact on energy consumption of Windows Phone applications. This operating system was chosen because limited research related thereto has been conducted, even though there are related studies for Android and iOS operating systems. Furthermore, another reason is the increasing number of Windows Phone users. The objective of this research is to categorise the energy consumption parameters (e.g. use of one thread or several threads for the same output). The result for each group of experiments will be analysed and a rule will be derived. The set of derived rules will serve as a guide for developers who intend to develop energy efficient Windows Phone applications. For each experiment, one application is created for each concept and the results are presented in two ways; a table and a chart. The table presents the duration of the experiment, the battery consumed in the experiment, the expected battery lifetime, and the energy consumption, while the charts display the energy distribution based on the main threads: UI thread, application thread, and network thread

Using a word knowledge framework to research vocabulary

The study of vocabulary acquisition is not exactly a new area, but previous research and hypothesizing has failed to produce a coherent overall theory which adequately describes it. This is partly because of the complexity of the subject. One method of reducing the complexity is to work with the individual components of vocabulary knowledge, in an attempt to understand the whole by first better understanding the parts. The word knowledge listing proposed by Nation (1990) is adopted in this thesis as a framework from which to study vocabulary. Chapter 1 introduces the word knowledge framework. Chapter 2 provides a literature review which summarizes the research concerning each of the eight types of word knowledge. Chapter 3 reports on a study which attempts to quantify native and non-native intuitions of word frequency. Chapter 4 describes how a procedure for weighting word association responses was developed. Chapter 5 does the same for a measure of collocational knowledge. Chapter 6 applies the word knowledge research paradigm to the evaluation of the vocabulary items on the TOEFL test. Chapter 7 reports on a longitudinal study of four non-native subjects which tracked their incremental acquisition of spelling, association, collocation, grammar, and meaning knowledge for eleven words over one year. Chapter 8 examines the data from the longitudinal study to see if the various kinds of word knowledge are learned in a developmental sequence. Chapter 9 concludes the thesis by giving the author's opinions about the strengths and weaknesses of the reported course of research

Using a word knowledge framework to research vocabulary

The study of vocabulary acquisition is not exactly a new area, but previous research and hypothesizing has failed to produce a coherent overall theory which adequately describes it. This is partly because of the complexity of the subject. One method of reducing the complexity is to work with the individual components of vocabulary knowledge, in an attempt to understand the whole by first better understanding the parts. The word knowledge listing proposed by Nation (1990) is adopted in this thesis as a framework from which to study vocabulary. Chapter 1 introduces the word knowledge framework. Chapter 2 provides a literature review which summarizes the research concerning each of the eight types of word knowledge. Chapter 3 reports on a study which attempts to quantify native and non-native intuitions of word frequency. Chapter 4 describes how a procedure for weighting word association responses was developed. Chapter 5 does the same for a measure of collocational knowledge. Chapter 6 applies the word knowledge research paradigm to the evaluation of the vocabulary items on the TOEFL test. Chapter 7 reports on a longitudinal study of four non-native subjects which tracked their incremental acquisition of spelling, association, collocation, grammar, and meaning knowledge for eleven words over one year. Chapter 8 examines the data from the longitudinal study to see if the various kinds of word knowledge are learned in a developmental sequence. Chapter 9 concludes the thesis by giving the author's opinions about the strengths and weaknesses of the reported course of research