Combining SAWSDL, OWL-DL and UDDI for Semantically Enhanced Web Service Discovery

UDDI registries are included as a standard offering within the product suite of any major SOA vendor, serving as the foundation for establishing design-time and run-time SOA governance. Despite the success of the UDDI specification and its rapid uptake by the industry, the capabilities of its offered service discovery facilities are rather limited. The lack of machine-understandable semantics in the technical specifications and classification schemes used for retrieving services, prevent UDDI registries from supporting fully automated and thus truly effective service discovery. This paper presents the implementation of a semantically-enhanced registry that builds on the UDDI specification and augments its service publication and discovery facilities to overcome the aforementioned limitations. The proposed solution combines the use of SAWSDL for creating semantically annotated descriptions of service interfaces and the use of OWL-DL for modelling service capabilities and for performing matchmaking via DL reasoning

Web Service Discovery in the FUSION Semantic Registry

The UDDI specification was developed as an attempt to address the key challenge of effective Web service discovery and has become a widely adopted standard. However, the text-based indexing and search mechanism that UDDI registries offer does not suffice for expressing unambiguous and semantically rich representations of service capabilities, and cannot support the logic-based inference capacity required for facilitating automated service matchmaking. This paper provides an overview of the approach put forward in the FUSION project for overcoming this important limitation. Our solution combines SAWSDL-based service descriptions with service capability profiling based on OWL-DL, and automated matchmaking through DL reasoning in a semantically extended UDDI registry

Supporting Semantically Enhanced Web Service Discovery for Enterprise Application Integration

The availability of sophisticated Web service discovery mechanisms is an essential prerequisite for increasing the levels of efficiency and automation in EAI. In this chapter, we present an approach for developing service registries building on the UDDI standard and offering semantically-enhanced publication and discovery capabilities in order to overcome some of the known limitations of conventional service registries. The approach aspires to promote efficiency in EAI in a number of ways, but primarily by automating the task of evaluating service integrability on the basis of the input and output messages that are defined in the Web service’s interface. The presented solution combines the use of three technology standards to meet its objectives: OWL-DL, for modelling service characteristics and performing fine-grained service matchmaking via DL reasoning, SAWSDL, for creating semantically annotated descriptions of service interfaces, and UDDI, for storing and retrieving syntactic and semantic information about services and service providers

Semantic annotation, publication, and discovery of Java software components: an integrated approach

Component-based software development has matured into standard practice in software engineering. Among the advantages of reusing software modules are lower costs, faster development, more manageable code, increased productivity, and improved software quality. As the number of available software components has grown, so has the need for effective component search and retrieval. Traditional search approaches, such as keyword matching, have proved ineffective when applied to software components. Applying a semantically- enhanced approach to component classification, publication, and discovery can greatly increase the efficiency of searching and retrieving software components. This has been already applied in the context of Web technologies, and Web services in particular, in the frame of Semantic Web Services research. This paper examines the similarities between software components and Web services and adapts an existing Semantic Web Service publication and discovery solution into a software component annotation and discovery tool which is implemented as an Eclipse plug-in

Semantic Web Technologies in Support of Service Oriented Architecture Governance

As Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) deployments gradually mature they also grow in size and complexity. The number of service providers, services, and service consumers increases, and so do the dependencies among these entities and the various artefacts that describe how services operate, or how they are meant to operate under specific conditions. Appropriate governance over the various phases and activities associated with the service lifecycle is therefore indispensable in order to prevent a SOA deployment from dissolving into an unmanageable infrastructure. The employment of Semantic Web technologies for describing and reasoning about service properties and governance requirements has the potential to greatly enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of SOA Governance solutions by increasing the levels of automation in a wide-range of tasks relating to service lifecycle management. The goal of the proposed research work is to investigate the application of Semantic Web technologies in the context of service lifecycle management, and propose a concrete theoretical and technological approach for supporting SOA Governance through the realisation of semantically-enhanced registry and repository solutions

MORMED: towards a multilingual social networking platform facilitating medicine 2.0

The broad adoption of Web 2.0 tools has signalled a new era of "Medicine 2.0" in the field of medical informatics. The support for collaboration within online communities and the sharing of information in social networks offers the opportunity for new communication channels among patients, medical experts, and researchers. This paper introduces MORMED, a novel multilingual social networking and content management platform that exemplifies the Medicine 2.0 paradigm, and aims to achieve knowledge commonality by promoting sociality, while also transcending language barriers through automated translation. The MORMED platform will be piloted in a community interested in the treatment of rare diseases (Lupus or Antiphospholipid Syndrome)

Policy-Driven Governance in Cloud Service Ecosystems

Cloud application development platforms facilitate new models of software co-development and forge environments best characterised as cloud service ecosystems. The value of those ecosystems increases exponentially with the addition of more users and third-party services. Growth however breeds complexity and puts reliability at risk, requiring all stakeholders to exercise control over changes in the ecosystem that may affect them. This is a challenge of governance. From the viewpoint of the ecosystem coordinator, governance is about preventing negative ripple effects from new software added to the platform. From the viewpoint of third-party developers and end-users, governance is about ensuring that the cloud services they consume or deliver comply with requirements on a continuous basis. To facilitate different forms of governance in a cloud service ecosystem we need governance support systems that achieve separation of concerns between the roles of policy provider, governed resource provider and policy evaluator. This calls for better modularisation of the governance support system architecture, decoupling governance policies from policy evaluation engines and governed resources. It also calls for an improved approach to policy engineering with increased automation and efficient exchange of governance policies and related data between ecosystem partners. The thesis supported by this research is that governance support systems that satisfy such requirements are both feasible and useful to develop through a framework that integrates Semantic Web technologies and Linked Data principles. The PROBE framework presented in this dissertation comprises four components: (1) a governance ontology serving as shared ecosystem vocabulary for policies and resources; (2) a method for the definition of governance policies; (3) a method for sharing descriptions of governed resources between ecosystem partners; (4) a method for evaluating governance policies against descriptions of governed ecosystem resources. The feasibility and usefulness of PROBE are demonstrated with the help of an industrial case study on cloud service ecosystem governance

Feasibility study and prototyping of a blockchain-based transport-service pricing and allocation platform

This report summarizes the activity and findings of the JRC Proof of Concept Project Ridechain. The project investigated the applicability and market potential of blockchain technology for asset sharing in the road transport sector. The project comprised two principal activities. The first activity was market research and analysis to support the development of a new service concept and business model for blockchain-powered shared mobility. Specifically, the research resulted in the definition of a novel technology platform that leverages blockchain, cloud services, and in-car technology to enhance trust, streamline coordination and improve information exchange in P2P car sharing ecosystems. The second activity was technology prototyping to demonstrate the technical feasibility of the novel service concept using state of the art blockchain and IoT frameworks. These two activities provided answers to two respective research questions. First, what would be a high-value transport sector market to which a blockchain-powered technology product could offer a high-value solution? Second, how could this technology product be realized?JRC.C.4-Sustainable Transpor

Run-time verification of behavioural conformance for conversational web services

Web services exposing run-time behaviour that deviates from their behavioural specifications represent a major threat to the sustainability of a service-oriented ecosystem. It is therefore critical to verify the behavioural conformance of services during run-time. This paper discusses a novel approach for run-time verification of Web services. It proposes the utilisation of Stream X-machines for constructing formal behavioural specifications of Web services which can be exploited for verifying that a service’s run-time behaviour does not deviate from what is defined in the specification. Our approach allows for checking both the control flow of a Web service and the values of the data in the generated responses. The paper also proposes a classification of Web services and discusses how different types of services can be verified at run-time. Finally, it presents a run-time monitoring and verification architecture and discusses how it can be integrated into different types of service-oriented infrastructures

Increased reliability in SOA environments through registry-based conformance testing of Web services

Organisations wishing to engage in industrial collaborative networks will typically seek some guarantees concerning the reliability of their prospective partners before committing to cooperation. Evaluating reliability can encompass several aspects, but one of the most crucial things to consider from a cooperation perspective is whether the software systems that support the business processes of some collaborator actually behave as expected. For organisations that rely on a service-oriented computing infrastructure, this amounts to checking whether the functionality of the respective services is conformant to a given behavioural specification. Today’s state of the art lacks standardised methods for creating behavioural specifications of Web services, and also lacks tools for automating the process of behavioural conformance checking through testing. This paper presents a concrete method for creating formal specifications of Web service behaviour and utilising them within service registries for automated testing of service implementations in order to verify and certify their conformance