A flexible service selection for executing virtual services

[EN] With the adoption of a service-oriented paradigm on the Web, many software services are likely to fulfil similar functional needs for end-users. We propose to aggregate functionally equivalent software services within one single virtual service, that is, to associate a functionality, a graphical user interface (GUI), and a set of selection rules. When an end user invokes such a virtual service through its GUI to answer his/her functional need, the software service that best responds to the end-user s selection policy is selected and executed and the result is then rendered to the end-user through the GUI of the virtual service. A key innovation in this paper is the flexibility of our proposed service selection policy. First, each selection policy can refer to heterogeneous parameters (e.g., service price, end-user location, and QoS). Second, additional parameters can be added to an existing or new policy with little investment. Third, the end users themselves define a selection policy to apply during the selection process, thanks to the GUI element added as part of the virtual service design. This approach was validated though the design, implementation, and testing of an end-to-end architecture, including the implementation of several virtual services and utilizing several software services available today on the Web.This work was partially supported in part by SERVERY (Service Platform for Innovative Communication Environment), a CELTIC project that aims to create a Service Marketplace that bridges the Internet and Telco worlds by merging the flexibility and openness of the former with the trustworthiness and reliability of the latter, enabling effective and profitable cooperation among actors.Laga, N.; Bertin, E.; Crespi, N.; Bedini, I.; Molina Moreno, B.; Zhao, Z. (2013). A flexible service selection for executing virtual services. 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Machine-Readable Privacy Certificates for Services

Privacy-aware processing of personal data on the web of services requires managing a number of issues arising both from the technical and the legal domain. Several approaches have been proposed to matching privacy requirements (on the clients side) and privacy guarantees (on the service provider side). Still, the assurance of effective data protection (when possible) relies on substantial human effort and exposes organizations to significant (non-)compliance risks. In this paper we put forward the idea that a privacy certification scheme producing and managing machine-readable artifacts in the form of privacy certificates can play an important role towards the solution of this problem. Digital privacy certificates represent the reasons why a privacy property holds for a service and describe the privacy measures supporting it. Also, privacy certificates can be used to automatically select services whose certificates match the client policies (privacy requirements). Our proposal relies on an evolution of the conceptual model developed in the Assert4Soa project and on a certificate format specifically tailored to represent privacy properties. To validate our approach, we present a worked-out instance showing how privacy property Retention-based unlinkability can be certified for a banking financial service.Comment: 20 pages, 6 figure

Automatic Dynamic Web Service Composition: A Survey and Problem Formalization

The aim of Web service composition is to arrange multiple services into workflows supplying complex user needs. Due to the huge amount of Web services and the need to supply dynamically varying user goals, it is necessary to perform the composition automatically. The objective of this article is to overview the issues of automatic dynamic Web service composition. We discuss the issues related to the semantics of services, which is important for automatic Web service composition. We propose a problem formalization contributing to the formal definition of the pre-/post-conditions, with possible value restrictions, and their relation to the semantics of services. We also provide an overview of several existing approaches dealing with the problem of Web service composition and discuss the current achievements in the field and depict some open research areas

Achieving autonomic Web service compositions with models at runtime

[EN] Several exceptional situations may arise in the complex, heterogeneous, and changing contexts where Web service operations run. For instance, a Web service operation may have greatly increased its execution time or may have become unavailable. The contribution of this article is to provide a tool-supported framework to guide autonomic adjustments of context-aware service compositions using models at runtime. During execution, when problematic events arise in the context, models are used by an autonomic architecture to guide changes of the service composition. Under the closed-world assumption, the possible context events are fully known at design time. Nevertheless, it is difficult to foresee all the possible situations arising in uncertain contexts where service compositions run. Therefore, the proposed framework also covers the dynamic evolution of service compositions to deal with unexpected events in the open world. An evaluation demonstrates that our framework is efficient during dynamic adjustments.Alférez-Salinas, GH.; Pelechano Ferragud, V. (2017). Achieving autonomic Web service compositions with models at runtime. Computers & Electrical Engineering. 63:332-352. doi:10.1016/j.compeleceng.2017.08.004S3323526

An architecture for certification-aware service discovery

Service-orientation is an emerging paradigm for building complex systems based on loosely coupled components, deployed and consumed over the network. Despite the original intent of the paradigm, its current instantiations are limited to a single trust domain (e.g., a single organization). Also, some of the key promises of service-orientation - such as the dynamic orchestration of externally provided software services, using runtime service discovery and deployment - are still unachieved. One of the main reasons for this is the trust gap that normally arises when software services, offered by previously unknown providers, are to be selected at run-time, without any human intervention. To close this gap, the concept of machine-readable security certificates (called asserts) has been recently introduced, which paves the way to automated processing about security properties of services. Similarly to current security certification schemes, the assessment of the security properties of a service is delegated to an independent third party (certification authority), who issues a corresponding assert, bound to the service. In this paper, we propose an architecture, which exploits the assert concept to realise a certification-aware service discovery framework. The architecture supports the discovery of single services based on certified security properties (in additional to the usual functional properties), as well as the dynamic synthesis of service compositions, that satisfy the given security properties. The architecture is extensible, thus allowing for a range of domain specific matchmaking components, to cover dimensions related to, e.g., performance, cost and other non-functional characteristics

Supporting Non-functional Requirements in Services Software Development Process: An MDD Approach

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