Mediation Patterns for Message Exchange Protocols

Systems interact with their environment (e.g., other systems) by ex-changing messages in a particular order. Interoperability problems arise when systems do not understand each other’s messages or follow incompatible message exchange protocols. In this paper we identify mismatches in message ex-change protocols (involving two systems) and we propose solution patterns to compensate these mismatches

Semantic and pragmatic interoperability: a model for understanding

In this paper we present a conceptual model for understanding of semantic and pragmatic interoperability. We use the model to identify and classify the possible semantic interoperability problems

Model-driven semantic integration of service-oriented applications

The integration of enterprise applications is an extremely complex problem since the most applications have not been designed to work with other applications. That is, they have different information models, do not share common state, and do not consult each other when updating their states. Unfortunately, domain experts, who have the required knowledge to resolve the mismatches between the applications, are typically not IT experts. Their expertise is only used in the very early stages of integration projects, namely, in the requirements elicitation stage. This makes the gap between business integration requirements and the software implementation of the integration solution wide, which, in turn, additionally complicates the integration process and often leads to the realization of solutions that work incorrectly. \ud \ud The work presented in this thesis makes contributions in the area of Enterprise Application Integration. We propose a method for the semantic integration of service-oriented applications. The key feature of the method is that semantically-rich service models, at different levels of abstraction, are employed to build flexible integration solutions. The method allows system integrators (both domain experts and software developers) to address only a limited set of concerns in a series of design steps. In addition, the proposed method supports handling of changes in the implementation technology and integration requirements. Finally, integration solutions produced by the method can be formally verified for correctness using automatic reasoners

Context-aware, ontology-based, service discovery

Service discovery is a process of locating, or discovering, one or more documents, that describe a particular service. Most of the current service discovery approaches perform syntactic matching, that is, they retrieve services descriptions that contain particular keywords from the user’s query. This often leads to poor discovery results, because the keywords in the query can be semantically similar but syntactically different, or syntactically similar but semantically different from the terms in a service description. Another drawback of the existing service discovery mechanisms is that the query-service matching score is calculated taking into account only the keywords from the user’s query and the terms in the service descriptions. Thus, regardless of the context of the service user and the context of the services providers, the same list of results is returned in response to a particular query. This paper presents a novel approach for service discovery that uses ontologies to capture the semantics of the user’s query, of the services and of the contextual information that is considered relevant in the matching process

On the enterprise modelling of an educational information infrastructure

In this report, we present the outcomes of exercising a design trajectory in respect of the modelling of an educational information infrastructure. The\ud infrastructure aims to support the organisation of teaching and learning activities, independently of any particular didactic policy. The design trajectory focuses on capturing invariant structures of relations between entities in educational organisation into Enterprise object models that underlie the design of the intended educational infrastructure.\ud An early-developed prototype of the infrastructure has emphasised the need for an Educational Model Space to determine the modelling and problem domain context apriori to modelling. In this space, educational requirements have been elaborated towards the Open Distributed Processing (ODP) Enterprise Viewpoint object models expressed in terms of the Unified Modelling Language (UML).\ud Recursive structures have been used to capture the dynamic needs of education. Furthermore, these structures are uniform for the planning, performance and evaluation activities of education. The Enterprise models developed can be used to derive the Information Viewpoint models and to further optimise the prototype of the infrastructure. In this work, we have managed to fruitfully combine educational and computer science modelling inputs by using ODP and UML as a bridge for this interdisciplinary collaboration

Business Level Service-Oriented Enterprise Application Integration

In this paper we propose a new approach for service-oriented enterprise application integration (EAI). Unlike current EAI solutions, which mainly focus on technological aspects, our approach allows business domain experts to get more involved in the integration process. First, we provide a technique for modeling application services at a sufficiently high level of abstraction for business experts to work with. Next, these business experts can model the orchestration as well as the information mappings that are required to achieve their integration goals. Our mediation framework then takes over and realizes the integration solution by transforming these models to existing service orchestration technology

Combining goal-oriented and model-driven approaches to solve the Payment Problem Scenario

Motivated by the objective to provide an improved participation of business domain experts in the design of service-oriented integration solutions, we extend our previous work on using the COSMO methodology for service mediation by introducing a goal-oriented approach to requirements engineering. With this approach, business requirements including the motivations behind the mediation solution are better understood, specified, and aligned with their technical implementations. We use the Payment Problem Scenario of the SWS Challenge to illustrate the extension