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

Identifying High Potential Police Officers and Role Characteristics.

Project commissioned in 2000 by the Metropolitan Police Service to carry out a psychometric assessment validation study as part of a career Pathways Project

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

Validation of community pharmacy : confirming the effectiveness of a pharmacist in a community setting

Validation of community pharmacy is a concept we coined to define the process carried out to demonstrate that the services provided by a community pharmacist are needed by the community. One method to undertake such a process was developed. This method involves the use of a series of Validation Tools which are measurement tools with which to monitor the standards of the service provided by a community pharmacist. Five Validation Tools were developed and subsequently the validity and reliability of these tools were tested. The developed Validation Tools were found to be valid and reliable methods which can be confidently used by community pharmacists to confirm the impact of their services on patient care.peer-reviewe

Semantic validation of affinity constrained service function chain requests

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has been proposed as a paradigm to increase the cost-efficiency, flexibility and innovation in network service provisioning. By leveraging IT virtualization techniques in combination with programmable networks, NFV is able to decouple network functionality from the physical devices on which they are deployed. This opens up new business opportunities for both Infrastructure Providers (InPs) as well as Service Providers (SPs), where the SP can request to deploy a chain of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) on top of which its service can run. However, current NFV approaches lack the possibility for SPs to define location requirements and constraints on the mapping of virtual functions and paths onto physical hosts and links. Nevertheless, many scenarios can be envisioned in which the SP would like to attach placement constraints for efficiency, resilience, legislative, privacy and economic reasons. Therefore, we propose a set of affinity and anti-affinity constraints, which can be used by SPs to define such placement restrictions. This newfound ability to add constraints to Service Function Chain (SFC) requests also introduces an additional risk that SFCs with conflicting constraints are requested or automatically generated. Therefore, a framework is proposed that allows the InP to check the validity of a set of constraints and provide feedback to the SP. To achieve this, the SFC request and relevant information on the physical topology are modeled as an ontology of which the consistency can be checked using a semantic reasoner. Enabling semantic validation of SFC requests, eliminates inconsistent SFCs requests from being transferred to the embedding algorithm.Peer Reviewe

Simplifying Satellite and Ground Data Validation with Level-2 Subsetting

We demonstrate that scientists can simplify their satellite data validation workflow with the use of NASA Godddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC) subsetting services. We perform a sample validation of Aura ozone products collocated with ground-based ozone measurements using subsetting services to trim satellite data to only the relevant user-defined variables and spatio-temporal region. Because the subsetting service automatically returns only relevant data granules that adhere to a set of user-defined coincidence criteria, user workload is greatly reduced. Moreover, the resultant data files are substantially smaller than full data granules due to the subsetting service further culling the data to the relevant geospatio-temporal coincidence criteria, user-defined variables, and user-defined dimensions of variables. This decreases data download throughput and file storage requirements. The validation presented here quantifies the time and file size savings that can be achieved by utilizing subsetting services within the satellite data validation workflow