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

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

Rethinking teaching strategies : a framework and demonstration through augmenting Maple

In this work, an interdisciplinary approach has been adopted for the study of • teaching strategies of an Intelligent Tutoring System, in the paradigm of multiple teaching strategies, and • the use of Computer Algebra Systems (CAS) in teaching problem solving in university mathematics. As a result, the SIMTA (Styles Implemented by Methods Tactics Actions) theoretical framework has been developed to support and sustain teaching strategies in the paradigm of multiple teaching strategies. TeLoDe (TEaching Linear Ordinary Differential Equations), is a prototype Intelligent Tutoring System, teaching the ,solution of linear second order differential equations with constant coefficients in a novel way. This novel way, which has been empirically tested, has been achieved by augmenting Maple and represents an alternative use of CASs where the human lecturer and Maple are interlocked in a symbiotic and interdependent manner. In SIMTA, the contemporary concept of teaching strategy is rethought and proposed to be viewed at two fundamental levels: • the organisational level • and the operational level. The organisational level deals with the structure of the teaching strategy whereas the operational level deals with the manifestation of that structure. In SIMTA the organisational level is represented by a triple generic structure, method, tactic(s), action(s). A method is a mechanism for structuring the subject matter (e.g. analogy, examples, generalisation, specialisation). Likewise, a tactic is a mechanism for facilitating the interaction (e.g. explicit interaction, implicit interaction). An action is a low level activity such as display this message, ask this question. In SIMTA, the exact manifestation of the above generic structures (analogies, examples, implicit interaction, explicit interaction) depends on the concept of style: different styles result in different manifestations of the same generic structures. Thus, in SIMTA the concept of multiple teaching strategies is seen as merely a collection of teaching strategies manifested under the same style. These strategies operate with the aim of offering alternative representations of the same task at hand and ensuring that the lea~er is active by activating, directing and maintaining exploration. To help demonstrate the feasibility of SIMTA, two styles, the expository style and the , guided discovery style have been formed. The expository style draws on Ausubel's theory of meaningful learning, whereas, the guided discovery style draws on Bruner's work. These styles have been implemented in TeLoDe. TeLoDe, incorporates a teaching strategy module, based on a style, and declarative knowledge. Its purpose is threefold: (i) to serve as a research tool for the SIMTA framework, (ii) to serve as a prototype, demonstrating clearly how a 'second generation' CAS which undertakes the procedural aspect of mathematics allowing the human tutor to concentrate on its conceptual aspect, could be developed, (iii) to demonstrate how Maple and human lecturers are given clear roles which are, nevertheless, interdependent in carrying out the teaching of university mathematics. Two small-scale empirical studies were carried out in order to test SIMTA and TeLoDe respectively. The first study involved lecturers whereas the second study was carried out in a classroom environment. The results found from these studies demonstrate that TeLoDe has a potential as a teaching tool for problem solving in university mathematics in a novel way

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)

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