Cardinality heterogeneities in Web service composition: Issues and solutions

Data exchanges between Web services engaged in a composition raise several heterogeneities. In this paper, we address the problem of data cardinality heterogeneity in a composition. Firstly, we build a theoretical framework to describe different aspects of Web services that relate to data cardinality, and secondly, we solve this problem by developing a solution for cardinality mediation based on constraint logic programming

Impacts of indoor surface finishes on bacterial viability.

Microbes in indoor environments are constantly being exposed to antimicrobial surface finishes. Many are rendered non-viable after spending extended periods of time under low-moisture, low-nutrient surface conditions, regardless of whether those surfaces have been amended with antimicrobial chemicals. However, some microorganisms remain viable even after prolonged exposure to these hostile conditions. Work with specific model pathogens makes it difficult to draw general conclusions about how chemical and physical properties of surfaces affect microbes. Here, we explore the survival of a synthetic community of non-model microorganisms isolated from built environments following exposure to three chemically and physically distinct surface finishes. Our findings demonstrated the differences in bacterial survival associated with three chemically and physically distinct materials. Alkaline clay surfaces select for an alkaliphilic bacterium, Kocuria rosea, whereas acidic mold-resistant paint favors Bacillus timonensis, a Gram-negative spore-forming bacterium that also survives on antimicrobial surfaces after 24 hours of exposure. Additionally, antibiotic-resistant Pantoea allii did not exhibit prolonged retention on antimicrobial surfaces. Our controlled microcosm experiment integrates measurement of indoor chemistry and microbiology to elucidate the complex biochemical interactions that influence the indoor microbiome

A web services composition approach based on software agents and context

We present an agent-based and context-oriented approach for Web services composition. A Web service is an accessible application that other applications and humans can discover and trigger to satisfy various needs. Due to the complexity of Web services composition, we consider two concepts to reduce this complexity: Software agent and context. A software agent is an autonomous entity that acts on behalf of users, whereas context is any information relevant to characterize a situation. During composition, software agents engage conversations with their peers to agree on the Web services that will participate in the composition

Towards an approach for enhancing web services discovery

This paper discusses the added-value of combining users\u27 preferences and Web services\u27 capacities during the process of discovering the Web services that permit satisfying users\u27 needs. The needs, preferences, and capacities vary over time, which requires tracking them using contextual details. Examples of needs include hotel booking and loan application. Examples of preferences include time of result delivery and interaction means. Examples of capacities include operations to perform at a certain time/place and non-functional characteristics of operations. In this paper, bringing Web services and users together is supported by an approach that develops respective ontologies for preferences and capacities, represents these latter with SAWSDL, and finally, matches them using a dedicated algorithm

A Quality-of-Things Model for Assessing the Internet-of-Thing’s Non-Functional Properties

The Internet of Things (IoT) is in a “desperate” need for a practical model that would help in differentiating things according to their non-functional properties. Unfortunately, despite IoT growth, such properties either lack or ill-defined resulting into ad-hoc ways of selecting similar functional things. This paper discusses how things’ non-functional properties are combined into a Quality-of-Things (QoT) model. This model includes properties that define the performance of things’ duties related to sensing, actuating, and communicating. Since the values of QoT properties might not always be available or confirmed, providers of things can tentatively define these values and submit them to an Independent Regulatory Authority (IRA) whose role is to ensure fair competition among all providers. The IRA assesses the values of non-functional properties of things prior to recommending those that could satisfy users’ needs. To evaluate the technical doability of the QoT model, a set of comprehensive experiments are conducted using real datasets. The results depict an acceptable level of the QoT estimation accuracy

Role assigning and taking in cloud computing

The widespread use of cloud computing (CC) has brought to the forefront information technology (IT) governance issues, rendering the lack of expertise in handling CC-based IT controls a major challenge for business enterprises and other societal organizations. In the cloud-computing context, this study identifies and ranks the determinants of role assigning and taking by IT people. The study’s integrative research links CC and IT governance to humane arrangements, as it validates and ranks role assigning and taking components through in-depth interviews with twelve IT decision-makers and forty-four Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA) members, engaged as panelists in a Delphi technique implementation. The empirical results recognize skills and competencies as prioritized determinants of IT controls, while IT security, risk and compliance emerge as capabilities crucial to evaluate and manage CC service providers. Despite the study’s generalizability limitations, its findings highlight future research paths and provide practical guidelines toward the high technology of open-market IT self-governance. The latter entails the humane flows of collegial control and responsibility, as opposed to the inhumane flows of authority and power, under the sequestered technique of the bureaucratically-hierarchized IT hetero-governanc

A Survey of Resource Management Challenges in Multi-cloud Environment: Taxonomy and Empirical Analysis

Cloud computing has seen a great deal of interest by researchers and industrial firms since its first coined. Different perspectives and research problems, such as energy efficiency, security and threats, to name but a few, have been dealt with and addressed from cloud computing perspective. However, cloud computing environment still encounters a major challenge of how to allocate and manage computational resources efficiently. Furthermore, due to the different architectures and cloud computing networks and models used (i.e., federated clouds, VM migrations, cloud brokerage), the complexity of resource management in the cloud has been increased dramatically. Cloud providers and service consumers have the cloud brokers working as the intermediaries between them, and the confusion among the cloud computing parties (consumers, brokers, data centres and service providers) on who is responsible for managing the request of cloud resources is a key issue. In a traditional scenario, upon renting the various cloud resources from the providers, the cloud brokers engage in subletting and managing these resources to the service consumers. However, providers’ usually deal with many brokers, and vice versa, and any dispute of any kind between the providers and the brokers will lead to service unavailability, in which the consumer is the only victim. Therefore, managing cloud resources and services still needs a lot of attention and effort. This paper expresses the survey on the systems of the cloud brokerage resource management issues in multi-cloud environments

Bridging the gap between business processes and IoT

© 2020 ACM. This paper discusses a novel way of making business processes and Internet of Things (IoT) work together. Indeed each suffers from many limitations that the other could help address them and vice versa. On the one hand, business processes are known for capturing organizations\u27 best practices when satisfying users\u27 demands but do not have the capabilities of controlling the physical surrounding that comprises millions of devices/things. On the other hand, IoT is known for provisioning contextualized services to users thanks to millions of devices/things but does not have the capabilities of making these devices/things collaborate. The paper presents a framework to support the collaboration of business processes and IoT. This collaboration is exemplified with 2 types of processes referred as thing-Aware processes (TaP) and process-of-Things (PoT). A system illustrating the development of PoT is presented in the paper as well

Improving Fog Computing Performance via Fog-2-Fog Collaboration

In the Internet of Things (IoT) era, a large volume of data is continuously emitted from a plethora of connected devices. The current network paradigm, which relies on centralized data centers (aka Cloudcomputing), has become inefficient to respond to IoT latency concern. To address this concern, fog computing allows data processing and storage \close" to IoT devices. However, fog is still not efficient due to spatial and temporal distribution of these devices, which leads to fog nodes' unbalanced loads. This paper proposes a new Fog-2-Fog (F2F) collaboration model that promotes offloading incoming requests among fog nodes, according to their load and processing capabilities, via a novel load balancing known as Fog Resource manAgeMEnt Scheme (FRAMES). A formal mathematical model of F2F and FRAMES has been fomulated, and a set of experiments has been carried out demonstrating the technical doability of F2F collaboration. The performance of the proposed fog load balancing model is compared to other load balancing models