Representing WSDL with extended UML

Web services are emerging to provide a systematic and extensible framework for interactions of applications, built on existing Web protocols and based on open XML standards. In spite of the existence of several middleware platforms that support Web service development, the lack of a solid methodological base for the development of Web services, as well as service-oriented applications, give rise to the need of methods or modeling techniques that guarantee the quality in the development of this kind of applications.Keywords: UML extension, WSDL, Web Service Modeling, Web Information Systems

Forum Session at the First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC03)

The First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC) was held in Trento, December 15-18, 2003. The focus of the conference ---Service Oriented Computing (SOC)--- is the new emerging paradigm for distributed computing and e-business processing that has evolved from object-oriented and component computing to enable building agile networks of collaborating business applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries. Of the 181 papers submitted to the ICSOC conference, 10 were selected for the forum session which took place on December the 16th, 2003. The papers were chosen based on their technical quality, originality, relevance to SOC and for their nature of being best suited for a poster presentation or a demonstration. This technical report contains the 10 papers presented during the forum session at the ICSOC conference. In particular, the last two papers in the report ere submitted as industrial papers

Model-driven design, simulation and implementation of service compositions in COSMO

The success of software development projects to a large extent depends on the quality of the models that are produced in the development process, which in turn depends on the conceptual and practical support that is available for modelling, design and analysis. This paper focuses on model-driven support for service-oriented software development. In particular, it addresses how services and compositions of services can be designed, simulated and implemented. The support presented is part of a larger framework, called COSMO (COnceptual Service MOdelling). Whereas in previous work we reported on the conceptual support provided by COSMO, in this paper we proceed with a discussion of the practical support that has been developed. We show how reference models (model types) and guidelines (design steps) can be iteratively applied to design service compositions at a platform independent level and discuss what tool support is available for the design and analysis during this phase. Next, we present some techniques to transform a platform independent service composition model to an implementation in terms of BPEL and WSDL. We use the mediation scenario of the SWS challenge (concerning the establishment of a purchase order between two companies) to illustrate our application of the COSMO framework

Distribution pattern-driven development of service architectures

Distributed systems are being constructed by composing a number of discrete components. This practice is particularly prevalent within the Web service domain in the form of service process orchestration and choreography. Often, enterprise systems are built from many existing discrete applications such as legacy applications exposed using Web service interfaces. There are a number of architectural configurations or distribution patterns, which express how a composed system is to be deployed in a distributed environment. However, the amount of code required to realise these distribution patterns is considerable. In this paper, we propose a distribution pattern-driven approach to service composition and architecting. We develop, based on a catalog of patterns, a UML-compliant framework, which takes existing Web service interfaces as its input and generates executable Web service compositions based on a distribution pattern chosen by the software architect

Integration of BPM systems

New technologies have emerged to support the global economy where for instance suppliers, manufactures and retailers are working together in order to minimise the cost and maximise efficiency. One of the technologies that has become a buzz word for many businesses is business process management or BPM. A business process comprises activities and tasks, the resources required to perform each task, and the business rules linking these activities and tasks. The tasks may be performed by human and/or machine actors. Workflow provides a way of describing the order of execution and the dependent relationships between the constituting activities of short or long running processes. Workflow allows businesses to capture not only the information but also the processes that transform the information - the process asset (Koulopoulos, T. M., 1995). Applications which involve automated, human-centric and collaborative processes across organisations are inherently different from one organisation to another. Even within the same organisation but over time, applications are adapted as ongoing change to the business processes is seen as the norm in today’s dynamic business environment. The major difference lies in the specifics of business processes which are changing rapidly in order to match the way in which businesses operate. In this chapter we introduce and discuss Business Process Management (BPM) with a focus on the integration of heterogeneous BPM systems across multiple organisations. We identify the problems and the main challenges not only with regards to technologies but also in the social and cultural context. We also discuss the issues that have arisen in our bid to find the solutions

Measuring and Evaluating a Design Complexity Metric for XML Schema Documents

The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) has been gaining extraordinary acceptance from many diverse enterprise software companies for their object repositories, data interchange, and development tools. Further, many different domains, organizations and content providers have been publishing and exchanging information via internet by the usage of XML and standard schemas. Efficient implementation of XML in these domains requires well designed XML schemas. In this point of view, design of XML schemas plays an extremely important role in software development process and needs to be quantified for ease of maintainability. In this paper, an attempt has been made to evaluate the quality of XML schema documents (XSD) written in W3C XML Schema language. We propose a metric, which measures the complexity due to the internal architecture of XSD components, and due to recursion. This is the single metric, which cover all major factors responsible for complexity of XSD. The metric has been empirically and theoretically validated, demonstrated with examples and supported by comparison with other well known structure metrics applied on XML schema documents

Optimal Web Service Selection Using UML Profile

Enterprises are more conscious of providing quality of services over the web for reasons of economy, reliability, interoperability and flexibility. Enterprise application relies on selection of the most appropriate service from several candidate services with similar capabilities provided by different service providers. The question is, on what basis the system chooses a service among several candidates. This paper proposes a model that makes an automatic selection of best service and detects the variance between the non-functional requirements of the users and service qualifications. In this paper, we describe our approach aimed to detect conflicts between user requirements and the service specifications of the service provider. Our work proposes to detect these conflicts using Ontology and UML profiles to achieve better performance and avoid unpredictable state of the system. We suggest use of UML extensions and domain Ontology to detect NFR conflicts between the client’s requirements and service specifications

Discovery and Selection of Certified Web Services Through Registry-Based Testing and Verification

Reliability and trust are fundamental prerequisites for the establishment of functional relationships among peers in a Collaborative Networked Organisation (CNO), especially in the context of Virtual Enterprises where economic benefits can be directly at stake. This paper presents a novel approach towards effective service discovery and selection that is no longer based on informal, ambiguous and potentially unreliable service descriptions, but on formal specifications that can be used to verify and certify the actual Web service implementations. We propose the use of Stream X-machines (SXMs) as a powerful modelling formalism for constructing the behavioural specification of a Web service, for performing verification through the generation of exhaustive test cases, and for performing validation through animation or model checking during service selection