Anne H. H. Ngu

QoS-aware middleware for Web services composition

The paradigmatic shift from a Web of manual interactions to a Web of programmatic interactions driven by Web services is creating unprecedented opportunities for the formation of online business-to-business (B2B) collaborations. In particular, the creation of value-added services by composition of existing ones is gaining a significant momentum. Since many available Web services provide overlapping or identical functionality, albeit with different quality of service (QoS), a choice needs to be made to determine which services are to participate in a given composite service. This paper presents a middleware platform which addresses the issue of selecting Web services for the purpose of their composition in a way that maximizes user satisfaction expressed as utility functions over QoS attributes, while satisfying the constraints set by the user and by the structure of the composite service. Two selection approaches are described and compared: one based on local (task-level) selection of services and the other based on global allocation of tasks to services using integer programming.

Declarative composition and peer-to-peer provisioning of dynamic Web services

The development of new services through the integration of existing ones has gained a considerable momentum as a means to create and streamline business-to-business collaborations. Unfortunately, as Web services are often autonomous and heterogeneous entities, connecting and coordinating them in order to build integrated services is a delicate and time-consuming task. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a system through which existing Web services can be declaratively composed, and the resulting composite services can be executed following a peer-to-peer paradigm, within a dynamic environment. This system provides tools for specifying composite services through. statecharts, data conversion rules, and provider selection, policies. These specifications are then translated into XML documents that can be interpreted by peer-to-peer inter-connected software components, in order to provision the composite service without requiring a central authority.

Business-to-business interactions: issues and enabling technologies

Abstract. Business-to-Business (B2B) technologies pre-date the Web. They have existed for at least as long as the Internet. B2B applications were among the first to take advantage of advances in computer networking. The Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) business standard is an illustration of such an early adoption of the advances in computer networking. The ubiquity and the affordability of the Web has made it possible for the masses of businesses to automate their B2B interactions. However, several issues related to scale, content exchange, autonomy, heterogeneity, and other issues still need to be addressed. In this paper, we survey the main techniques, systems, products, and standards for B2B interactions. We propose a set of criteria for assessing the different B2B interaction techniques, standards, and products.

Web Information Systems Engineering – WISE 2005

Web Mining.- Mining Communities on the Web Using a Max-Flow and a Site-Oriented Framework.- A Web Recommendation Technique Based on Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis.- Constructing Interface Schemas for Search Interfaces of Web Databases.- Web Information Retrieval.- Temporal Ranking of Search Engine Results.- Evaluation of Result Merging Strategies for Metasearch Engines.- Decomposition-Based Optimization of Reload Strategies in the World Wide Web.- Metadata Management.- An Ontological Approach for Defining Agents for Collaborative Applications.- Improving Web Data Annotations with Spreading Activation.- Semantic Partitioning of Web Pages.- Ontology and Semantic Web.- A Formal Ontology Reasoning with Individual Optimization: A Realization of the Semantic Web.- oMAP: Combining Classifiers for Aligning Automatically OWL Ontologies.- Semantic Web Technologies for Interpreting DNA Microarray Analyses: The MEAT System.- XML.- Extracting Global Policies for Efficient Access Control of XML Documents.- Querying and Repairing Inconsistent XML Data.- Towards Automatic Generation of Rules for Incremental Maintenance of XML Views of Relational Data.- Web Service Method.- A Methodological Approach for Incorporating Adaptive Navigation Techniques into Web Applications.- A Web Service Support to Collaborative Process with Semantic Information.- Server-Side Caching Strategies for Online Auction Sites.- Web Service Structure.- Maintaining Consistency Under Isolation Relaxation of Web Services Transactions.- Binding and Execution of Web Service Compositions.- Handling Transactional Properties in Web Service Composition.- Collaborative Methodology.- XFlow: An XML-Based Document-Centric Workflow.- Optimization of XSLT by Compact Specialization and Combination.- Extracting Web Data Using Instance-Based Learning.- P2P, Ubiquitous and Mobile.- PRoBe: Multi-dimensional Range Queries in P2P Networks.- An Infrastructure for Reactive Information Environments.- LoT-RBAC: A Location and Time-Based RBAC Model.- Document Retrieval Applications.- Document Re-ranking by Generality in Bio-medical Information Retrieval.- Representing and Reasoning About Privacy Abstractions.- Conceptual Query Refinement: The Basic Model.- Short Paper Session 1: Web Services and E-Commerce.- Peer-to-Peer Technology Usage in Web Service Discovery and Matchmaking.- A Contract-Based Approach for Monitoring Collaborative Web Services Using Commitments in the Event Calculus.- Asynchronous Web Services Communication Patterns in Business Protocols.- Towards the Automation of E-Negotiation Processes Based on Web Services - A Modeling Approach.- Modeling of User Acceptance of Consumer E-Commerce Website.- Short Paper Session 2: Recommendation and Web Information Extraction.- A Collaborative Recommender System Based on User Association Clusters.- Space-Limited Ranked Query Evaluation Using Adaptive Pruning.- Automated Retraining Methods for Document Classification and Their Parameter Tuning.- NET - A System for Extracting Web Data from Flat and Nested Data Records.- Blog Map of Experiences: Extracting and Geographically Mapping Visitor Experiences from Urban Blogs.- Short Paper Session 3: P2P, Grid and Distributed Management.- Reliable Multicast and Its Probabilistic Model for Job Submission in Peer-to-Peer Grids.- Peer-Sensitive ObjectRank - Valuing Contextual Information in Social Networks.- Automatic Performance Tuning for J2EE Application Server Systems.- Xebu: A Binary Format with Schema-Based Optimizations for XML Data.- Maintaining Versions of Dynamic XML Documents.- Short Paper Session 4: Advanced Issues.- Identifying Value Mappings for Data Integration: An Unsupervised Approach.- Relaxing Result Accuracy for Performance in Publish/Subscribe Systems.- Using Non-random Associations for Predicting Latency in WANs.- An Online Face Recognition System Using Multiple Compressed Images over the Internet.- The Information Market: Its Basic Concepts and Its Challenges.- Poster Flash Session 1.- List Data Extraction in Semi-structured Document.- Optimization Issues for Keyword Search over Tree-Structured Documents.- Semantic Integration of Schema Conforming XML Data Sources.- Extract Salient Words with WordRank for Effective Similarity Search in Text Data.- Intensional P2P Mappings Between RDF Ontologies.- Meta-modeling of Educational Practices for Adaptive Web Based Education Systems.- An On-line Intelligent Recommendation System for Digital Products Using Fuzzy Logic.- Consensus Making on the Semantic Web: Personalization and Community Support.- Dictionary-Based Voting Text Categorization in a Chemistry-Focused Search Engine.- Poster Flash Session 2.- An Approach to Securely Interconnect Geo Web Services.- Automatic Keyword Extraction by Server Log Analysis.- Approximate Intensional Representation of Web Search Results.- A Unique Design for High-Performance Decentralized Resources Locating: A Topological Perspective.- Searching the Web Through User Information Spaces.- REBIEX: Record Boundary Identification and Extraction Through Pattern Mining.- Discovering the Biomedical Deep Web.- A Potential IRI Based Phishing Strategy.- Multiway Iceberg Cubing on Trees.- Industry-1: Semantic Web.- Building a Semantic-Rich Service-Oriented Manufacturing Environment.- Building a Semantic Web System for Scientific Applications: An Engineering Approach.- A SOAP Container Model for e-Business Messaging Requirements.- Industry-2: SOA.- An Empirical Study of Security Threats and Countermeasures in Web Services-Based Services Oriented Architectures.- Collaborative End-Point Service Modulation System (COSMOS).- A Process-Driven e-Business Service Integration System and Its Application to e-Logistics Services.- Industry-3: BPM.- BPM and SOA: Synergies and Challenges.- Web Performance Indicator by Implicit User Feedback - Application and Formal Approach.- Discovering the Most Frequent Patterns of Executions in Business Processes Described in BPEL.- CONFIOUS: Managing the Electronic Submission and Reviewing Process of Scientific Conferences.- Industry-4: Web Infrastructure.- Tool Support for Model-Driven Development of Web Applications.- Web Personalization: My Own Web Based on Open Content Platform.- An Effective Approach for Content Delivery in an Evolving Intranet Environment - A Case Study of the Largest Telecom Company in Taiwan.- Achieving Decision Consistency Across the SOA-Based Enterprise Using Business Rules Management Systems.- Tutorials and Panels.- Service Design, Implementation and Description (Tutorial).- WISE-2005 Tutorial: Web Content Mining.- An Introduction to Data Grid Management Systems.- Are We Ready for the Service Oriented Architecture?.- Poster.- Data Engineering Approach to Design of Web Services.

Picture similarity retrieval using the 2D projection interval representation

Spatial relationships are important ingredients for expressing constraints in retrieval systems for pictorial or multimedia databases. We have proposed a unified representation for spatial relationships, 2D Projection Interval Relationships (2D-PIR), that integrates both directional and topological relationships. We develop techniques for similarity retrieval based on the 2D-PIR representation, including a method for dealing with rotated and reflected images.

Semantic-Based Mashup of Composite Applications

The need for integration of all types of client and server applications that were not initially designed to interoperate is gaining popularity. One of the reasons for this popularity is the capability to quickly reconfigure a composite application for a task at hand, both by changing the set of components and the way they are interconnected. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has recently become a popular platform in the IT industry for building such composite applications with the integrated components being provided as Web services. A key limitation of solely Web-service-based integration is that it requires extra programming efforts when integrating non-Web service components, which is not cost-effective. Moreover, with the emergence of new standards, such as Open Service Gateway Initiative (OSGi), the components used in composite applications have grown to include more than just Web services. Our work enables progressive composition of non-Web-service-based components such as portlets, Web applications, native widgets, legacy systems, and Java Beans. Further, we proposed a novel application of semantic annotation together with the standard semantic Web matching algorithm for finding sets of functionally equivalent components out of a large set of available non-Web-service-based components. Once such a set is identified, the user can drag and drop the most suitable component into an Eclipse-based composition canvas. After a set of components has been selected in such a way, they can be connected by data-flow arcs, thus forming an integrated, composite application without any low-level programming and integration efforts. We implemented and conducted extensive experimental study on the above progressive composition framework on IBMs Lotus Expeditor, an extension of an SOA platform called the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) that complies with the OSGi standard.

Dynamic composition and optimization of Web services

Process-based composition of Web services has recently gained significant momentum for the implementation of inter-organizational business collaborations. In this approach, individual Web services are choreographed into composite Web services whose integration logics are expressed as composition schema. In this paper, we present a goal-directed composition framework to support on-demand business processes. Composition schemas are generated incrementally by a rule inference mechanism based on a set of domain-specific business rules enriched with contextual information. In situations where multiple composition schemas can achieve the same goal, we must first select the best composition schema, wherein the best schema is selected based on the combination of its estimated execution quality and schema quality. By coupling the dynamic schema creation and quality-driven selection strategy in one single framework, we ensure that the generated composite service comply with business rules when being adapted and optimized.

Configurable Composition and Adaptive Provisioning of Web Services

Web services composition has been an active research area over the last few years. However, the technology is still not mature yet and several research issues need to be addressed. In this paper, we describe the design of CCAP, a system that provides tools for adaptive service composition and provisioning. We introduce a composition model where service context and exceptions are configurable to accommodate needs of different users. This allows for reusability of a service in different contexts and achieves a level of adaptiveness and contextualization without recoding and recompiling of the overall composed services. The execution semantics of the adaptive composite service is provided by an event-driven model. This execution model is based on Linda Tuple Spaces and supports real-time and asynchronous communication between services. Three core services, coordination service, context service, and event service, are implemented to automatically schedule and execute the component services, and adapt to user configured exceptions and contexts at run time. The proposed system provides an efficient and flexible support for specifying, deploying, and accessing adaptive composite services. We demonstrate the benefits of our system by conducting usability and performance studies.

Flexible Composition of Enterprise Web Services

The process-based composition of Web services is emerging as a promising approach to automate business process within and across organizational boundaries. In this approach, individual Web services are federated into composite Web services whose business logic is expressed as a process model. Business process automation technology such as workflow management systems (WFMSs) can be used to choreograph the component services. However, one of the fundamental assumptions of most WFMSs is that workflow schemas are static and predefined. Such an assumption is impractical for business processes that have an explosive number of options, or dynamic business processes that must be generated and altered on the fly to meet rapid changing business conditions. In this paper, we describe a rule inference framework called DY flow , where end users declaratively define their business objectives or goals and the system dynamically composes Web services

Enabling Personalized Composition and Adaptive Provisioning of Web Services

The proliferation of interconnected computing devices is fostering the emergence of environments where Web services made available to mobile users are a commodity. Unfortunately, inherent limitations of mobile devices still hinder the seamless access to Web services, and their use in supporting complex user activities. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a distributed, adaptive, and context-aware framework for personalized service composition and provisioning adapted to mobile users. Users specify their preferences by annotating existing process templates, leading to personalized service-based processes. To cater for the possibility of low bandwidth communication channels and frequent disconnections, an execution model is proposed whereby the responsibility of orchestrating personalized processes is spread across the participating services and user agents. In addition, the execution model is adaptive in the sense that the runtime environment is able to detect exceptions and react to them according to a set of rules.