Andreas Friesen

Semantic Enterprise Application Integration for Business Processes: Service-Oriented Frameworks

The lack of formal semantics of applications and services to be integrated into business processes makes it difficult for software engineers and developers to interconnect heterogeneous applications. Semantic Enterprise Application Integration for Business Processes: Service-Oriented Frameworks provides methods that incorporate and streamline processes that allow employees, decision makers, and industry partners to readily access corporate and customer data independent of where it resides. This advanced reference source provides the latest research findings in the design and development of business processes for academicians, researchers, and practitioners.

Towards semantically-assisted design of collaborative business processes in EAI scenarios

This paper describes two approaches for semantically-assisted design of collaborative business processes in intra-and inter-enterprise application integration scenarios. Both approaches rely on the ENterprise Integration Ontology (ENIO) that resolves structural heterogeneities of different business applications on the data and functional level. Additionally, the ENIO ontology provides a process facet that supports semantically-assisted creation and adaptation of process templates within a hierarchy of business process categories. The proposed solution should provide additional value, in particular for SMEs since the achieved degree of automation is expected to reduce the integration costs significantly.

Brokerage for Quality Assurance and Optimisation of Cloud Services: An Analysis of Key Requirements

As the number of cloud service providers grows and the requirements of cloud service consumers become more complex, the latter will come to depend more and more on the intermediation services of cloud service brokers. Continuous quality assurance and optimisation of services is becoming a mission-critical objective that many consumers will find difficult to address without help from cloud service intermediaries. The Broker@Cloud project envisages a software framework that will make it easier for cloud service intermediaries to address this need, and this paper provides an analysis of key requirements for this framework. We discuss the methodology that we followed to capture these requirements, which involved defining a conceptual service lifecycle model, carrying out a series of Design Thinking workshops, and formalising requirements based on an agile requirements information model. Then, we present the key requirements identified through this process in the form of summarised results.

Web Service Discovery in a Semantically Extended UDDI Registry: The Case of Fusion

Service-oriented computing is being adopted at an unprecedented rate, making the effectiveness of automated service discovery an increasingly important challenge. UDDI has emerged as a de facto industry standard and fundamental building block within SOA infrastructures. Nevertheless, conventional UDDI registries lack means to provide unambiguous, semantically rich representations of Web service capabilities, and the logic inference power required for facilitating automated service discovery. To overcome this important limitation, a number of approaches have been proposed towards augmenting Web service discovery with semantics. This paper discusses the benefits of semantically extending Web service descriptions and UDDI registries, and presents an ovennew of the approach put forward in project FUSION, towards semanticallyenhanced publication and discovery of services based on SAWSDL.

Continuous Quality Assurance and Optimisation in Cloud-Based Virtual Enterprises

With the rise of cloud computing, enterprises increasingly rely for their daily operations on heterogeneous externally-sourced cloud services that span different levels of capability. Their IT environment is thus progressively transformed into an ecosystem of intertwined infrastructure, platform, and application services. To effectively manage the ensuing complexity, enterprises are anticipated to increasingly rely on cloud service brokerage (CSB). This work presents a conceptual architecture for a framework which provides solutions with respect to the quality assurance and optimisation dimensions of CSB in the context of virtual enterprises. The framework revolves around three general themes, namely governance and quality control, failure prevention and recovery, and optimisation.

Underpinning a Cloud Brokerage Service Framework for Quality Assurance and Optimization

With the pervasion of cloud computing, enterprises increasingly rely on ecosystems of distributed, task-oriented, modular, and collaborative cloud services. In order to effectively manage the complexity inherent in such ecosystems, enterprises are anticipated to depend upon brokerage mechanisms for performing policy-based governance and for recommending optimal services to consumers. Such mechanisms crucially depend upon the existence of a uniform, platform-independent representation of services, consumer preferences, and policies concerning service delivery. In this paper we propose an ontology-based approach to such a representation.

Application of the Fusion Approach for Assisted Composition of Web Services

The FUSION approach proposes both a conceptual framework and a system architecture that supports the composition of business processes using semantically annotated web services as building blocks. Results will be validated by supporting collaborative commercial proof-of-concept pilots. The FUSION approach will facilitate trans-national pilot cases having operations spanning the enlarged Europe, in particular: integration of transactions of a franchising firm, provision of career and human resource management services, collaboration of companies in a chain of schools of foreign languages. The paper provides an overview on the FUSION approach and illustrates how it can be applied on one of the pilot cases.

Model-based Testing in Cloud Brokerage Scenarios

In future Cloud ecosystems, brokers will mediate between service providers and consumers, playing an increased role in quality assurance, checking services for functional compliance to agreed standards, among other aspects. To date, most Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) testing has been performed manually, requiring duplicated effort at the development, certification and deployment stages of the service lifecycle. This paper presents a strategy for achieving automated testing for certification and re-certification of SaaS applications, based on the adoption of simple state-based and functional specifications. High-level test suites are generated from specifications, by algorithms that provide the necessary and sufficient coverage. The high-level tests must be grounded for each implementation technology, whether SOAP, REST or rich-client. Two examples of grounding are presented, one into SOAP for a traditional web service and the other into Selenium for a SAP HANA rich-client application. The results demonstrate good test coverage. Further work is required to fully automate the grounding.

Underpinning a Cloud Brokerage Service Framework for Quality Assurance and Optimisation: A Case Study

With the pervasion of cloud computing, enterprises increasingly rely on ecosystems of variably-sourced, task-oriented, modular, cloud services for their daily operations. In order to effectively manage the complexity inherent in such ecosystems, enterprises are anticipated to depend upon brokerage mechanisms for performing policy-based governance and for selecting optimal services. Such mechanisms crucially depend upon the existence of a generic, uniform, and platform-independent representation of services, service-delivery policies, and consumer preferences. In this paper we describe an ontology-based approach to such a representation and demonstrate its applicability through a realistic case study.

Derivation of Broker Policies from Cloud Hosting Platform Service Descriptions

Cloud service brokerage leads to creation of ecosystems of highly distributed, task-oriented, modular, and collaborative cloud services managed by a broker. A broker is striving to create optimized cloud service consumption lifecycle in terms of cost, flexibility and business agility. In order to effectively manage the complexity inherent in such ecosystems, enterprises are anticipated to crucially depend upon cloud service brokerage (CSB) mechanisms. This work focuses on the management of hosting platforms participating in the ecosystem of a cloud service brokerage platform. The hosting platforms are as any other actor of a cloud service brokerage ecosystem evolving over time. The hosting platforms may join or leave the ecosystem, add or remove hosting services to the ecosystem or change characteristics of the available hosting services. The broker is thereby confronted with the issue of keeping its business policy offered to the service providers and service consumers up to date concerning the hosting alternatives in the ecosystem. We present a strategy for derivation of business policies from service descriptions of hosting services. The strategy is showcased in Linked USDL – our chosen technical specification for enabling platform-agnostic data exchanges.