Ajith Harshana Ranabahu

An Online Platform for Web APIs and Service Mashups

On the newly programmable Web, mashups are flourishing. Designers create mashups by combining components of existing Web sites and applications. Although rapid mashup proliferation offers many opportunities, a lack of standarization and compatibility offers considerable challenges. IBM Sharable Code is an online service platform for developing and sharing situational Web 2.0 applications and mashups. The platform is based on an innovative domain-specific language that streamlines and standardizes the development and deployment of applications consuming and exposing Web APIs. Parts of the DSL and the resulting applications and mashups can be shared and reused by members of the IBM Sharable Code community. In this article, the authors offer an overview of the platforms architecture and the DSL language at its core.

A Faceted Classification Based Approach to Search and Rank Web APIs

Web application hybrids, popularly known as mashups, are created by integrating services on the Web using their APIs. Support for finding an API is currently provided by generic search engines or domain specific solutions such as Google and ProgrammableWeb. Shortcomings of both these solutions in terms of and reliance on user tags make the task of identifying an API challenging. Since these APIs are described in HTML documents, it is essential to look beyond the boundaries of current approaches to Web service discovery that rely on formal descriptions. In this work, we present a faceted approach to searching and ranking Web APIs that takes into consideration attributes or facets of the APIs as found in their HTML descriptions. Our method adopts current research in document classification and faceted search and introduces the serviut score to rank APIs based on their utilization and popularity. We evaluate classification, search accuracy and ranking effectiveness using available APIs while contrasting our solution with existing ones.

Spatio-Temporal-Thematic Analysis of Citizen Sensor Data: Challenges and Experiences

We present work in the spatio-temporal-thematic analysis of citizen-sensor observations pertaining to real-world events. Using Twitter as a platform for obtaining crowd-sourced observations, we explore the interplay between the 3 dimensions in extracting insightful summaries of observations. We present our experiences in building a web mashup application, Twitris [1] that also facilitates the spatio-temporal-thematic exploration of social signals underlying events.

Semantic Modeling for Cloud Computing, Part 1

Cloud computing has lately become the attention grabber in both academia and industry. The promise of seemingly unlimited, readily available utility-type computing has opened many doors previously considered difficult, if not impossible, to open. The cloud computing landscape, however, is still evolving, and we must overcome many challenges to foster widespread adoption of clouds. The main challenge is interoperability.

Toward cloud-agnostic middlewares

Cloud computing is a natural progression of service-oriented architecture. The Web as the platform: data with Web 2.0, programming and development with mashups, and deployments and resource provisioning with cloud computing. However, the Web was not necessarily designed to be an on-demand compute platform and infrastructure and certainly not designed to be a network for data centers which is what it is displacing with cloud computing. What are the challenges to advance cloud computing? For example, how do users of compute clouds make efficient usage of the heterogeneous nature of the Web and specifically of the choices between potentially engaging with public clouds versus creating enterprise private clouds, or some hybrid combination thereof? Additionally, since there are usually no single answers, due to a variety of compute workload demands, how should cloud providers and cloud users harvest, create, and utilize best practices in this new platform, thereby encouraging improvements in cloud engagements?

Power of Clouds in Your Pocket: An Efficient Approach for Cloud Mobile Hybrid Application Development

The advancements in computing have resulted in a boom of cheap, ubiquitous, connected mobile devices as well as seemingly unlimited, utility style, pay as you go computing resources, commonly referred to as Cloud computing. However, taking full advantage of this mobile and cloud computing landscape, especially for the data intensive domains has been hampered by the many heterogeneities that exist in the mobile space as well as the Cloud space. Our research focuses on exploiting the capabilities of the mobile and cloud landscape by defining a new class of applications called cloud mobile hybrid (CMH) applications and a Domain Specific Language (DSL) based methodology to develop these applications. We define Cloud-mobile hybrid as a collective application that has a Cloud based back-end and a mobile device front-end. Using a single DSL script, our toolkit is capable of generating a variety of CMH applications. These applications are composed of multiple combinations of native Cloud and mobile applications. Our approach not only reduces the learning curve but also shields developers from the complexities of the target platforms. We provide a detailed description of our language and present the results obtained using our prototype generator implementation. We also present a list of extensions that will enhance the various aspects of this platform.

Semantics Centric Solutions for Application and Data Portability in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has become one of the key considerations both in academia and industry. Cheap, seemingly unlimited computing resources that can be allocated almost instantaneously and pay-as-you-go pricing schemes are some of the reasons for the success of Cloud computing. The Cloud computing landscape, however, is plagued by many issues hindering adoption. One such issue is vendor lock-in, forcing the Cloud users to adhere to one service provider in terms of data and application logic. Semantic Web has been an important research area that has seen significant attention from both academic and industrial researchers. One key property of Semantic Web is the notion of interoperability and portability through high level models. Significant work has been done in the areas of data modeling, matching, and transformations. The issues the Cloud computing community is facing now with respect to portability of data and application logic are exactly the same issue the Semantic Web community has been trying to address for some time. In this paper we present an outline of the use of well established semantic technologies to overcome the vendor lock-in issues in Cloud computing. We present a semantics-centric programming paradigm to create portable Cloud applications and discuss MobiCloud, our early attempt to implement the proposed approach.

Application Portability in Cloud Computing: An Abstraction-Driven Perspective

Cloud computing has changed the way organizations create, manage, and evolve their applications. While the abundance of computing resources at low cost opens up many possibilities for migrating applications to the cloud, this migration also comes at a price. Cloud applications, in many cases, depend on certain provider specific features or services. In moving applications to the cloud, application developers face the challenge of balancing these dependencies to avoid vendor lock-in. We present an abstraction-driven approach to address the application portability issues and focus on the application development process. We also present our theoretical basis and experience in two practical projects where we have applied the abstraction-driven approach.

Kino: A Generic Document Management System for Biologists Using SA-REST and Faceted Search

Document management has become an important consideration for the scientific community over the last decade. Human knowledge is central to many scientific domains, thus it is not possible to completely automate the document management process. Managing scientific documents require a semi-automatic approach to overcome issues of large volume, yet support the human participation in the process. In this paper we present Kino, a set of tools that streamline the document management process in life science domains. Kino is integrated with National Center for Biomedical On-to logy (NCBO), providing scientists access to quality domain models. Annotated documents are indexed using a faceted indexing and search engine that provides fine grained search capabilities to the scientists. We present two use cases that highlight the pain points in managing scientific literature and also include an empirical evaluation.

A domain specific language for enterprise grade cloud-mobile hybrid applications

Cloud computing has changed the technology landscape by offering flexible and economical computing resources to the masses. However, vendor lock-in makes the migration of applications and data across clouds an expensive proposition. The lock-in is especially serious when considering the new technology trend of combining cloud with mobile devices. In this paper, we present a domain specific language (DSL) that is purposely created for generating hybrid applications spanning across mobile devices as well as computing clouds. We propose a model-driven development process that makes use of a DSL to provide sufficient programming abstractions over both cloud and mobile features. We describe the underlying domain modeling strategy as well as the details of our language and the tools supporting our approach.