On the Use of Social Networks in Web Services: Application to the Discovery Stage

This chapter discusses the use of social networks in Web services with focus on the discovery stage that characterizes the life cycle of these Web services. Other stages in this life cycle include description, publication, invocation, and composition. Web services are software applications that end users or other peers can invoke and compose to satisfy different needs such as hotel booking and car rental. Discovering the relevant Web services is, and continues to be, a major challenge due to the dynamic nature of these Web services. Indeed, Web services appear/disappear or suspend/resume operations without prior notice. Traditional discovery techniques are based on registries such as Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) and Electronic Business using eXtensible Markup Language (ebXML). Unfortunately, despite the different improvements that these techniques have been subject to, they still suffer from various limitations that could slow down the acceptance trend of Web services by the IT community. Social networks seem to offer solutions to some of these limitations but raise, at the same time, some issues that are discussed in this chapter. The contributions of this chapter are three: social network definition in the particular context of Web services; mechanisms that support Web services build, use, and maintain their respective social networks; and social networks adoption to discover Web services

DO WEB SERVICES FOSTER SPECIALIZATION? AN ANALYSIS OF WEB SERVICE DIRECTORIES

Web service technologies are expected to foster the creation of networks of specialists which expose their digital services over the internet for the dynamic discovery of services by other organizations. Although the idea of a global Web service directory, which was considered a key enabler of e-commerce in the dot.com era, has failed with the shutdown of the Universal Business Registry in 2006, the vision of an open market for Web services has regained popularity lately in the context of the SOA and Web 2.0 concepts. Given these latest developments, the interesting question is whether there is empirical evidence of an emerging market for Web services. Based on a longitudinal study of Web services directories, this paper aims at analyzing the evolving offering and market structure of B2B Web services. The study suggests that commercial Web services which enable companies to out-task discrete, repetitive tasks to specialized service providers continue to be relatively scarce. However, Web services specialists emerge in specific domains, such as compliance, online validation and alerting. In addition, Web services directories are extending their scope beyond service discovery and evolve into either ‘real’ electronic marketplaces or infomediaries

Caching of XML Web Services to Support Disconnected Operation

XML Web services can now be accessed in all places and at all times. The problem now facing these XML Web services is the need be to universal availability. Caching can be used by client applications that use XML Web Services on wireless or mobile networks in the face of intermittent connectivity. The idea of interjecting a client side cache proxy may be a step in the direction towards the ultimate goal of a seamless online/offline operating environment of these XML Web Services. But, Web services present new challenges to existing cache managers since they have generally been designed without regard to caching and hence offer little support. The WSDL description of a Web service specifies the message format of a necessary to invoke a service operation but lacks the information needed to indicate whether an operation will modify the server state or produce different results on different invocations. We have suggested several annotations to the WSDL document that will allow custom cache managers to tailor their behavior based on the specific requirements of the Web service. We then built a caching system onto an HTTP proxy and interjected it between a Web service and its application client, to test our assumptions. We demonstrated that a XML Web services could be operated to a limited extent disconnected from the server, without modifying the implementation of the service or their applications

Gateways for the Internet of Things: An Old Problem Revisited

An early paper in network interconnection outlined the choices between adoption and adaption of protocol structures at different levels of the early Internet. This paper revisits that theme in the light of the many advances of the last three decades, and the emergence of the Internet of Things. We maintain that there are close parallels between the variety of incompatible networks which were in vogue in the early days of the Internet and the current situation with domain-specific sensor and actuator systems in the Internet of Things. We point out that there is now much more agreement on the approach to basic services, and a more universal approach to adaption. While universal adoption of common technologies is still far distant, there has been a broad consensus on the use of the Internet and web services for the access to such systems. Because of the standardization in some of the levels of web services, particularly in the context of IPv6, a consistent architecture is defined and examples of possible implementations given

Electronic Social Networks as Supporting Means of Educational Process in Higher Education Institutions

Given research describes experience of electronic social networks use in educational practices. It was determined that electronic social networks can be a powerful tool for support of educational process in higher education institutions, namely to support study of different disciplines. There are main advantages of electronic social networks use for education: universal accessibility and free of charge; possibility of instant messaging and multimedia data; user-friendly intuitive interface; ability to search data and information; availability of event scheduling, invitations, reminder settings; support for synchronous and asynchronous communication between network members; access from different devices. It is emphasized that one of the main advantages of electronic social networks is receipt of quick feedback and convenience of their tools and services. Nowadays, it is important to include network educational interaction in existing models of study organization. It is advisable to use electronic social networks to manage educational process in higher education institution. Efficiency of electronic social networks use depends on intensity and need for their use in educational system management for implementation of organizational, educational, psychological and pedagogical functions and ensuring universal communication with subjects of educational process. Expediency of electronic social networks use to carry out research work at university is described. Electronic social networks are convenient tool to conduct surveys and questionnaires, to create thematic groups for specific issue discussion. Also it is possible to interact with researchers from different countries, share experiences and disseminate research findings, invite those who wish to participate in various scientific activities using these networks

Dynamic virtual private network provisioning from multiple cloud infrastructure service providers

The Cloud infrastructure service providers currently provision basic virtualized computing resources as on demand and dynamic services but there is no common framework in existence that allows the seamless provisioning of even these basic services across multiple cloud service providers, although this is not due to any inherent incompatibility or proprietary nature of the foundation technologies on which these cloud platforms are built. We present a solution idea which aims to provide a dynamic and service oriented provisioning of secure virtual private networks on top of multiple cloud infrastructure service providers. This solution leverages the benefits of peer to peer overlay networks, i.e., the flexibility and scalability to handle the churn of nodes joining and leaving the VPNs and can adapt the topology of the VPN as per the requirements of the applications utilizing its intercloud secure communication framework

Secure communication using dynamic VPN provisioning in an Inter-Cloud environment

Most of the current cloud computing platforms offer Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model, which aims to provision basic virtualised computing resources as on-demand and dynamic services. Nevertheless, a single cloud does not have limitless resources to offer to its users, hence the notion of an Inter-Cloud enviroment where a cloud can use the infrastructure resources of other clouds. However, there is no common framework in existence that allows the srevice owners to seamlessly provision even some basic services across multiple cloud service providers, albeit not due to any inherent incompatibility or proprietary nature of the foundation technologies on which these cloud platforms are built. In this paper we present a novel solution which aims to cover a gap in a subsection of this problem domain. Our solution offer a security architecture that enables service owners to provision a dynamic and service-oriented secure virtual private network on top of multiple cloud IaaS providers. It does this by leveraging the scalability, robustness and flexibility of peer- to-peer overlay techniques to eliminate the manual configuration, key management and peer churn problems encountered in setting up the secure communication channels dynamically, between different components of a typical service that is deployed on multiple clouds. We present the implementation details of our solution as well as experimental results carried out on two commercial clouds

On the Design of Ambient Intelligent Systems in the Context of Assistive Technologies

The design of Ambient Intelligent Systems (AISs) is discussed in the context of assistive technologies. The main issues include ubiquitous communications, context awareness, natural interactions and heterogeneity, which are analyzed using some examples. A layered architecture is proposed for heterogeneous sub-systems integration with three levels of interactions that may be used as a framework to design assistive AISs.Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIC2001-1868-C0

Networks without wires: Human networks in the Information Society

It is the purpose of this paper to argue that the very significant skills we have brought as a profession to making the printed word uniformly and universally available have been overlooked. An electronic environment is being created which is inimical to scholarship and which is largely being designed by commercial and entertainment forces, which are irrelevant to the scholarly process. Even if that environment is modified and the issues described are resolved, it will remain an essentially hostile commercial environment. The academy remains largely unaware of the dangers - particularly in the area of preservation of both primary and secondary research resources. Our electronic house is built on shifting sands and a much more active approach is required from the profession to demonstrate that we can, like Sisyphus, reclimb the hill of bibliographic control and access and use that most basic skill of library school courses - the Organisation of Knowledge - to define scholarly requirements for the emerging information society. It is in fact by ensuring that our human networks are active and effective and by managing the flow of paper-based information effectively that we can best serve our readers, earn their professional respect, and position ourselves to act as guides to rather than bystanders at the information revolution

European Law and Regulation of Mobile Net Neutrality

Mobile is a rapidly growing and potentially major element of the future Internet, and its environment cannot be sensibly considered in isolation from fixed networks [2]. A note on terminology: Europe uses the term Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) while the United States uses 'wireless' Internet Service Providers (ISPs) [3]. 'Wireless' is somewhat more open in the United States. In Europe, mobile has always made special pleading for forms of self-regulation, as we will see. The article introduces mobile broadband, then considers net neutrality in the fixed environment including the new laws passed in November 2009 in the European Parliament, before considering the mobile net neutrality debate, the degree of price control regulation exerted on European mobiles and the MNOs' vigorous rear-guard anti-regulation defence. Finally, I look at the effects of this regulatory asymmetry and whether MNO calls for mobile to be treated differently from other ISPs can be justified. I conclude by examining what the effect of price and content control on mobile is likely to be for incentives for fixed ISPs and produce a result that I describe as the 'fixed' strategy