Open semantic service networks

Online service marketplaces will soon be part of the economy to scale the provision of specialized multi-party services through automation and standardization. Current research, such as the *-USDL service description language family, is already defining the basic building blocks to model the next generation of business services. Nonetheless, the developments being made do not target to interconnect services via service relationships. Without the concept of relationship, marketplaces will be seen as mere functional silos containing service descriptions. Yet, in real economies, all services are related and connected. Therefore, to address this gap we introduce the concept of open semantic service network (OSSN), concerned with the establishment of rich relationships between services. These networks will provide valuable knowledge on the global service economy, which can be exploited for many socio-economic and scientific purposes such as service network analysis, management, and control

Implications of Integration and Interoperability for Enterprise Cloud-based Applications

Enterprise’s adoption of cloud-based solutions is often hindered by problems associated with the integration of the cloud environment with on-premise systems. Currently, each cloud provider creates its proprietary application programing interfaces (APIs), which will complicate integration efforts for companies as they struggle to understand and manage these unique application interfaces in an interoperable way. This paper aims to address this challenge by providing recommendations to enterprises. The presented work is based on a quantitative study of 114 companies, which discuss current issues and future trends of integration and interoperability requirements for enterprise cloud application adoption and migration. The outcome of the discussion provides a guideline applicable to support decision makers, software architects and developers when considering to design and develop interoperable applications in order to avoid lock-in and integrate seamlessly into other cloud and on-premise systems

Mapping the Domain of Service Science

The emerging discipline of service science currently lacks coherence because it calls on knowledge from many disciplines and covers topics ranging from services involving human interaction and discretion through invisible services that are hidden in computerized infrastructures. This paper explains the service domain framework, which is designed to help in understanding, analyzing, and researching service topics across the entire domain of service science. This framework is presented as four concentric layers, with the inner layer most closely related to specific service processes and activities, and each of the other layers successively broader in scope and further from action related to specific services. Figures in the paper illustrate the location of topics from different disciplines, synergies between quadrants, links within layers, the location of service-dominant logic, the location of various aspects of SaaS, and the path for bypassing the gap between human and machine services

A new MDA-SOA based framework for intercloud interoperability

Cloud computing has been one of the most important topics in Information Technology which aims to assure scalable and reliable on-demand services over the Internet. The expansion of the application scope of cloud services would require cooperation between clouds from different providers that have heterogeneous functionalities. This collaboration between different cloud vendors can provide better Quality of Services (QoS) at the lower price. However, current cloud systems have been developed without concerns of seamless cloud interconnection, and actually they do not support intercloud interoperability to enable collaboration between cloud service providers. Hence, the PhD work is motivated to address interoperability issue between cloud providers as a challenging research objective. This thesis proposes a new framework which supports inter-cloud interoperability in a heterogeneous computing resource cloud environment with the goal of dispatching the workload to the most effective clouds available at runtime. Analysing different methodologies that have been applied to resolve various problem scenarios related to interoperability lead us to exploit Model Driven Architecture (MDA) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) methods as appropriate approaches for our inter-cloud framework. Moreover, since distributing the operations in a cloud-based environment is a nondeterministic polynomial time (NP-complete) problem, a Genetic Algorithm (GA) based job scheduler proposed as a part of interoperability framework, offering workload migration with the best performance at the least cost. A new Agent Based Simulation (ABS) approach is proposed to model the inter-cloud environment with three types of agents: Cloud Subscriber agent, Cloud Provider agent, and Job agent. The ABS model is proposed to evaluate the proposed framework.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - (Referencia da bolsa: SFRH SFRH / BD / 33965 / 2009) and EC 7th Framework Programme under grant agreement n° FITMAN 604674 (http://www.fitman-fi.eu

The step project:societal and political engagement of young people in environmental issues

Decisions on environmental topics taken today are going to have long-term consequences that will affect future generations. Young people will have to live with the consequences of these decisions and undertake special responsibilities. Moreover, as tomorrow’s decision makers, they themselves should learn how to negotiate and debate issues before final decisions are made. Therefore, any participation they can have in environmental decision making processes will prove essential in developing a sustainable future for the community.However, recent data indicate that the young distance themselves from community affairs, mainly because the procedures involved are ‘wooden’, politicians’ discourse alienates the young and the whole experience is too formalized to them. Authorities are aware of this fact and try to establish communication channels to ensure transparency and use a language that speaks to new generations of citizens. This is where STEP project comes in.STEP (www.step4youth.eu) is a digital Platform (web/mobile) enabling youth Societal and Political e-Participation in decision-making procedures concerning environmental issues. STEP is enhanced with web/social media mining, gamification, machine translation, and visualisation features.Six pilots in real contexts are being organised for the deployment of the STEP solution in 4 European Countries: Italy, Spain, Greece, and Turkey. Pilots are implemented with the direct participation of one regional authority, four municipalities, and one association of municipalities, and include decision-making procedures on significant environmental questions.</p

Improvement of DHRA-DMDC Physical Access Software DBIDS Using Cloud Computing Technology: a Case Study

The U.S government has created and been executing an Identity and Management (IdM) vision to support a global, robust, trusted and interoperable identity management capability that provides the ability to correctly identify individuals and non-person entities in support of DoD mission operations. Many Directives and Instructions have been issued to standardize the process to design, re-designed new and old systems with latest available technologies to meet the visions requirements. In this thesis we introduce a cloud-based architecture for the Defense Biometric Identification System (DBIDS), along with a set of DBIDS Cloud Services that supports the proposed architecture. This cloud-based architecture will move DBIDS in the right direction to meet Dod IdM visions and goals by decoupling current DBIDS functions into DBIDS core services to create interoperability and flexibility to expand future DBIDS with new requirements. The thesis will show its readers how DBIDS Cloud Services will help Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) easily expanding DBIDS functionalities such as connecting to other DMDC services or federated services for vetting purposes. This thesis will also serve as a recommendation of a blue-print for DBIDS architecture to support new generation of DBIDS application. This is a step closer in moving DMDC Identity Enterprise Solution toward DoD IdM realizing vision and goals. The thesis also includes a discussion of how to utilize virtualized DBIDS workstations to address software-deployment and maintenance issues to resolve configuration and deployment issues which have been costly problems for DMDC over the years.http://archive.org/details/improvementofdhr109457379Civilian, Department of Defens

Seeking Synergies Between Four Views of Service in the IS Field

The term service appears in IS in contexts ranging from visible business activities performed for customers through invisible computerized responses to computerized requests deep within IT infrastructures. After distinguishing between rigorous definitions of service and treatment of service as an analytical lens, this paper presents a framework that distinguishes between four lenses for understanding and analyzing services and systems in the IS field. Each lens is directly applicable to many situations, and less applicable elsewhere. This paper summarizes each lens and identifies potential synergies between pairs of lenses. The synergies may help in using secondary lenses to support analyses guided by a primary lens. The range of lenses helps in understanding the range of meanings of service in IS

Blueprint model and language for engineering cloud applications

Abstract: The research presented in this thesis is positioned within the domain of engineering CSBAs. Its contribution is twofold: (1) a uniform specification language, called the Blueprint Specification Language (BSL), for specifying cloud services across several cloud vendors and (2) a set of associated techniques, called the Blueprint Manipulation Techniques (BMTs), for publishing, querying, and composing cloud service specifications with aim to support the flexible design and configuration of an CSBA.