David Parlanti

A DHT-Based Discovery Service for the Internet of Things

Current trends towards the Future Internet are envisaging the conception of novel services endowed with context-aware and autonomic capabilities to improve end users’ quality of life. The Internet of Things paradigm is expected to contribute towards this ambitious vision by proposing models and mechanisms enabling the creation of networks of “smart things” on a large scale. It is widely recognized that efficient mechanisms for discovering available resources and capabilities are required to realize such vision. The contribution of this work consists in a novel discovery service for the Internet of Things. The proposed solution adopts a peer-to-peer approach for guaranteeing scalability, robustness, and easy maintenance of the overall system. While most existing peer-to-peer discovery services proposed for the IoT support solely exact match queries on a single attribute (i.e., the object identifier), our solution can handle multiattribute and range queries. We defined a layered approach by distinguishing three main aspects: multiattribute indexing, range query support, peer-to-peer routing. We chose to adopt an over-DHT indexing scheme to guarantee ease of design and implementation principles. We report on the implementation of a Proof of Concept in a dangerous goods monitoring scenario, and, finally, we discuss test results for structural properties and query performance evaluation.

A Service-Oriented Approach for Network-Centric Data Integration and Its Application to Maritime Surveillance

Maritime-surveillance operators still demand for an integrated maritime picture better supporting international coordination for their operations, as looked for in the European area. In this area, many data-integration efforts have been interpreted in the past as the problem of designing, building and maintaining huge centralized repositories. Current research activities are instead leveraging service-oriented principles to achieve more flexible and network-centric solutions to systems and data integration. In this direction, this article reports on the design of a SOA platform, the “Service and Application Integration” (SAI) system, targeting novel approaches for legacy data and systems integration in the maritime surveillance domain. We have developed a proof-of-concept of the main system capabilities to assess feasibility of our approach and to evaluate how the SAI middleware architecture can fit application requirements for dynamic data search, aggregation and delivery in the distributed maritime domain.

Message-Based Service Brokering and Dynamic Composition in the SAI Middleware

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is a wide and complex research area. Despite the huge effort in both industrial and academics initiatives, several challenges need to be addressed in order to effectively realize the SOC vision. One of the most relevant issues is the need of effective, flexible, reliable, low cost solutions for dynamic service brokering and composition. This paper presents results of an ongoing work on the design and development of a service- and message-oriented middleware for atomic and composite service brokering, named SAI middleware. The SAI middleware offers a set of features for service brokering and dynamic composition, while also guaranteeing loose coupling between service providers and consumers and relaxing the prerequisites for service providers to publish their capabilities in an interoperability domain. SAI dynamic composition is based on an Artificial Intelligence planning approach and on the adoption of an ontology-based functional profile encoding information for enabling automatic information extraction and combination in the service composition chain. Our main contribution consists in addressing these issues in a holistic way, as required to effectively support the SOA vision in real application scenarios, while not optimizing single aspects yet.

A Scalable Grid and Service-Oriented Middleware for Distributed Heterogeneous Data and System Integration in Context-Awareness-Oriented Domains

This chapter investigates the application of SOA principles for integrating embedded devices features, typically operating in ubiquitous computing environments, with enterprise-level services and business processes. Under this perspective, we present the SAI – Service Application Integration – system as a working example of a message-oriented middleware supporting context-aware application development. A special case study, focused on the monitoring of dangerous goods shipment via maritime transport and involving the gathering, processing, and distribution of data collected by heterogeneous components, has been designed to experiment the added value of the proposed integration system in a Web of Things scenario.

A Dynamic Composition and Stubless Invocation Approach for Information-Providing Services

The automated specification and execution of composite services are important capabilities of service-oriented systems. In practice, service invocation is performed by client components (stubs) that are generated from service descriptions at design time. Several researchers have proposed mechanisms for late binding. They all require an object representation (e.g., Java classes) of the XML data types specified in service descriptions to be generated and meaningfully integrated in the client code at design time. However, the potential of dynamic composition can only be fully exploited if supported in the invocation phase by the capability of dynamically binding to services with previously unknown interfaces. In this work, we address this limitation by proposing a way of specifying and executing composite services, without resorting to previously compiled classes that represent XML data types. Semantic and structural properties encoded in service descriptions are exploited to implement a mechanism, based on the Graphplan algorithm, for the run-time specification of composite service plans. Composite services are then executed through the stubless invocation of constituent services. Stubless invocation is achieved by exploiting structural properties of service descriptions for the run-time generation of messages.

A QoS‐aware service composition approach based on semantic annotations and integer programming

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose a novel quality of service (QoS)‐aware service composition approach, called SEQOIA, capable of defining at run‐time a service composition plan meeting both functional and non‐functional constraints and optimizing the overall quality of service.Design/methodology/approach – SEQOIA is a semantic‐driven QoS‐aware dynamic composition approach leveraging on an integer linear programming technique (ILP). It exploits the expressiveness of an ontology‐based service profile model handling structural and semantic properties of service descriptions. It represents the service composition problem as a set of functional and non‐functional constraints and an objective function.Findings – The authors developed a proof of concept implementing SEQOIA, as well as an alternative composition solution based on state‐of‐the‐art AI planning and ILP techniques. Results of testing activities show that SEQOIA performs better than the alternative solution over a limited set of candid...

LiSEP: A Lightweight and Extensible Tool for Complex Event Processing

Service-oriented enterprise platforms are increasingly called to support sense-and-respond capabilities in several application domains. In this context, Complex Event Processing is considered as a promising asset, as it enables to effectively extract meaningful events from raw data streams originated by sensing infrastructures, for enterprise processes and applications consumption. This paper proposes a novel CEP engine conceived with extensibility, interoperability, modularity and scalability requirements in mind. More specifically, we propose a Lightweight Stage-based Event Processor (LiSEP), based on a layered architectural design. Thanks to the adoption of Stage-Event Driven Architecture principles, core event processing logic is decoupled from low-level thread management issues. This results in an easy-to-understand and extensible implementation while testing results show performance scalability. We also report on the development of an ongoing case study on dangerous goods monitoring.

Individual and social needs motivating trust-enabling intermediation services

The aim of this research is to single out individual and social requisites to be addressed in the design and development of trust-enabling systems providing network-based intermediation services.

A SOA-Based Mobile Guide to Augment Tourists' Experiences with User-Generated Content and Third-Party Services

Several mobile guides exist providing tourists with location-based content delivery. This paper presents a novel mobile application, named InfoTour, aiming at enriching tourists’ experiences by supporting social interactions among tourists and by enabling seamless interaction with third-party service and data providers. The proposed system is based on Service Oriented Architecture principles, and we describe here the main issues related to the system prototype design and development.

An Overlay Infrastructural Approach for a Web-Wide Trustworthy Identity and Profile Management

Scalability and trust-enabling capabilities in Web-wide Profile Management are two challenges addressed in this paper. An infrastructural theoretical framework is proposed and discussed, based on the InterDataNet (IDN) architecture aimed at supporting seamless data interoperability to facilitate sharing and exploitation of distributed and heterogeneous user profile information. This paper presents the grounding issues of a more detailed analysis in progress on this problem, to highlight the prospected advantages and the technical viability of the proposed approach. It is possible to apply the framework in cross-domains scenarios such as e.g. e-gov and e-health, in which the trusted management of identities and profiles is required. The present study provides a starting-point for further research and development of the IDN as the technological system underlying the e-Profile Management Systems towards a trust-enabling Web-wide service.