Remote Data Retrieval for Bioinformatics Applications: An Agent Migration Approach

Some of the approaches have been developed to retrieve data automatically from one or multiple remote biological data sources. However, most of them require researchers to remain online and wait for returned results. The latter not only requires highly available network connection, but also may cause the network overload. Moreover, so far none of the existing approaches has been designed to address the following problems when retrieving the remote data in a mobile network environment: (1) the resources of mobile devices are limited; (2) network connection is relatively of low quality; and (3) mobile users are not always online. To address the aforementioned problems, we integrate an agent migration approach with a multi-agent system to overcome the high latency or limited bandwidth problem by moving their computations to the required resources or services. More importantly, the approach is fit for the mobile computing environments. Presented in this paper are also the system architecture, the migration strategy, as well as the security authentication of agent migration. As a demonstration, the remote data retrieval from GenBank was used to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed approach

Backing Composite Web Services Using Formal Concept Analysis

Abstract. A Web service is a software functionality accessible through the network. Web services are intended to be composed into coarser-grained applications. Achieving a required composite functionality requires the discovery of a collection of Web services out of the enormous service space. Each service must be examined to verify its provided functionality, making the selection task neither efficient nor practical. Moreover, when a service in a composition becomes unavailable, the whole composition may become functionally broken. Therefore, an equivalent service must be retrieved to replace the broken one, thus spending more time and effort. In this paper, we propose an approach for Web service classification based on FCA, using their operations estimated similarities. The generated lattices make the identification of candidate substitutes to a given service straightforward. Thus, service compositions can be achieved more easily and with backup services, so as to easily recover the functionality of a broken service