Christoph Schroth

The Internet of Things in an Enterprise Context

This paper puts the Internet of Things in a wider context: How it relates to the Future Internet overall, and where the business value lies so that it will become interesting for enterprises to invest in it. Real-World Awareness and Business Process Decomposition are the two major paradigms regarding future business value. The major application domains where the Internet of Things will play an important role and where there are concrete business opportunities are highlighted. But there are also many technical challenges that need to be addressed. These are listed and it is shown how they are tackled by existing research projects with industrial participation.

Web 2.0 and SOA: Converging Concepts Enabling the Internet of Services

Recently, the relationship between Web 2.0 and service-oriented architectures (SOAs) has received an enormous amount of coverage because of the notion of complexity-hiding and reuse, along with the concept of loosely coupling services. Some argue that Web 2.0 and SOAs have significantly different elements and thus cannot be regarded as parallel philosophies. Others, however, consider the two concepts as complementary and regard Web 2.0 as the global SOA. This paper investigate these two philosophies and their respective applications from both a technological and business perspective

The scalability problem of vehicular ad hoc networks and how to solve it

Intervehicle communication (IVC) and its diverse application possibilities are experiencing growing interest both in research and industry. The dissemination of active safety messages generated by context-sensitive applications in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) promises to improve passenger safety and comfort. One of the main challenges inherent to the deployment of VANETs is operability, both in very sparse and in highly overloaded networks. This scalability problem is not comprehensively addressed by existing approaches, as they only focus on parts of the problem. This article shows how a relevance-based, altruistic communication scheme helps realize scalability by optimizing the application benefit and the bandwidth usage. In-vehicle and intervehicle message selection are based on a relevance function that makes use of the current context and the content of the messages. A novel, proprietary cross-layer architecture and an IEEE 802.11e-based architecture can be used to implement the scheme

Enterprise Mashups: Design Principles towards the Long Tail of User Needs

A new type of Web-based applications, known as Enterprise Mashups, has been gaining momentum in the last years. Novel design principles are currently about to emerge allowing to cover the long tail of user needs and to provide individual and heterogeneous enterprise applications in a shorter time. In this paper, we introduce the main components of this new paradigm, and discuss the design principles of the architecture (Enterprise Mashup Stack), upcoming intermediaries and mass collaboration, lightweight composition as well as perpetual beta development model.

Strategies for Context-Adaptive Message Dissemination in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

In future deployments of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) safety-related applications such as local danger warning (LDW) will use broadcast-based communication schemes to transmit information to other vehicles within the network. The unlimited flooding of a message throughout the whole network however, is neither feasible nor intended. The high resulting traffic load would congest the shared wireless medium and prevent other, potentially highly relevant and time-critical messages from getting access to the medium. Existing strategies to limit redundant packet retransmissions manage to make broadcast-based data packet dissemination more efficient and reliable. However, they do not take into account the individual networks nodes interest in information. In fact, the static mechanisms proposed are not adequate to leverage the limited network resources as efficiently as possible in varying network conditions and to transport information to where it is needed as fast as possible. Therefore, we propose an altruistic communication scheme which differentiates data traffic according to the benefit it is likely to provide to potential recipients. A system for calculating and leveraging message benefit and two different node architectures are presented. With the help of a comprehensive simulation environment, the performance of our concept is analyzed. Comparative simulative studies show that an improvement of the benefit provided to all the participants in a VANET is also possible with the help of the readily available IEEE 802.11e standard, but to a lower extent

Brave New Web: Emerging Design Principles and Technologies as Enablers of a Global SOA

Web services have experienced great interest during the last years as they were expected to play a key role as enablers of seamless application-to-application integration both within company boundaries and on a global, cross-organizational scale. As a technical foundation for the realization of service-oriented architectures (SOAs), Web services encapsulate complexity inherent to individual applications and allow for their loose coupling. However, a truly global mesh of such services has not yet become reality due to various reasons. Novel technologies and design principles are currently about to emerge which allow human users to use, customize, combine, interconnect and finally expose Web-based content or functionality as new resources which are often referred to as mash-ups. In this article, we provide an overview of existing mash-ups as well as tools and platforms that empower users to build them in a highly efficient and intuitive fashion. Statistical data and case studies are leveraged to examine new ways of resource provision and consumption and also the relevance of upcoming intermediaries. Finally, we investigate remaining research challenges on the path to a truly global SOA.

Patterns for Enterprise Mashups in B2B Collaborations to Foster Lightweight Composition and End User Development

The huge demand for situational and ad-hoc applications desired by the mass of business end users cannot be fully implemented by IT departments. New approaches that allow for End User Development (EUD) are needed to overcome this “long-tail” dilemma. More specifically,most existing approaches insufficiently support EUD for infrequent, situational, and ad-hoc B2B Collaborations.Enterprise Mashup-/ and Lightweight Composition approaches and tools are promising solutions to unleash the huge potential of integrating the mass of users into development. Within the current research project FAST,a Web based Mashup/ Gadget development tool is in development that allows for different options to realizeB2B collaborations via Mashups. In this work, five patterns for the development of Enterprise Mashups are identified, characterized, and evaluated with focus on their adequacy for B2B collaborations.

The internet of services: Global industrialization of information intensive services

Web Services have experienced great interest during the last years as they were expected to act as enablers of seamless application-to-application integration both within company boundaries and on a global scale. However, a truly global mesh of interoperable services has not yet become reality due to various reasons. Novel technologies and design principles are now about to emerge which shift the Internet towards a major inflection point: It is envisioned to evolve as a global platform for the retrieval, combination and utilization of interoperable resources. In this article, we contrast the Internet of today and the envisioned Internet of Services along three major categories: Stakeholders, Applications and finally Technology. We conclude with an analysis of the important role this emerging Internet of Services will play as technological enabler of information services industrialization: By reducing different kinds of waste, the Internet of Services acts as enabler of Lean Service Management

Self-organized and Context-Adaptive Information Diffusion in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks are considered as technology enabler for new automotive telematics services. In particular, those networks will enable foresighted active safety applications. However, in order to guarantee fast market introduction, a large variety of different applications with different traffic patterns must be supported. Due to the strict limitation of the available bandwidth in ad hoc networks, it is likely that in many situations the channel capacity is not sufficient to satisfy all transmission requests of all vehicles. However, a situation adaptive and self-organized utilization of the ad hoc network can optimize the overall utility of the deployed applications in the participating vehicles. Thereby, channel access is coordinated in a way that those data packets can access the channel first that provide the biggest expected utility for other vehicles in a specific situation. In this paper we delineate the effects of this implicit and situation adaptive information diffusion strategy and show that neither an explicit dissemination area or message life time is necessary.

A core component-based modelling approach for achieving e-business semantics interoperability

The adoption of advanced integration technologies that enable private and public organizations to seamlessly execute their business transactions electronically is still relatively low, especially among governmental bodies and Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). Current solutions often lack a common understanding of the underlying business document semantics and most existing approaches are not able to cope with the huge variety of business document formats, stemming from highly diverse requirements of the different stakeholders. Developed and applied in the course of the EU-funded research project GENESIS, this paper presents a comprehensive core component-based business document modelling approach that builds upon existing standards such as the OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL) and the UN/CEFACT Core Component Technical Specification (CCTS). These standards are extended by introducing the concept of generic business document templates out of which specific documents can be derived according to the actual users needs. Key principle to achieve this flexibility is the integration of business context information that allows for modelling standard-based but at the same time customized business documents. The resulting modelling framework ranges from (tool-supported) graphical data models to the technical representation of the business documents as XML schema documents designed in compliance with the UN/CEFACT XML schema Naming and Design Rules (NDR).