A metadata service for service oriented architectures

Service oriented architectures provide a modern paradigm for web services allowing seamless interoperation among network applications and supporting a flexible approach to building large complex information systems. A number of industrial standards have emerged to exploit this paradigm with the development o f the J2E E and .N E T infrastructure platforms, communication protocol SOAP, d e scription language WSDL and orchestration languages BPEL, XLANG and WSCI. At the same time the Semantic Web enables automated use of ontologies to describe web services in a machine interpretable language. To enable process composition and large scale resource integration over heterogeneous sources a new research in itiative is needed. Current initiatives have identified the role of Peer-to-Peer networks and Service Oriented Architectures to enable large scale resource communication an d integration. However this approach neglects to identify or utilise the role of Semantic Web technologies to promote greater automation and reliability using service semantics, thus a new framework is required adopting Peer-to-Peer networks, Service Oriented Architectures and Semantic Web technologies. In this context, this thesis presents a management an d storage framework for a distributed service repository over a super peer network to facilitate process composition

Little Steps Towards Big Goals. Using Linked Data to Develop Next Generation Spatial Data Infrastructures (aka SDI 3.0)

Ponencias, comunicaciones y pósters presentados en el 17th AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science "Connecting a Digital Europe through Location and Place", celebrado en la Universitat Jaume I del 3 al 6 de junio de 2014.Society is moving at an increasing pace toward the next stage of the information society through linked data. Among the relevant developments in geographic information science, linked data approaches offer potential for improving SDI functionality [12]. Linked data uses Semantic Web technologies and makes it possible to link at a very granular level data resources of the web for a multitude of purposes. While the technological implementation in many ways is still in a phase of adolescence, vast amounts of data, including geographic information (GI) have been prepared, for example by the UK Ordinance Survey [8] and other governmental and non-governmental bodies. The overwhelming focus has been on producing RDF formatted data for linked data applications--the foundation for applications. In this short paper, we provide an overview of potentials of linked open data for SDI 3.0 developments. Through two exemplary use cases we illustrate specifically some first steps towards a more web-oriented and distributed approach to creating SDI architectures. The cases demonstrate applications based on the LOD4WFS Adapter, which opens the way for multi-perspective GI applications, created on-demand from multiple GI data resources. These applications automate geometry-based selections of data using spatial queries with the use of RCC8 and OGC Simple Features topological functions. Future work in this area includes adding semantic operators to refine GI processing with multiple ontologies

Ontology-based patterns for the integration of business processes and enterprise application architectures

Increasingly, enterprises are using Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) as an approach to Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). SOA has the potential to bridge the gap between business and technology and to improve the reuse of existing applications and the interoperability with new ones. In addition to service architecture descriptions, architecture abstractions like patterns and styles capture design knowledge and allow the reuse of successfully applied designs, thus improving the quality of software. Knowledge gained from integration projects can be captured to build a repository of semantically enriched, experience-based solutions. Business patterns identify the interaction and structure between users, business processes, and data. Specific integration and composition patterns at a more technical level address enterprise application integration and capture reliable architecture solutions. We use an ontology-based approach to capture architecture and process patterns. Ontology techniques for pattern definition, extension and composition are developed and their applicability in business process-driven application integration is demonstrated

Privacy-Preserving Reengineering of Model-View-Controller Application Architectures Using Linked Data

When a legacy system’s software architecture cannot be redesigned, implementing additional privacy requirements is often complex, unreliable and costly to maintain. This paper presents a privacy-by-design approach to reengineer web applications as linked data-enabled and implement access control and privacy preservation properties. The method is based on the knowledge of the application architecture, which for the Web of data is commonly designed on the basis of a model-view-controller pattern. Whereas wrapping techniques commonly used to link data of web applications duplicate the security source code, the new approach allows for the controlled disclosure of an application’s data, while preserving non-functional properties such as privacy preservation. The solution has been implemented and compared with existing linked data frameworks in terms of reliability, maintainability and complexity

Optimized mobile thin clients through a MPEG-4 BiFS semantic remote display framework

According to the thin client computing principle, the user interface is physically separated from the application logic. In practice only a viewer component is executed on the client device, rendering the display updates received from the distant application server and capturing the user interaction. Existing remote display frameworks are not optimized to encode the complex scenes of modern applications, which are composed of objects with very diverse graphical characteristics. In order to tackle this challenge, we propose to transfer to the client, in addition to the binary encoded objects, semantic information about the characteristics of each object. Through this semantic knowledge, the client is enabled to react autonomously on user input and does not have to wait for the display update from the server. Resulting in a reduction of the interaction latency and a mitigation of the bursty remote display traffic pattern, the presented framework is of particular interest in a wireless context, where the bandwidth is limited and expensive. In this paper, we describe a generic architecture of a semantic remote display framework. Furthermore, we have developed a prototype using the MPEG-4 Binary Format for Scenes to convey the semantic information to the client. We experimentally compare the bandwidth consumption of MPEG-4 BiFS with existing, non-semantic, remote display frameworks. In a text editing scenario, we realize an average reduction of 23% of the data peaks that are observed in remote display protocol traffic

Digital Ecosystems: Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures

We view Digital Ecosystems to be the digital counterparts of biological ecosystems. Here, we are concerned with the creation of these Digital Ecosystems, exploiting the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems to evolve high-level software applications. Therefore, we created the Digital Ecosystem, a novel optimisation technique inspired by biological ecosystems, where the optimisation works at two levels: a first optimisation, migration of agents which are distributed in a decentralised peer-to-peer network, operating continuously in time; this process feeds a second optimisation based on evolutionary computing that operates locally on single peers and is aimed at finding solutions to satisfy locally relevant constraints. The Digital Ecosystem was then measured experimentally through simulations, with measures originating from theoretical ecology, evaluating its likeness to biological ecosystems. This included its responsiveness to requests for applications from the user base, as a measure of the ecological succession (ecosystem maturity). Overall, we have advanced the understanding of Digital Ecosystems, creating Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures where the word ecosystem is more than just a metaphor.Comment: 39 pages, 26 figures, journa