Semantic Inference on Heterogeneous E-Marketplace Activities

An electronic marketplace (e-marketplace) is a common business information space populated with many entities of different system types. Each of them has its own context of how to process activities. This leads to heterogeneous e-marketplace activities, which are difficult to make interoperable and inferred from one entity to another. This study solves this problem by proposing a concept of separation strategy and implementing it through providing a semantic inference engine with a novel inference algorithm. The solution, called the RuleXPM approach, enables one to semantically infer a next e-marketplace activity across multiple contexts/domains. Experiments show that the cross-context/cross-domain semantic inference is achievable. This paper is an understanding of many aspects related to heterogeneous activity inference

A Configurable Matchmaking Framework for Electronic Marketplaces

E-marketplaces constitute a major enabler of B2B and B2C e-commerce activities. This paper proposes a framework for one of the central activities of e-marketplaces: matchmaking of trading intentions lodged by market participants. The framework identifies a core set of concepts and functions that are common to all types of marketplaces and can serve as the basis for describing the distinct styles of matchmaking employed within various market mechanisms. A prototype implementation of the framework based on Web services technology is presented, illustrating its ability to be dynamically configured to meet specific market needs and its potential to serve as a foundation for more fully fledged e-marketplace frameworks

The Semantic Grid: A future e-Science infrastructure

e-Science offers a promising vision of how computer and communication technology can support and enhance the scientific process. It does this by enabling scientists to generate, analyse, share and discuss their insights, experiments and results in an effective manner. The underlying computer infrastructure that provides these facilities is commonly referred to as the Grid. At this time, there are a number of grid applications being developed and there is a whole raft of computer technologies that provide fragments of the necessary functionality. However there is currently a major gap between these endeavours and the vision of e-Science in which there is a high degree of easy-to-use and seamless automation and in which there are flexible collaborations and computations on a global scale. To bridge this practice–aspiration divide, this paper presents a research agenda whose aim is to move from the current state of the art in e-Science infrastructure, to the future infrastructure that is needed to support the full richness of the e-Science vision. Here the future e-Science research infrastructure is termed the Semantic Grid (Semantic Grid to Grid is meant to connote a similar relationship to the one that exists between the Semantic Web and the Web). In particular, we present a conceptual architecture for the Semantic Grid. This architecture adopts a service-oriented perspective in which distinct stakeholders in the scientific process, represented as software agents, provide services to one another, under various service level agreements, in various forms of marketplace. We then focus predominantly on the issues concerned with the way that knowledge is acquired and used in such environments since we believe this is the key differentiator between current grid endeavours and those envisioned for the Semantic Grid

Regulating Data Exchange in Service Oriented Applications

We define a type system for COWS, a formalism for specifying and combining services, while modelling their dynamic behaviour. Our types permit to express policies constraining data exchanges in terms of sets of service partner names attachable to each single datum. Service programmers explicitly write only the annotations necessary to specify the wanted policies for communicable data, while a type inference system (statically) derives the minimal additional annotations that ensure consistency of services initial configuration. Then, the language dynamic semantics only performs very simple checks to authorize or block communication. We prove that the type system and the operational semantics are sound. As a consequence, we have the following data protection property: services always comply with the policies regulating the exchange of data among interacting services. We illustrate our approach through a simplified but realistic scenario for a service-based electronic marketplace

A conceptual architecture for semantic web services development and deployment

Several extensions of the Web Services Framework (WSF) have been proposed. The combination with Semantic Web technologies introduces a notion of semantics, which can enhance scalability through automation. Service composition to processes is an equally important issue. Ontology technology – the core of the Semantic Web – can be the central building block of an extension endeavour. We present a conceptual architecture for ontology-based Web service development and deployment. The development of service-based software systems within the WSF is gaining increasing importance. We show how ontologies can integrate models, languages, infrastructure, and activities within this architecture to support reuse and composition of semantic Web services

An Analysis of Service Ontologies

Services are increasingly shaping the world’s economic activity. Service provision and consumption have been profiting from advances in ICT, but the decentralization and heterogeneity of the involved service entities still pose engineering challenges. One of these challenges is to achieve semantic interoperability among these autonomous entities. Semantic web technology aims at addressing this challenge on a large scale, and has matured over the last years. This is evident from the various efforts reported in the literature in which service knowledge is represented in terms of ontologies developed either in individual research projects or in standardization bodies. This paper aims at analyzing the most relevant service ontologies available today for their suitability to cope with the service semantic interoperability challenge. We take the vision of the Internet of Services (IoS) as our motivation to identify the requirements for service ontologies. We adopt a formal approach to ontology design and evaluation in our analysis. We start by defining informal competency questions derived from a motivating scenario, and we identify relevant concepts and properties in service ontologies that match the formal ontological representation of these questions. We analyze the service ontologies with our concepts and questions, so that each ontology is positioned and evaluated according to its utility. The gaps we identify as the result of our analysis provide an indication of open challenges and future work

Context-awareness for mobile sensing: a survey and future directions

The evolution of smartphones together with increasing computational power have empowered developers to create innovative context-aware applications for recognizing user related social and cognitive activities in any situation and at any location. The existence and awareness of the context provides the capability of being conscious of physical environments or situations around mobile device users. This allows network services to respond proactively and intelligently based on such awareness. The key idea behind context-aware applications is to encourage users to collect, analyze and share local sensory knowledge in the purpose for a large scale community use by creating a smart network. The desired network is capable of making autonomous logical decisions to actuate environmental objects, and also assist individuals. However, many open challenges remain, which are mostly arisen due to the middleware services provided in mobile devices have limited resources in terms of power, memory and bandwidth. Thus, it becomes critically important to study how the drawbacks can be elaborated and resolved, and at the same time better understand the opportunities for the research community to contribute to the context-awareness. To this end, this paper surveys the literature over the period of 1991-2014 from the emerging concepts to applications of context-awareness in mobile platforms by providing up-to-date research and future research directions. Moreover, it points out the challenges faced in this regard and enlighten them by proposing possible solutions

KLAIM: A Kernel Language for Agents Interaction and Mobility

We investigate the issue of designing a kernel programming language for mobile computing and describe KLAIM, a language that supports a programming paradigm where processes, like data, can be moved from one computing environment to another. The language consists of a core Linda with multiple tuple spaces and of a set of operators for building processes. KLAIM naturally supports programming with explicit localities. Localities are first-class data (they can be manipulated like any other data), but the language provides coordination mechanisms to control the interaction protocols among located processes. The formal operational semantics is useful for discussing the design of the language and provides guidelines for implementations. KLAIM is equipped with a type system that statically checks access rights violations of mobile agents. Types are used to describe the intentions (read, write, execute, etc.) of processes in relation to the various localities. The type system is used to determine the operations that processes want to perform at each locality, and to check whether they comply with the declared intentions and whether they have the necessary rights to perform the intended operations at the specific localities. Via a series of examples, we show that many mobile code programming paradigms can be naturally implemented in our kernel language. We also present a prototype implementaton of KLAIM in Java