Enhancement of the usability of SOA services for novice users

Recently, the automation of service integration has provided a significant advantage in delivering services to novice users. This art of integrating various services is known as Service Composition and its main purpose is to simplify the development process for web applications and facilitates reuse of services. It is one of the paradigms that enables services to end-users (i.e.service provisioning) through the outsourcing of web contents and it requires users to share and reuse services in more collaborative ways. Most service composers are effective at enabling integration of web contents, but they do not enable universal access across different groups of users. This is because, the currently existing content aggregators require complex interactions in order to create web applications (e.g., Web Service Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL)) as a result not all users are able to use such web tools. This trend demands changes in the web tools that end-users use to gain and share information, hence this research uses Mashups as a service composition technique to allow novice users to integrate publicly available Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) services, where there is a minimal active web application development. Mashups being the platforms that integrate disparate web Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to create user defined web applications; presents a great opportunity for service provisioning. However, their usability for novice users remains invalidated since Mashup tools are not easy to use they require basic programming skills which makes the process of designing and creating Mashups difficult. This is because Mashup tools access heterogeneous web contents using public web APIs and the process of integrating them become complex since web APIs are tailored by different vendors. Moreover, the design of Mashup editors is unnecessary complex; as a result, users do not know where to start when creating Mashups. This research address the gap between Mashup tools and usability by the designing and implementing a semantically enriched Mashup tool to discover, annotate and compose APIs to improve the utilization of SOA services by novice users. The researchers conducted an analysis of the already existing Mashup tools to identify challenges and weaknesses experienced by novice Mashup users. The findings from the requirement analysis formulated the system usability requirements that informed the design and implementation of the proposed Mashup tool. The proposed architecture addressed three layers: composition, annotation and discovery. The researchers developed a simple Mashup tool referred to as soa-Services Provisioner (SerPro) that allowed novice users to create web application flexibly. Its usability and effectiveness was validated. The proposed Mashup tool enhanced the usability of SOA services, since data analysis and results showed that it was usable to novice users by scoring a System Usability Scale (SUS) score of 72.08. Furthermore, this research discusses the research limitations and future work for further improvements

A Semantic-Oriented Description Framework and Broker Architecture for Publication and Discovery in Cloud Based Conferencing

Cloud computing is an emerging paradigm for provisioning network, storage, and computing resources on demand using a pay-per-use model. Conferencing is the conversational exchange of media between several parties. Cloud-based conferencing services can provide benefits such as easy introduction of different types of conferences, resource usage efficiency and scalability. A business model has been recently proposed in a position paper for cloud-based conferencing with the following roles: conference substrate provider, conference infrastructure provider, conference platform provider, conference service provider, and broker. Conference substrates are generally atomic and served as elementary building blocks (e.g. signaling, mixing) of conferencing applications. They can be virtualized and shared for resource efficiency purposes. Multiple conferencing substrates can be combined to build a conferencing service (e.g. a dial-out audio signaling conference service composed from dial-out signaling and audio mixer substrates). The focus of this thesis is to design a semantic-oriented description framework for conferencing substrates and an architecture for their publication and discovery. The description framework is made up of a description language and a cloud-based conference ontology. The conference ontology is modeled on the basis of the interacting roles in the proposed cloud-based conferencing business model. The overall publication and discovery architecture for cloud-based conference substrates is made up of three brokers and the related publication and discovery interfaces. The publication and discovery interfaces are modelled using REpresentation State Transfer (REST) interfaces. A prototype is built to demonstrate the feasibility of this architecture. The effectiveness of the architecture is also proved using the performance measurements