Christian Kubczak

Model-driven development with the jABC

We present the jABC, a framework for model driven application development based on Lightweight Process Coordination. With jABC, users (product developers and system/software designers) easily develop services and applications by composing reusable building-blocks into hierarchical (flow-) graph structures that are executable models of the application. This process is supported by an extensible set of plugins providing additional functionalities, so that the jABC models can be animated, analyzed, simulated, verified, executed and compiled. This way of handling the collaborative design of complex software systems has proven to be effective and adequate for the cooperation of non-programmers and technical people, and it is now being rolled out in the operative practice.

Bio-jETI: a service integration, design, and provisioning platform for orchestrated bioinformatics processes

BackgroundWith Bio-jETI, we introduce a service platform for interdisciplinary work on biological application domains and illustrate its use in a concrete application concerning statistical data processing in R and xcms for an LC/MS analysis of FAAH gene knockout.MethodsBio-jETI uses the jABC environment for service-oriented modeling and design as a graphical process modeling tool and the jETI service integration technology for remote tool execution.ConclusionsAs a service definition and provisioning platform, Bio-jETI has the potential to become a core technology in interdisciplinary service orchestration and technology transfer. Domain experts, like biologists not trained in computer science, directly define complex service orchestrations as process models and use efficient and complex bioinformatics tools in a simple and intuitive way.

Model-based design of distributed collaborative bioinformatics processes in the jABC

Our approach to the model-driven collaborative design of workflows for bioinformatic applications uses the jABC for model driven mediation and choreography to complement a Web service-based elementary service provision. jABC is a framework for service development based on lightweight process coordination. Users (product developers and system/software designers) develop services and applications by composing reusable building-blocks into (flow-)graph structures that can be animated, analyzed, simulated, verified, executed, and compiled. This way of handling the collaborative design of complex processes has proven to be effective and adequate for the cooperation of non-programmers (in this case biologists) and technical people, and it is now being rolled out in the operative practice.

Biological LC/MS Preprocessing and Analysis with jABC, jETI and xcms

LC/MS is a successful analysis technique for the statistical analysis used in several branches of biology. It requires an intense screening and combination of the raw data, which is usually done with programs and libraries invoked by scripts in the domain-specific statistics language S or R. We show here how to model and implement this complex workflow in a service-oriented fashion, using the jABC service definition environment and jETI for remote service integration and execution.

Service-Oriented Mediation with jETI/jABC: Verification and Export

The paper presents how we solved the mediation challenge in a model driven, service oriented fashion, how we verify properties of the mediator via model checking in the jABC, and how to systematically export jABC/jETI orchestrated services as Web services. Due to the lack of maturity of the involved environments and external components, the latter task is less easy and the solutions possible today are less stable than one would expect from these technologies.

Model Driven Design of Reliable Robot Control Programs Using the jABC

Developing robot control applications is a software engineering domain that still relies on low-level development tools with limited testing capabilities. The Java application building center (jABC), a framework for model-based application development that supports the modelling process of service-oriented software applications, on the contrary offers a number of early error detection mechanisms like animation, analysis, simulation, and formal verification. We investigate the adequacy of jABC to model, verify and implement robot control applications in a model driven paradigm, and aim at addressing the design of software for autonomous robots for space missions later on. Being able to model and verify their reconfiguration behaviour before launching them is of central importance there. We developed a proof-of-concept application that controls a Legoreg Mindstormstrade robot which finds its way through a maze. As this maze may change dynamically, the robot must be capable of reacting and adjusting its behaviour. This application was completely modelled, verified, and generated with the jABC

Synthesizing Semantic Web Service Compositions with jMosel and Golog

In this paper we investigate different technologies to attack the automatic solution of orchestration problems based on synthesis from declarative specifications, a semantically enriched description of the services, and a collection of services available on a testbed. In addition to our previously presented tableaux-based synthesis technology, we consider two structurally rather different approaches here: using jMosel , our tool for Monadic Second-Order Logic on Strings and the high-level programming language Golog , that internally makes use of planning techniques. As a common case study we consider the Mediation Scenario of the Semantic Web Service Challenge, which is a benchmark for process orchestration. All three synthesis solutions have been embedded in the jABC/jETI modeling framework, and used to synthesize the abstract mediator processes as well as their concrete, running (Web) service counterpart. Using the jABC as a common frame helps highlighting the essential differences and similarities. It turns out, at least at the level of complication of the considered case study, all approaches behave quite similarly, both considering the performance as well as the modeling. We believe that turning the jABC framework into experimentation platform along the lines presented here, will help understanding the application profiles of the individual synthesis solutions and technologies, answering questing like when the overhead to achieve compositionality pays of and where (heuristic) search is the technology of choice.

An Approach to Discovery with miAamics and jABC

We address the discovery scenario using miAamics, a framework for rule-based evaluation originally developed for efficient and scalable personalization purposes, as a reasoning engine. The discovery service is implemented in the jABC framework.

The XMDD Approach to the Semantic Web Services Challenge

The Semantic Web Services Challenge addresses since 2006 the issue of finding adequate domain modeling formalisms that help taming the complexity of service orchestration and service discovery. In this chapter we sketch briefly our XMDD (eXtreme Model Driven Design) approach to the development of large service-oriented applications and describe how it was used to address the Challenge. Our approach gave rise so far to a collection of six solutions with different engines, methods, and profiles. We examine in this technological landscape the concrete settings, the dimensions of complexity that appear in the Challenge, and reflect on the essence of the evaluations and observations so far.