Ontologies for specifying and reconciling contexts of web services

This paper presents an ontology-based approach for the specification (using OWL-C as a definition language) and reconciliation (using ConWeS as a mediation tool) of contexts of Web services. Web services are independent components that can be triggered and composed for the satisfaction of user needs (e.g., hotel booking). Because Web services originate from different providers, their composition faces the obstacle of the context heterogeneity featuring these Web services. An unawareness of this context heterogeneity during Web services composition and execution results in a lack of the quality and relevancy of information that permits tracking the composition, monitoring the execution, and handling exceptions. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

EUROMICRO - Context-based personalization of Web services composition and provisioning

This work presents an approach that aims at personalizing Web services composition and provisioning using context. Composition addresses the situation of a user\u27s request that cannot be satisfied by any available service, and thus requires the combination of several Web services. Provisioning focuses on the deployment of Web services according to users\u27 preferences. A Web service is an accessible application that other applications and humans can discover and trigger. Context is the information that characterizes the interactions between humans, applications, and the surrounding environment. Web services are subject to personalization if there is a need of accommodating users\u27 preferences during service performance and outcome delivery. To be able to track personalization in terms of what happened, what is happening, and what might happen three types of context are devised, and they are referred to as user-, Web service-, and resource-context

Referral based expertise search system in a time evolving social network

To solve some difficult problems that requires procedural knowledge, people often seek the advice of experts who have got competence in that problem domain. This paper focuses on locating and determining an expert in a particular knowledge domain. In most cases, social network of a user is explored through referrals to locate human experts. Past work in searching for experts through referrals focused primarily on static social network. However, static social network fail to accurately represent the set of experts, as in a knowledge domain as time evolves experts continuously keep changing. This paper focuses on the problem of finding experts through referrals in a time evolving co-author social network. Authors and co-authors of research publication for instance are domain experts. In this paper, we propose a solution where the network is expanded incrementally and the information on domain experts is suitably modified. This will avoid periodic global expertise recomputation and would help to effectively retrieve relevant information on domain experts. A novel data structure is also introduced in our study to effectively track the change in expertise of an author with time. © 2010 ACM

A novel scalable representative-based forecasting approach of service quality

© 2020, Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria, part of Springer Nature. Several approaches to forecast the service quality based on its quality of service (QoS) properties are reported in the literature. However, their main disadvantage resides in their limited scalability. In fact, they elaborate a forecasting model for each quality attribute per service, which cannot scale well for large or even medium size datasets of services. Accordingly, we propose a novel scalable representative-based forecasting approach of QoS. The QoS is modeled as a multivariate time series in which the values of service attributes are evaluated at each time instant and forecasted based on three stages. First, a data aggregation function is applied to the multivariate time series data. Then, principal component analysis (PCA) is applied to the quality attributes to determine the most relevant ones. The reduced data is then clustered, so that, a representative for each cluster is computed. Finally, a forecasting model is built for each cluster representative for the sake of deriving other services’ forecasting models. A set of extensive experiments are carried out to assess the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed approach on a dataset of real services. The experimental results show that the proposed approach is up to 75% more efficient than direct forecasting approaches using time measurements while increasing the number of forecasted services and that the elaborated forecasting models enjoy insignificant forecasting errors

Context-driven policy enforcement and reconciliation for Web services

Security of Web services is a major factor to their successful integration into critical IT applications. An extensive research in this direction concentrates on low level aspects of security such as message secrecy, data integrity, and authentication. Thus, proposed solutions are mainly built upon the assumption that security mechanisms are static and predefined. However, the dynamic nature of the Internet and the continuously changing environments where Web services operate require innovative and adaptive security solutions. This paper presents our solution for securing Web services based on adaptive policies, where adaptability is satisfied using the contextual information of the Web services. The proposed solution includes a negotiation and reconciliation protocol for security policies

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

Decoupling security concerns in web services using aspects

This paper discusses the Aspect-oriented Framework for Web services (AoF4WS) that supports on-demand context-sensitive security in Web services. Flexible security schemes are needed in many Web services applications where authentication, authorization, etc., can no longer be used in their current form. Security mechanisms are to be customized to the continuously changing requirements of Web services. Examples of this customization concern cryptographic protocol for a specific situation and timeout for user credentials. The AoF4WS uses aspect-oriented programming and frames. Aspects provide flexibility to the framework, and frames adjust aspects to specific requirements. © 2006 IEEE

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

Storytelling integration of the internet of things into business processes

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018. This paper discusses the integration of Internet of Things (IoT) into Business Processes (BPs). To define the business logic of thing-aware BPs, existing approaches extend traditional workflow languages (i.e., who does what, why, when, and where) with constructs like things’ roles. However, this way of defining the business logic restricts things’ operations and, thus, hinders them from initiating ad-hoc/opportunistic collaboration with peers. To overcome this limitation, we tap into the storytelling principles to introduce the concept of Process of Things (PoT) as a new way of integrating IoT into BPs. A PoT is specified as a story whose script indicates the characters that things will play as well as the scenes that will feature these things. A PoT, also, allows things to collaborate by offering value-added services to end-users. For demonstration purposes, a hospital scenario is implemented using a combination of real and simulated sensors along with different IoT technologies and communication protocols