Semantic Content Mediation and Acquisition: The Challenge for Semantic e-Business Solutions

A Top Quadrant report situates the Semantic Web within the current Innovation Wave of “Distributed Intelligence”. This is one of the main innovation waves of the last centuries including textile, railway, auto, computer, distributed intelligence (1997-2061) and nanotechnology (2007-2081). The Distributed Intelligence wave started in the late nineties and is expected to peak between 2010 and 2020. The report estimates first return on investments in 2006-7, growing to a market of $40-60 billion in 2010. Funds are coming primary from governments, venture capitalists and industry commercialization. Over the next few years, this is expected to change in favour of industry commercialization

Compatibility Checking for Asynchronously Communicating Software

International audienceCompatibility is a crucial problem that is encountered while constructing new software by reusing and composing existing components. A set of software components is called compatible if their composition preserves certain properties, such as deadlock freedom. However, checking compatibility for systems communicating asynchronously is an undecidable problem, and asynchronous communication is a common interaction mechanism used in building software systems. A typical approach in analyzing such systems is to bound the state space. In this paper, we take a different approach and do not impose any bounds on the number of participants or the sizes of the message buffers. Instead, we present a sufficient condition for checking compatibility of a set of asynchronously communicating components. Our approach relies on the synchronizability property which identifies systems for which interaction behavior remains the same when asynchronous communication is replaced with synchronous communication. Using the synchronizability property, we can check the compatibility of systems with unbounded message buffers by analyzing only a finite part of their behavior. We have implemented a prototype tool to automate our approach and we have applied it to many examples

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

Using Web services choreography to support an extensible and flexible system development process

Systems Engineering (SE) controls a complex environment consisting of various collaborative subsystems. Each subsystem demands different kind of requirements and follows a specific strategy for its development process. Unifying and harmonizing the development process of all collaborative subsystems towards achieving the ultimate integrated system is one of the main challenges of SE. This work introduces a new approach towards having a generic SE unified process applicable to various environments. We suggest a service-oriented framework for SE process implemented using Web Services, and describe the process scenario in a machine-friendly abstract layer over the Development Process. This description layer choreographs collaborative subsystems and is implemented by a Web Services Choreography Description Language (WSCDL). It also covers Interface Management concerns of SE. In such an environment, as long as all services follow a unique framework for the SE process such as the one specified by the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE), each phase of the process would then be an anonymous service implemented by a different vendor. As the result, an organization could easily customize its own specific development environment by editing this choreography layer according to its specific development policies, and then tailor its own desired development environment by choosing and integrating various services available on the Web. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-01, page: 0351. Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2006

A programming system for process coordination in virtual organisations

PhD thesisDistributed business applications are increasingly being constructed by composing them from services provided by various online businesses. Typically, this leads to trading partners coming together to form virtual organizations (VOs). Each member of a VO maintains their autonomy, except with respect to their agreed goals. The structure of the Virtual Organisation may contain one dominant organisation who dictates the method of achieving the goals or the members may be considered peers of equal importance. The goals of VOs can be defined by the shared global business processes they contain. To be able to execute these business processes, VOs require a flexible enactment model as there may be no single ‘owner’ of the business process and therefore no natural place to enact the business processes. One solution is centralised enactment using a trusted third party, but in some cases this may not be acceptable (for instance because of security reasons). This thesis will present a programming system that allows centralised as well as distributed enactment where each organisation enacts part of the business process. To achieve distributed enactment we must address the problem of specifying the business process in a manner that is amenable to distribution. The first contribution of this thesis is the presentation of the Task Model, a set of languages and notations for describing workflows that can be enacted in a centralised or decentralised manner. The business processes that we specify will coordinate the services that each organisation owns. The second contribution of this thesis is the presentation of a method of describing the observable behaviour of these services. The language we present, SSDL, provides a flexible and extensible way of describing the messaging behaviour of Web Services. We present a method for checking that a set of services described in SSDL are compatible with each other and also that a workflow interacts with a service in the desired manner. The final contribution of this thesis is the presentation of an abstract architecture and prototype implementation of a decentralised workflow engine. The prototype is able to enact workflows described in the Task Model notation in either a centralised or decentralised scenario

Using Web services choreography to model business process in e-commerce

Web modeling languages like WebML (Web modeling Language), OOHDM (Object Oriented Hypermedia design) are evolved from hypermedia models. And they pay attention only to hypermedia modeling and model business rules as a form of navigation, this is called business process emulation. Our approach is to use web service peer-peer language, such as WS-CDL to model business process in an e-commerce application. In this way we introduce a new layer that models all the business rules using WS-CDL In this approach the hypermedia model models only navigation using WebML and once business process is initiated from simple navigation the process layer defined using WS-CDL will execute the business rules. By constructing a case study to test this hybrid-modeling framework, we hypothesise that this newly released peer-peer collaborative language for web-services can be used to model the concepts of business process. Thus we get a unique approach to model business process along with navigation. This approach is a proposed solution to the issues of business process emulation. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2006 .S86. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-01, page: 0366. Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2006

Design of composable services

Service composition methods range from industry standard approaches based on Web Services and BPEL to Semantic Web approaches that rely on AI techniques to automate service discovery and composition. Service composition research mostly focuses on the dynamic (workflow) aspects of compositions. In this paper we consider the static component of service composition and discuss the importance of compatibility of service interfaces in ensuring the composability of services. Using a flight booking scenario example we show that reducing the granularity of services by decomposition into service operations with normalized interfaces produces compatible interfaces that facilitate service assembly. We then show how relational algebra can be used to represent service operations and provide a framework for service assembly. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg

Viitearkkitehtuuri tapahtumapohjaiselle mikropalveluarkkitehtuurille pilvipalveluissa

The emergence of public cloud computing platforms has had a profound effect on how software is being developed. To take advantage of many of the features of cloud platforms, software architecture of applications must aligned with the characteristics of cloud services. Where systems designed for traditional data center deployments have typically consisted of a single large application and a centralized data store, systems targeting cloud platform have become distributed applications. The microservice architecture is a software architecture style for building distributed systems that consist of autonomous services, each responsible for a single problem domain. Decomposing an application to individual components makes is possible to utilize cloud platform features such as scaling each part of the system according to load and performance. Enterprise applications are the context where the microservice architecture pattern is typically applied. These applications are large, long-lived, in state of constant change and highly integrated to other systems. But building complex enterprise applications as distributed systems poses architectural challenges on how to build a system that is evolvable, maintainable and understandable. This thesis describes patterns for building microservice systems that can scale to a large amount of services while retaining the autonomy the services and the maintainability of the system as a whole. A key factor in these patterns is the use of events for communication between the different components of the system. The thesis then presents a reference architecture on how such a system can be developed by utilizing managed services of a public cloud platform.Lisääntyvä pilvipalveluiden käyttö on vaikuttanut merkittävästi siihen, millaisia sovelluksia kehitetään. Sovelluksen arkkitehtuurin täytyy olla suunniteltu siten, että pilvipalveluiden ominaisuuksia voidaan hyödyntää. Sovellukset, jotka ovat suunniteltu ennen pilvipohjaisia arkkitehtuureja koostuvat tyypillisesti yhdestä suuresta asennettavasta komponentista ja keskitetystä tietovarastosta. Pilvipalveluiden myötä tämän mallin sijaan on ruvettu rakentamaan hajautettuja järjestelmiä. Mikropalveluarkkitehtuuri on ohjelmistoarkkitehtuuri, jossa hajautettu järjestelmä koostetaan yksittäisistä erillisistä palveluista. Jokainen palvelu vastaa järjestelmän tietystä toiminnosta tai osa-alueesta. Arkkitehtuuri, jossa sovellus on pilkottu pieniin autonomisiin komponentteihin mahdollistaa monien pilvipalveluiden ominaisuuksien (kuten kuorman mukaisen skaalauksen) käytn. Monimutkaiset yritysjärjestelmät ovat kenttä, jossa mikropalveluarkkitehtuuria tyypillisesti käytetään. Nämä järjestelmät ovat suuria, jatkuvan muutoksen alaisia ja moninaisin tavoin integroituneita useisiin muihin järjestelmiin. Monimutkaisten yritysjärjestelmien rakentaminen mikropalveluarkkitehtuurilla luo omat haasteensa siinä, miten järjestelmästä saadaan ylläpidettävä, jatkokehityskelpoinen ja ymmärrettävä. Tämä diplomityö kuvaa malleja mikropalvelujärjestelmien rakentamiseen siten, että järjestelmän kasvaessa yksittäiset mikropalvelut pysyvät erillisinä ja autonomisina sekä järjestelmä kokonaisuutena pystyy ylläpidettävänä. Avainrakenne näiden tavoitteiden saavuttamisessa on tapahtumien käyttö tiedon välittämisessä palveluiden välillä. Diplomityössä esitetään sitten viitearkkitehtuuri miten nämä mallit voidaan ottaa käyttöön julkisessa pilvipalvelussa

Correctness of services and their composition

We study correctness of services and their composition and investigate how the design of correct service compositions can be systematically supported. We thereby focus on the communication protocol of the service and approach these questions using formal methods and make contributions to three scenarios of SOC.Wir studieren die Korrektheit von Services und Servicekompositionen und untersuchen, wie der Entwurf von korrekten Servicekompositionen systematisch unterstützt werden kann. Wir legen dabei den Fokus auf das Kommunikationsprotokoll der Services. Mithilfe von formalen Methoden tragen wir zu drei Szenarien von SOC bei