Transitioning Applications to Semantic Web Services: An Automated Formal Approach

Semantic Web Services have been recognized as a promising technology that exhibits huge commercial potential, and attract significant attention from both industry and the research community. Despite expectations being high, the industrial take-up of Semantic Web Service technologies has been slower than expected. One of the main reasons is that many systems have been developed without considering the potential of the web in integrating services and sharing resources. Without a systematic methodology and proper tool support, the migration from legacy systems to Semantic Web Service-based systems can be a very tedious and expensive process, which carries a definite risk of failure. There is an urgent need to provide strategies which allow the migration of legacy systems to Semantic Web Services platforms, and also tools to support such a strategy. In this paper we propose a methodology for transitioning these applications to Semantic Web Services by taking the advantage of rigorous mathematical methods. Our methodology allows users to migrate their applications to Semantic Web Services platform automatically or semi-automatically

IRS-III: A Broker for Semantic Web Services based Applications

In this paper we describe IRS-III which takes a semantic broker based approach to creating applications from Semantic Web Services by mediating between a service requester and one or more service providers. Business organisations can view Semantic Web Services as the basic mechanisms for integrating data and processes across applications on the Web. This paper extends previous publications on IRS by providing an overall description of our framework from the point of view of application development. More specifically, we describe the IRS-III methodology for building applications using Semantic Web Services and illustrate our approach through a use case on e-government

Web-Services - The Next Evolutionary Stage of E-Business

Web-Services are a set of new technologies that promise to take service-oriented distributed computing to a whole new level, and eventually take e-business to the next evolutionary stage. Web-Services, in a nutshell, let organizations bridge communication gaps among their information systems, and build new software applications by stitching together existing ones. It is capable of integrating applications written in different programming languages, developed by different vendors, and running on different servers with dissimilar operating systems. Web- Services would enable companies to seamlessly connect their information systems and business processes with those of their partners and customers - thus ushering in a new service oriented distributed computing architecture. The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of Web-Services, explain the essential concepts that enable Web- Services, and understand its major benefits and point out its shortcomings

Transition of legacy systems to semantically enabled applications:TAO method and tools

Despite expectations being high, the industrial take-up of Semantic Web technologies in developing services and applications has been slower than expected. One of the main reasons is that many legacy systems have been developed without considering the potential of theWeb in integrating services and sharing resources.Without a systematic methodology and proper tool support, the migration from legacy systems to SemanticWeb Service-based systems can be a tedious and expensive process, which carries a significant risk of failure. There is an urgent need to provide strategies, allowing the migration of legacy systems to Semantic Web Services platforms, and also tools to support such strategies. In this paper we propose a methodology and its tool support for transitioning these applications to Semantic Web Services, which allow users to migrate their applications to Semantic Web Services platforms automatically or semi-automatically. The transition of the GATE system is used as a case study

Two-staged approach for semantically annotating and brokering TV-related services

Nowadays, more and more distributed digital TV and TV-related resources are published on the Web, such as Electronic Personal TV Guide (EPG) data. To enable applications to access these resources easily, the TV resource data is commonly provided by Web service technologies. The huge variety of data related to the TV domain and the wide range of services that provide it, raises the need to have a broker to discover, select and orchestrate services to satisfy the runtime requirements of applications that invoke these services. The variety of data and heterogeneous nature of the service capabilities makes it a challenging domain for automated web-service discovery and composition. To overcome these issues, we propose a two-stage service annotation approach, which is resolved by integrating Linked Services and IRS-III semantic web services framework, to complete the lifecycle of service annotating, publishing, deploying, discovering, orchestration and dynamic invocation. This approach satisfies both developer's and application's requirements to use Semantic Web Services (SWS) technologies manually and automatically

WSDL-S: Adding Semantics to WSDL

Web services have primarily been designed for providing inter-operability between business applications. Current technologies assume a large amount of human interaction, for integrating two applications. This is primarily due to the fact that business process integration requires understanding of data and functions of the involved entities. Semantic Web technologies, powered by description logic based languages like OWL[1], aim to add greater meaning to Web content, by annotating the data with ontologies. Ontologies provide a mechanism of providing shared conceptualizations of domains. This allows agents to get an understanding of users’ Web content and greatly reduces human interaction for meaningful Web searches. A similar approach can be used for adding greater meaning to Web service descriptions, which will in turn, allow greater automation, by reducing human involvement for understanding the data and functions of the services

Exploring the Supply-Side of Web Services: The Need for Market Positioning

Web services are emerging as a new paradigm for integrating business processes across heterogeneous computing environments. They are expected to alleviate the perennial problem of interoperability of software applications, which results in data and information silos. Many application service providers have repositioned themselves as Web services providers to compete in this highly volatile industry. This paper focuses upon the supply-side of Web services, utilizing four constructs: market positioning, partnerships and alliances, products and services, and integration. It presents the findings from survey research into 190 technology sector firms, which indicate that Web service firms will need to strengthen their market positioning if they are to develop strong partnerships and alliances with leading technology firms

An adaptive approach for QoS-aware Web service composition

Web service composition is the process of integrating existing web services. It is a prospective method to build an application system. Current approaches, however, only take service function aspect into consideration. With the rapid growth of web service applications and the abundance of service providers, the consumer is facing the inevitability of selecting the maximum satisfied service providers due to the dynamic nature of web services. This requirement brings us some research challenges including a web service quality model, to design a web service framework able to monitor the service\u27s real time quality. A further challenge is to find an algorithm that can handle extensible service quality parameters and has good performance to solve NP-hard web services global selection problem. In this thesis, we propose a web service framework, using an extensible service quality model. A Cultural Algorithm is adopted to accelerate service global selection. We also provide experimental results comparing between Cultural Algorithm with Genetic Algorithm and Random service selection

Enhancement of the usability of SOA services for novice users

Recently, the automation of service integration has provided a significant advantage in delivering services to novice users. This art of integrating various services is known as Service Composition and its main purpose is to simplify the development process for web applications and facilitates reuse of services. It is one of the paradigms that enables services to end-users (i.e.service provisioning) through the outsourcing of web contents and it requires users to share and reuse services in more collaborative ways. Most service composers are effective at enabling integration of web contents, but they do not enable universal access across different groups of users. This is because, the currently existing content aggregators require complex interactions in order to create web applications (e.g., Web Service Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL)) as a result not all users are able to use such web tools. This trend demands changes in the web tools that end-users use to gain and share information, hence this research uses Mashups as a service composition technique to allow novice users to integrate publicly available Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) services, where there is a minimal active web application development. Mashups being the platforms that integrate disparate web Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to create user defined web applications; presents a great opportunity for service provisioning. However, their usability for novice users remains invalidated since Mashup tools are not easy to use they require basic programming skills which makes the process of designing and creating Mashups difficult. This is because Mashup tools access heterogeneous web contents using public web APIs and the process of integrating them become complex since web APIs are tailored by different vendors. Moreover, the design of Mashup editors is unnecessary complex; as a result, users do not know where to start when creating Mashups. This research address the gap between Mashup tools and usability by the designing and implementing a semantically enriched Mashup tool to discover, annotate and compose APIs to improve the utilization of SOA services by novice users. The researchers conducted an analysis of the already existing Mashup tools to identify challenges and weaknesses experienced by novice Mashup users. The findings from the requirement analysis formulated the system usability requirements that informed the design and implementation of the proposed Mashup tool. The proposed architecture addressed three layers: composition, annotation and discovery. The researchers developed a simple Mashup tool referred to as soa-Services Provisioner (SerPro) that allowed novice users to create web application flexibly. Its usability and effectiveness was validated. The proposed Mashup tool enhanced the usability of SOA services, since data analysis and results showed that it was usable to novice users by scoring a System Usability Scale (SUS) score of 72.08. Furthermore, this research discusses the research limitations and future work for further improvements