144,228 research outputs found
Leveraging Semantic Web Service Descriptions for Validation by Automated Functional Testing
Recent years have seen the utilisation of Semantic Web Service descriptions for automating a wide range of service-related activities, with a primary focus on service discovery, composition, execution and mediation. An important area which so far has received less attention is service validation, whereby advertised services are proven to conform to required behavioural specifications. This paper proposes a method for validation of service-oriented systems through automated functional testing. The method leverages ontology-based and rule-based descriptions of service inputs, outputs, preconditions and effects (IOPE) for constructing a stateful EFSM specification. The specification is subsequently utilised for functional testing and validation using the proven Stream X-machine (SXM) testing methodology. Complete functional test sets are generated automatically at an abstract level and are then applied to concrete Web services, using test drivers created from the Web service descriptions. The testing method comes with completeness guarantees and provides a strong method for validating the behaviour of Web services
Conceptual modelling of adaptive web services based on high-level petri nets
Service technology geared by its SOA architecture and enabling Web services is
rapidly gaining in maturity and acceptance. Consequently, most worldwide
(private and corporate) cross-organizations are embracing this paradigm by
publishing, requesting and composing their businesses and applications in the
form of (web-)services. Nevertheless, to face harsh competitiveness such service oriented
cross-organizational applications are increasingly pressed to be highly
composite, adaptive, knowledge-intensive and very reliable. In contrast to that,
Web service standards such as WSDL, WSBPEL, WS-CDL and many others
offer just static, manual, purely process-centric and ad-hoc techniques to deploy
such services.
The main objective of this thesis consists therefore in leveraging the development
of service-driven applications towards more reliability, dynamically
and adaptable knowledge-intensiveness. This thesis puts forward an innovative
framework based on distributed high-level Petri nets and event-driven business
rules. More precisely, we developed a new variant of high-level Petri Nets formalism
called Service-based Petri nets (CSrv-Nets), that exhibits the following
potential characteristics. Firstly, the framework is supported by a stepwise
methodology that starts with diagrammatical UML-class diagrams and business
rules and leads to dynamically adaptive services specifications. Secondly, the
framework soundly integrates behavioural event-driven business rules and stateful
services both at the type and instance level and with an inherent distribution.
Thirdly, the framework intrinsically permits validation through guided graphical
animation. Fourthly, the framework explicitly separates between orchestrations
for modelling rule-intensive single services and choreography for cooperating
several services through their governing interactive business rules. Fifthly, the
framework is based on a two-level conceptualization: (1) the modelling of any
rule-centric service with CSrv-Nets; (2) the smooth upgrading of this service
modelling with an adaptability-level that allows for dynamically shifting up and
down any rule-centric behavior of the running business activities
Dynamic integration of context model constraints in web service processes
Autonomic Web service composition has been a challenging topic for some years. The context in which composition takes places determines essential aspects. A context model can provide meaningful composition information for services process composition. An ontology-based approach for context information integration is the basis of a constraint approach to dynamically integrate context validation into service processes. The dynamic integration of context constraints into an orchestrated service process is a necessary direction to achieve autonomic service composition
Combining goal-oriented and model-driven approaches to solve the Payment Problem Scenario
Motivated by the objective to provide an improved participation of business domain experts in the design of service-oriented integration solutions, we extend our previous work on using the COSMO methodology for service mediation by introducing a goal-oriented approach to requirements engineering. With this approach, business requirements including the motivations behind the mediation solution are better understood, specified, and aligned with their technical implementations. We use the Payment Problem Scenario of the SWS Challenge to illustrate the extension
Towards a dynamic rule-based business process
IJWGS is now included in Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), starting from volume 4, 2008. The first impact factor, which will be for 2010, is expected to be published in mid 201
Authorised Translations of Electronic Documents
A concept is proposed to extend authorised translations of documents to
electronically signed, digital documents. Central element of the solution is an
electronic seal, embodied as an XML data structure, which attests to the
correctness of the translation and the authorisation of the translator. The
seal contains a digital signature binding together original and translated
document, thus enabling forensic inspection and therefore legal security in the
appropriation of the translation. Organisational aspects of possible
implementation variants of electronic authorised translations are discussed and
a realisation as a stand-alone web-service is presented.Comment: In: Peer-reviewed Proceedings of the Information Security South
Africa (ISSA) 2006 From Insight to Foresight Conference, 5 to 7 July 2006,
Sandton, South Afric
Knowledge Representation Concepts for Automated SLA Management
Outsourcing of complex IT infrastructure to IT service providers has
increased substantially during the past years. IT service providers must be
able to fulfil their service-quality commitments based upon predefined Service
Level Agreements (SLAs) with the service customer. They need to manage, execute
and maintain thousands of SLAs for different customers and different types of
services, which needs new levels of flexibility and automation not available
with the current technology. The complexity of contractual logic in SLAs
requires new forms of knowledge representation to automatically draw inferences
and execute contractual agreements. A logic-based approach provides several
advantages including automated rule chaining allowing for compact knowledge
representation as well as flexibility to adapt to rapidly changing business
requirements. We suggest adequate logical formalisms for representation and
enforcement of SLA rules and describe a proof-of-concept implementation. The
article describes selected formalisms of the ContractLog KR and their adequacy
for automated SLA management and presents results of experiments to demonstrate
flexibility and scalability of the approach.Comment: Paschke, A. and Bichler, M.: Knowledge Representation Concepts for
Automated SLA Management, Int. Journal of Decision Support Systems (DSS),
submitted 19th March 200
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