Brahim Medjahed

Composing Web services on the Semantic Web

Abstract.Service composition is gaining momentum as the potential silver bullet for the envisioned Semantic Web. It purports to take the Web to unexplored efficiencies and provide a flexible approach for promoting all types of activities in tomorrow’s Web. Applications expected to heavily take advantage of Web service composition include B2B E-commerce and E-government. To date, enabling composite services has largely been an ad hoc, time-consuming, and error-prone process involving repetitive low-level programming. In this paper, we propose an ontology-based framework for the automatic composition of Web services. We present a technique to generate composite services from high-level declarative descriptions. We define formal safeguards for meaningful composition through the use of composability rules. These rules compare the syntactic and semantic features of Web services to determine whether two services are composable. We provide an implementation using an E-government application offering customized services to indigent citizens. Finally, we present an exhaustive performance experiment to assess the scalability of our approach.

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.

Deploying and managing Web services: issues, solutions, and directions

Web services are expected to be the key technology in enabling the next installment of the Web in the form of the Service Web. In this paradigm shift, Web services would be treated as first-class objects that can be manipulated much like data is now manipulated using a database management system. Hitherto, Web services have largely been driven by standards. However, there is a strong impetus for defining a solid and integrated foundation that would facilitate the kind of innovations witnessed in other fields, such as databases. This survey focuses on investigating the different research problems, solutions, and directions to deploying Web services that are managed by an integrated Web Service Management System (WSMS). The survey identifies the key features of a WSMS and conducts a comparative study on how current research approaches and projects fit in.

A multilevel composability model for semantic Web services

We propose a composability model to ascertain that Web services can safely be combined, hence avoiding unexpected failures at runtime. Composability is checked through a set of rules organized into four levels, syntactic, static semantic, dynamic semantic, and qualitative levels. We introduce the concepts of composability degree and /spl tau/-composability to cater for partial and total composability. We also propose a set of algorithms for checking composability. Finally, we conduct a performance study (analytical and experimental) of the proposed algorithms.

Context-based matching for Web service composition

In this paper, we propose a novel matching framework for Web service composition. The framework combines the concepts of Web service, context, and ontology. We adopt a broad definition of context for Web services, encompassing all information needed for enabling interactions between clients and providers. Context-based matching for Web services requires dealing with three major research thrusts: context categorization, modeling, and matching. We first propose an ontology-based categorization of contextual information in Web service environments. We then define a two-level mechanism for modeling Web service contexts. In the first level, service providers create context specifications using category-specific Web service languages and standards. In the second level, context specifications are enveloped by policies (called context policies) using WS-Policy standard. Finally, we present a peer-to-peer architecture for matching context policies. The architecture relies on a context matching engine, context policy assistants, and context community services. Community services implement rule-based techniques for comparing context policies.

A dynamic foundational architecture for semantic web services

The combination of Web services and ontologies is gaining momentum as the potential silver bullets for tomorrow’s Web, i.e., the Semantic Web. We propose an architectural foundation for managing semantic Web services in dynamic environments. We introduce the concept of community to cater for an ontological organization of Web services. We develop an ontology called community ontology that serves as a “template” for describing communities of Web services. We also propose a peer-to-peer approach for managing communities in dynamic environments.

Self-adapting recovery nets for policy-driven exception handling in business processes

Abstract In this paper, we propose Self-Adapting Recovery Net (SARN), an extended Petri net model, for specifying exceptional behavior in business processes. SARN adapts the structure of the underlying Petri net at run time to handle exceptions while keeping the Petri net design easy. The proposed framework caters for the specification of high-level recovery policies that are incorporated either with a single task or a set of tasks, called a Recovery Region. These recovery policies are generic directives that model exceptions at design time together with a set of primitive operations used at run time to handle the occurrence of exceptions. We identified a set of recovery policies that are useful and commonly needed in many practical situations. A tool has been developed to illustrate the viability of the proposed exception handling technique.

Introduction to special issue on semantic Web services

Service-oriented computing (SOC) is a new paradigm for distributed computing , slated to shape modern societies in vital areas such as health, government, science, engineering, and business [Spohrer and Riecken 2006; Yu et al. 2007; Medjahed et al. 2003]. It utilizes Web services as the building blocks for developing agile networks of collaborating applications. Web services are the direct answer to the explosion of heterogeneous Web applications that have been developed in the last decade or so. They are increasingly becoming the de facto means to deliver all kinds of functionalities on the Web for direct consumption by programs. Web services may wrap a wide range of Web-accessible resources such as software programs, sensors, databases, and storage devices. This unprecedented proliferation of Web services has been possible because of the intense activity aimed at standardizing the different aspects of Web services (e.g., [WSDL 2007] for description, [SOAP 2007] for messaging, WS-BPEL [OASIS 2007] for orchestration, [WS-CDL 2007] for choreography, [UDDI 2007] for registration and discovery). Because of the already huge investment and lack of a holistic view in the management of Web services, there is a mounting pressure to now build a rigorous foundation for efficiently managing the lifecycle of Web services [Yu et al. 2007; Alonso et al. 2003]. Todays Web is largely populated with data that lack a standard way of interpretation. Ontologies make it possible to build a controlled vocabulary of concepts that can be used to describe and interpret the semantics of Web content unambiguously. This initial view of the semantic Web has now been extended to include Web services. These are poised to be the cornerstone of tomorrows Web where users would be querying services as opposed to querying data, in effect making the Web service-centric, as opposed to todays Web which is data-centric. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or direct commercial advantage and that copies show this notice on the first page or initial screen of a display along with the full citation. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, to redistribute to lists, or to use any component of this work in other works …

A two-phase framework for quality-aware Web service selection

Service-oriented computing is gaining momentum as the next technological tool to leverage the huge investments in Web application development. The expected large number of Web services poses a set of new challenges for efficiently accessing these services. We propose an integrated service query framework that facilitates users in accessing their desired services. The framework incorporates a service query model and a two-phase optimization strategy. The query model defines service communities that are used to organize the large and heterogeneous service space. The service communities allow users to use declarative queries to retrieve their desired services without worrying about the underlying technical details. The two-phase optimization strategy automatically generates feasible service execution plans and selects the plan with the best user-desired quality. In particular, we present an evolutionary algorithm that is able to “co-evolve” multiple feasible execution plans simultaneously and allows them to compete with each other to generate the best plan. We conduct a set of experiments to assess the performance of the proposed algorithms.

Privacy-Enhanced Web Service Composition

Data as a Service (DaaS) builds on service-oriented technologies to enable fast access to data resources on the Web. However, this paradigm raises several new privacy concerns that traditional privacy models do not handle. In addition, DaaS composition may reveal privacy-sensitive information. In this paper, we propose a formal privacy model in order to extend DaaS descriptions with privacy capabilities. The privacy model allows a service to define a privacy policy and a set of privacy requirements. We also propose a privacy-preserving DaaS composition approach allowing to verify the compatibility between privacy requirements and policies in DaaS composition. We propose a negotiation mechanism that makes it possible to dynamically reconcile the privacy capabilities of services when incompatibilities arise in a composition. We validate the applicability of our proposal through a prototype implementation and a set of experiments.