The fundamental purpose of cloud computing is the ability to quickly provide software and hardware resources to global users. The main aim of cloud service localisation is to provide a method for facilitating the internationalisation and localisation of cloud services by allowing them to be adapted to different locales. We address lingual localisation by providing a service translation using the latest web-services technology to adapt services to different languages and currency conversion by using realtime data provided by the European Central Bank. Units and Regulatory Localisations are performed by a conversion mapping, which we have generated for a subset of locales. The aim is to provide a standardised view on the localisation of services by using

runtime and middleware services to deploy a localisation implementation

Collins, Luke

Fowley, Frank

Pahl, Claus

English

DCU Online Research Access Service

Rule-based Cloud Service LocalisationLuke Collins1 and Frank Fowley1 and Claus Pahl21School of Computing, Dublin City University, Dublin 9, Ireland2CNGL, School of Computing, Dublin City University, Dublin 9, Irelandluke.collins4@mail.dcu.ie, frank.fowley@dcu.ie, claus.pahl@dcu.ieKeywords: Cloud Service Localisation, Cloud Computing, Cloud Architecture.Abstract: The fundamental purpose of cloud computing is the ability to quickly provide software and hardware resourcesto global users. The main aim of cloud service localisation is to provide a method for facilitating the interna-tionalisation and localisation of cloud services by allowing them to be adapted to different locales. We addresslingual localisation by providing a service translation using the latest web-services technology to adapt ser-vices to different languages and currency conversion by using realtime data provided by the European CentralBank. Units and Regulatory Localisations are performed by a conversion mapping, which we have generatedfor a subset of locales. The aim is to provide a standardised view on the localisation of services by usingruntime and middleware services to deploy a localisation implementation.1 INTRODUCTIONDistributed web services can provide business andprivate consumers with computing abilities whichmay not be feasible for them to develop in-house(Armbrust et al., 2010; Voorsluys et al., 2011). How-ever, cloud computing introduces new issues, for ex-ample in Europe, where there is a wide range of lan-guages spoken, services are very often only developedfor single language. Often, companies do not have theresources to develop multilingual products. Locali-sation encapsulates a large number of issues whichneed to be addressed. These include Language Trans-lation, Regulatory Compliance, Currency Conversionor Units Conversion. Localisation is typically per-formed on textual content (i.e. strings) and refers toeither languages only or physical location. However,the purpose of this work is to develop a method of lo-calising services by implementing a ’mediator’ typeservice which interacts between the APIs of the cloudservice provider and the requester. We are going tofocus on a number of locale dimensions such as lan-guage, taxation, currency and units. We aim to pro-vide service-level language translation techniques tolocalise services (including API interfaces) to differ-ent languages. Regulatory translation which includescurrency, units and taxation among other legal gov-ernance and compliance rules will be provided bystandards-based mappings. Regulatory translation isimportant for applications to comply with varying re-gional laws and regulations.A specific need is to make localisation techniquesavailable at runtime for dynamic localisation, which isrequired for instance for currencies and other variableaspects. Thus, Cloud Service Localisation (CSL) pro-vides a mechanism for converting and adapting ser-vices to the locale of the requester. A LocalisationProvider act as an intermediary between the serviceprovider and the requester. In our proposed platform,this is supported by a mediation service. By generat-ing a common platform solution for these localisationissues, we allow the ability to dynamically localisecloud services to be made with little effort. The keycontributions of our work are:• Software Localisation at Service Level - the mainconcern is a standardised mapping within a poten-tially heterogeneous environment.• Adaptation and Integration - the main concernis the maintenance of service quality after it hasbeen localised through adaptation.2 SERVICE LOCALISATIONOur focus is a platform for cloud service locali-sation, which makes a shift from a ”one size fits all”scenario towards an end-to-end personalised servicescenario. Currently, cloud computing services sufferfrom localisation and adaptability issues for multipleusers in different regions. These issues could be over-come if a multi-lingual and multi-regional solutionwas developed (Pahl, 2012; Wang et al., 2010).A scenario which illustrates the benefits of locali-sation could be a cloud service provider that managescompany accounts for its customers, with offices indifferent global locations.• Regulatory: Conversion of data between stan-dards and their variants, e.g. based on differentunits of measurement Metric→ Imperial.• Currency: Conversion of between currencies, e.g.Euro→ Dollar.• Lingual: Translation of service related data be-tween languages. This could include free text, butalso specific vocabularies based on business prod-uct and process standards such as GS1 or EAN-COM for documents.• Taxation: Different customers have different taxa-tion requirements, e.g. different VAT rates. Local-isation of the accounts software should take thisinto account for each locale.3 PLATFORM ARCHITECTURELocalisation of cloud services requires an ar-chitecture framework (Pahl et al., 2007) to be im-plemented to facilitate various localisation methods.These various methods, implemented as services inour proposed localisation platform, are used to facil-itate the localisation of localisable elements or arte-facts. This paper focuses on the dynamic localisationof service level descriptions.With every cloud service there are various el-ements which may be localised: Service specifi-cations/descriptions (APIs), Models (structural/be-havioural), Documentation (for human consumption),and Messages exchanged between services. Servicesare normally written to be independent of locales,however localisation is often needed. A localisationplatform should be based on attributes which varyfrom locale to locale, like time or date format.A service localisation platform requires a numberof elements. These elements can be pre-translatedfragments in static form or can be dynamic transla-tion systems. Figure 1 aims to demonstrate the con-cept of a policy and mappings based system, whichcan be scaled when additional processes are attachedto the mediation process. In the platform architec-ture, user-specific locale policies are applied to ser-vice endpoints. For example, in a WSDL file wemay localise messages and operation names. Rulesfor each type of translation would be stored in a rulesFigure 1: Architecture of the Localisation Platform.database (General Rules Repository). Similarly, map-pings between common translations would be storedin a mappings database (Translation Memory).A mediator operates between users (with differentlocales) and several service providers (with differentlocales) by providing core localisation services, suchas currency conversion and language translation. Thearchitecture supports the following:• Static Mappings: these could be the mapping ofone language to another or one unit to another,pre-translated in translation memories.• Dynamic Localisation: when translation map-pings are not stored, then a dynamic localisation isrequired in order to obtain the correct translationand store the mapping.• Policy Configuration: in order to configure thevarious locale policies, we must generate partic-ular translation rules, supported by a logical rea-soning component.• Negotiation: this is the exchange of locale policiesthrough the form of XML and SOAP from a webservices point of view.• Localisation of Services: the mappings betweenthe remote service and the localised service de-scription must be stored in a mappings database(Translation Memory) so the localised service hasa direct relationship with the remote service.A sample locale setup is<CSLContext><Loca le s><R e q u e s t e r L o c a l e><LanguageCode>e f r </LanguageCode><CountryCode>FR</CountryCode><CurrencyCode>EUR</CurrencyCode><UnitCode>M</UnitCode></ R e q u e s t e r L o c a l e><P r o v i d e r L o c a l e><LanguageCode>en</LanguageCode><CountryCode>IE</CountryCode><CurrencyCode>EUR</CurrencyCode><UnitCode>M</UnitCode></ P r o v i d e r L o c a l e></ Loca le s></CSLContext>A mismatch between provided and required localesneeds to be bridged by a mediator service.In order to provide the localisation platform ser-vices, we need to implement a number of classes toenable a modular service localisation platform. Theirinteraction is summarised below.4 LOCALISATION RULESAt the core of our service localisation platform isa language to specify the rules in relation to local-isations. In most cases, languages like WSDL andother XML languages provide information regardingthe services that are provided via an API. However,in order to encapsulate localisation information, thereis a necessity to provide a language which will con-tain details in relation to the locales of the requesterand the provider. For the purpose of our localisationplatform, we use a policy language based on the Se-mantic Web Rule Language SWRL, which is basedon the propositional calculus.A localisation layer is used to encapsulate the var-ious forms of translations. It is used to describe therelationships between localisable elements. For ex-ample, it contains the details of items which can betranslated. For our localisation model these are: Doc-umentation & Descriptions and API Messages & Op-erations. The rule language is used to define policiesof two types: firstly, locale definitions and, secondly,conversion (translation) rules. We motivate the ruleset through selected examples. There are a number oflocale definition rules provided, like Loc or hasCur,by which locales for specific regions are described.A locale can also be described by other rules such ashasTax, hasLang and hasUnit:IELoc(?l)←Loc(?l)∧hasLang(?l,?z)∧ hasCur(?l,?c)∧ hasUnit(?l,?u)∧?z= en∧ ?c= EUR∧ ?u= metricThe benefit of a formal framework for the rules is thatother rules can be inferred by from partial informa-tion. For example, if we knew that a locale had USDas its currency we may be able to infer its countryfrom it: ?c =USD→?l =USLocale. These inferredrules do not apply in general - this may not work if weknow a currency is Euro in which case it could be oneof many locales in Europe. The purpose of these rulescould be to determine inconsistencies, however. Pre-conditions can clarify the remit of these rules. A con-version between locales, e.g. LocaleA→ LocaleB, isgiven by the following general conversion rule:IELoc2USLoc(?l1,?l2)←hasLang(?l1,?z1)∧ hasLang(?l2,?z2)∧hasCur(?l1,?c1)∧ hasCur(?l2,?c2)∧hasUnit(?l1,?u1)∧ hasUnit(?l2,?u2)∧?z2 = convertLang(en,en,?z1)∧?c2 = convertCur(EUR,USD,?c1)∧?u2 = convertCur(metric, imperial,?u1)5 EVALUATIONScalability becomes more important from a cloudcomputing perspective when a service may have largemultiples of users. Scalability has not been empir-ically addressed for this phase of research and willbe evaluated in later prototypes. Many aspects of theplatform would require modification to effectively al-low the infrastructure to vertically scale-up or scale-out efficiently. However, horizontal scalability - i.e.the addition of more localisation concerns - is concep-tually easily supported by the modular mediator ar-chitecture, which we will address further below in theextensibility context from an implementation view.Performance is one of the CSFs of this platform.Poor performance often tends to affect software expo-nentially as multiples of users consume a cloud ser-vice at the same time. As the application scales up tomultiple concurrent users, the latency would increasedue to extra loads placed on the platforms services.This makes latency one of the KPIs of the project.Latency, is also an area to be assessed as adding thelocalisation platform to the workflow of an existingprocess has the potential to add lag-time. This lag-time exists due to time required to compute and alsothe time to initialise the various variables. As a strat-egy, we have aimed to improve performance by usingpre-translated aspects (through stored mappings).6 RELATEDWORKOur platform addresses the need for dynamic lo-calisation of various artefacts by use of a translationmemory and a set of logical rules.• Software Localisation: this usually refers to hu-man consumption of data which are produced bythe software - namely messages and dialogues.Our focus is on the localisation of the servicelevel. Service internationalisation is supportedby the W3C Service Internationalisation activity(W3C, 2005; Phillips, 2005).• Adaptation and Integration: it is not uncommonfor software adaptation at service level, but theadaptation of services based on locales and usinga translation memory with rules and mappings isnew (Truong and Dustdar, 2009). The problem ofmulti-tenancy is a widespread issue in the area ofcloud computing (Wang et al., 2009; Wang et al.,2010). This is an area where a lot of research isbeing invested in order to provide a platform fordifferent users with different business needs to bekept separate and their data to be kept private.• Semantics: involves the matching of services withvarious locales using mappings and rule-basedsystem (Bandara et al., 2009; Anastasiou, 2011;Fujii and Suda, 2009).IBM (IBM, 2010) presents a localisation solution forits WebSphere platform. It uses static localisation asit requires the WSDL files to be generated prior to de-ployment. This differs from our proposed localisationplatform as our solution aims to perform transforma-tions between locales dynamically.7 CONCLUSIONSA Cloud Service Localisation (CSL) implementa-tion should allow for a seamless and transparent solu-tion by automatically adjusting and adapting servicesto the requesters’ own locales. We have presenteda modular CSL implementation which can enablecloud services to be introduced into emerging marketswhich have localisation issues. Localisation henceprovides a mechanism to widen a service provider’starget market by enabling multi-locale solutions. Theeasiest solution is for a cloud service provider to pro-vide a ’mediator’ service which could act as middle-ware between a requester and the service provider. Byallowing services to be localised, we are enabling theprovision of multi-locale cloud services to create in-teroperable clouds. The localisation of services alsoallows the geographic scope for service providers tobroaden and users to have the ability to combine ser-vices from different providers from different regions.These clouds can be heterogeneous in nature. Thus,the platform described in this paper must support thatability. Due to the nature of third-party services, it ismore intuitive for service localisation to be performeddynamically through the use of a mediator service.REFERENCESAnastasiou, D. (2011). The impact of localisation on se-mantic web standards. European Journal of ePractice,12:42–52.Armbrust, M., Fox, A., Griffith, R., Joseph, A., Katz, R.,Konwinski, A., Lee, G., Patterson, D., Rabkin, A.,Stoica, I., et al. (2010). A view of cloud computing.Communications of the ACM, 53(4):50–58.Bandara, K., Wang, M., and Pahl, C. (2009). Dynamic in-tegration of context model constraints in web serviceprocesses. International Software Engineering Con-ference SE’2009. IASTED.Fingar, P. (2009). Cloud computing and the promise ofon-demand business inovation. InformationWeek, July13,2009.Fujii, K. and Suda, T. (2009). Semantics-based context-aware dynamic service composition. ACM Transac-tions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS),4(2):12.IBM (2010). IBM WebSphere Developer Technical Journal:Developing internationalized Web services with Web-Sphere Business Integration Server Foundation V5.1.Pahl, C., Giesecke, S. and Hasselbring, W. (2007). AnOntology-based Approach for Modelling Architec-tural Styles. European Conference on Software Ar-chitecture ECSA2007. Springer.Pahl, C. (2012). Cloud Service Localisation. EuropeanConference on Service-Oriented and Cloud Comput-ing ESOCC 2012. Springer.Phillips, A. (2005). Web Services and Internationalization.Whitepaper.Truong, H. and Dustdar, S. (2009). A survey on context-aware web service systems. International Journal ofWeb Information Systems, 5(1):5–31.Voorsluys, W., Broberg, J., and Buyya, R. (2011). CloudComputing: Principles and Paradigms. John Wileyand Sons.W3C (2005). Web Services Internationalization Usage Sce-narios.Wang, M.X., Bandara, K.Y. and Pahl, C. (2009). Inte-grated constraint violation handling for dynamic ser-vice composition. IEEE Intl Conf on Services Com-puting. pp. 168-175.Wang, M.X., Bandara, K.Y. and Pahl, C. (2010). Processas a service distributed multi-tenant policy-based pro-cess runtime governance. International Conference onServices Computing (SCC), pages 578–585. IEEE.

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Rule-based cloud service localisation

The fundamental purpose of cloud computing is the ability to quickly provide software and hardware resources to global users. The main aim of cloud service localisation is to provide a method for facilitating the internationalisation and localisation of cloud services by allowing them to be adapted to different locales. We address lingual localisation by providing a service translation using the latest web-services technology to adapt services to different languages and currency conversion by using realtime data provided by the European Central Bank. Units and Regulatory Localisations are performed by a conversion mapping, which we have generated for a subset of locales. The aim is to provide a standardised view on the localisation of services by using
runtime and middleware services to deploy a localisation implementation

Irish Universities

The fundamental purpose of cloud computing is the ability to quickly provide software and hardware resources to global users. The main aim of cloud service localisation is to provide a method for facilitating the internationalisation and localisation of cloud services by allowing them to be adapted to different locales. We address lingual localisation by providing a service translation using the latest web-services technology to adapt services to different languages and currency conversion by using realtime data provided by the European Central Bank. Units and Regulatory Localisations are performed by a conversion mapping, which we have generated for a subset of locales. The aim is to provide a standardised view on the localisation of services by using\ud
runtime and middleware services to deploy a localisation implementation

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Rule-based cloud service localisation

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