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

Towards a flexible service integration through separation of business rules

Driven by dynamic market demands, enterprises are continuously exploring collaborations with others to add value to their services and seize new market opportunities. Achieving enterprise collaboration is facilitated by Enterprise Application Integration and Business-to-Business approaches that employ architectural paradigms like Service Oriented Architecture and incorporate technological advancements in networking and computing. However, flexibility remains a major challenge related to enterprise collaboration. How can changes in demands and opportunities be reflected in collaboration solutions with minimum time and effort and with maximum reuse of existing applications? This paper proposes an approach towards a more flexible integration of enterprise applications in the context of service mediation. We achieve this by combining goal-based, model-driven and serviceoriented approaches. In particular, we pay special attention to the separation of business rules from the business process of the integration solution. Specifying the requirements as goal models, we separate those parts which are more likely to evolve over time in terms of business rules. These business rules are then made executable by exposing them as Web services and incorporating them into the design of the business process.\ud Thus, should the business rules change, the business process remains unaffected. Finally, this paper also provides an evaluation of the flexibility of our solution in relation to the current work in business process flexibility research

Towards a Formal Theory of Interoperability

This dissertation proposes a formal theory of interoperability that explains 1) what interoperability is as opposed to how it works, 2) how to tell whether two or more systems can interoperate and 3) how to identify whether systems are interoperating or merely exchanging bits and bytes. The research provides a formal model of data in M&S that captures all possible representations of a real or imagined thing and distinguishes between existential dependencies and transformational dependencies. Existential dependencies capture the relationships within a model while transformational dependencies capture the relationships between interactions with a model. These definitions are used to formally specify interoperation, the ability to exchange information, as a necessary condition for interoperability. Theorems of interoperation that capture the nature and boundaries of the interoperation space and how to measure it are formulated. Interoperability is formally captured as a subset of the interoperation space for which transformational dependencies can be fulfilled. Theorems of interoperability that capture the interoperability space and how to measure it are presented. Using graph theory and complexity theory, the model of data is reformulated as a graph, and the complexity of interoperation and interoperability is shown to be at least NP-Complete. Model Based Data Engineering (MBDE) is formally defined using the model of data introduced earlier and transformed into a heuristic that supports interoperability. This heuristic is shown to be more powerful than current approaches in that it is consistent and can easily be verified

Service-oriented simulation using web ontology

Copyright © 2012 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.Commercial-off-the-Shelf (COTS) Simulation Packages (CSPs) have proved popular in a wider industrial setting. Reuse of Simulation Component (SC) models by collaborating organisations or divisions is restricted, however, by the same semantic issues that restrict the inter-organisation use of other software services. Semantic models, in the form of ontology, utilised by a web-service-based discovery and deployment architecture provide one approach to support simulation model reuse. Semantic interoperation is achieved using domain-grounded SC ontology to identify reusable components and subsequently loaded into a CSP, and locally or remotely executed. The work is based on a health service simulation that addresses the transportation of blood. The ontology-engineering framework and discovery architecture provide a novel approach to inter-organisation simulation, uncovering domain semantics and providing a less intrusive mechanism for component reuse. The resulting web of component models and simulation execution environments present a nascent approach to simulation grids

Applications of Blockchain in Business Processes: A Comprehensive Review

Blockchain (BC), as an emerging technology, is revolutionizing Business Process Management (BPM) in multiple ways. The main adoption is to serve as a trusted infrastructure to guarantee the trust of collaborations among multiple partners in trustless environments. Especially, BC enables trust of information by using Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). With the power of smart contracts, BC enforces the obligations of counterparties that transact in a business process (BP) by programming the contracts as transactions. This paper aims to study the state-of-the-art of BC technologies by (1) exploring its applications in BPM with the focus on how BC provides the trust of BPs in their lifecycles; (2) identifying the relations of BPM as the need and BC as the solution with the assessment towards BPM characteristics; (3) discussing the up-to-date progresses of critical BC in BPM; (4) identifying the challenges and research directions for future advancement in the domain. The main conclusions of our comprehensive review are (1) the study of adopting BC in BPM has attracted a great deal of attention that has been evidenced by a rapidly growing number of relevant articles. (2) The paradigms of BPM over Internet of Things (IoT) have been shifted from persistent to transient, from static to dynamic, and from centralized to decentralized, and new enabling technologies are highly demanded to fulfill some emerging functional requirements (FRs) at the stages of design, configuration, diagnosis, and evaluation of BPs in their lifecycles. (3) BC has been intensively studied and proven as a promising solution to assure the trustiness for both of business processes and their executions in decentralized BPM. (4) Most of the reported BC applications are at their primary stages, future research efforts are needed to meet the technical challenges involved in interoperation, determination of trusted entities, confirmation of time-sensitive execution, and support of irreversibility

A look at cloud architecture interoperability through standards

Enabling cloud infrastructures to evolve into a transparent platform while preserving integrity raises interoperability issues. How components are connected needs to be addressed. Interoperability requires standard data models and communication encoding technologies compatible with the existing Internet infrastructure. To reduce vendor lock-in situations, cloud computing must implement universal strategies regarding standards, interoperability and portability. Open standards are of critical importance and need to be embedded into interoperability solutions. Interoperability is determined at the data level as well as the service level. Corresponding modelling standards and integration solutions shall be analysed

SOA4All, enabling the SOA revolution on a world wide scale

SOA4All will help to realize a world where billions of parties are exposing and consuming services via advanced Web technology. The outcome of the project will be a comprehensive framework and infrastructure that integrates four complimentary paradigm-shifting technical advances into a coherent and domain independent service delivery platform: Web principles and technology as the underlying infrastructure for the integration of services at a world wide scale; Web 2.0 as a means to structure human-machine cooperation in an efficient and cost effective manner; Semantic Web technology as a means to abstract from syntax to semantics as required for meaningful service discovery; and context management as a way to process in a machine understandable way user needs that facilitate the customization of existing services for the needs of users

Cloud based testing of business applications and web services

This paper deals with testing of applications based on the principles of cloud computing. It is aimed to describe options of testing business software in clouds (cloud testing). It identifies the needs for cloud testing tools including multi-layer testing; service level agreement (SLA) based testing, large scale simulation, and on-demand test environment. In a cloud-based model, ICT services are distributed and accessed over networks such as intranet or internet, which offer large data centers deliver on demand, resources as a service, eliminating the need for investments in specific hardware, software, or on data center infrastructure. Businesses can apply those new technologies in the contest of intellectual capital management to lower the cost and increase competitiveness and also earnings. Based on comparison of the testing tools and techniques, the paper further investigates future trend of cloud based testing tools research and development. It is also important to say that this comparison and classification of testing tools describes a new area and it has not yet been done