Diego Zuquim Guimarães Garcia

A Web Service Architecture Providing QoS Management

Although Web service technology allows the development and execution of distributed applications, it still lacks facilities to deal with quality of service (QoS). Consumers may require services with particular nonfunctional characteristics and expect quality level guarantees. The goal of this paper is to propose an extended Web service architecture supporting QoS management for Web services. It includes brokers to facilitate service selection according to functional and non-functional requirements and monitors to verify QoS attributes. The main contributions of this approach are the use of the Web services policy framework (WS-Policy) standard to enhance the service specification with QoS policies and an extension to the universal description discovery & integration (UDDI) standard for QoS-enriched Web service publication and discovery

Semantics-enriched QoS policies for web service interactions

Web service technology provides an infrastructure for developing distributed systems and performing electronic business operations within and across organizational boundaries. It is still evolving. Currently, it is lacking mechanisms to deal with Quality of Service (QoS). Service consumer requirements may include functional and non-functional aspects. The Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and Universal Description Discovery & Integration (UDDI) standards support the specification, publication and discovery of Web services based only on functional aspects. The goal of this paper is to propose an approach for supporting Web service interactions. Brokers are employed to facilitate the partnership establishment between service consumers and providers. They select services in UDDI registries according to consumer functional and non-functional requirements. The main contributions of this paper are an extension to the Web Services Policy Framework (WS-Policy) standard to complement WSDL descriptions with semantics-enriched QoS policies using the Ontology Web Language (OWL) and ABLE Rule Language (ARL) standards, and an extension to the UDDI standard to include QoS policies.

A Web Service Privacy Framework Based on a Policy Approach Enhanced with Ontologies

The Web service technology facilitates the automated use of electronic services on the Web. It offers benefits, mainly the system interoperability support, but it also raises privacy concerns on the handling of sensitive data about service consumers. For instance, in electronic commerce applications, privacy protection is frequently a major consumer requirement. It includes concerns such as, how sensitive data are used and who has access to them. These concerns have been increasingly discussed. However, there is not a standard privacy framework for Web services. This paper proposes a Web service privacy framework based on a policy approach enhanced with ontologies. It uses different Web standards for supporting privacy protection, including the platform for privacy preferences (P3P), the Web services policy framework (WS-Policy) and the Web ontology language (OWL).

Web service security management using semantic web techniques

The importance of the Web service technology for business, government, among other sectors, is growing. Its use in these sectors demands security concern. The Web Services Security standard is a step towards satisfying this demand. However, in the current security approach, the mechanism used for describing security properties of Web services restricts security policy specification and intersection. In environments that include loosely-coupled components, a rich description of components is needed to determine whether they can interact in a secure manner. The goal of this paper is to propose a security approach for Web services, which combines Web Services Policy Framework policies and a Web Ontology Language ontology to overcome the limitation of the current syntactic approach. The main contribution of this paper is an extended approach based on semantics-enriched security policies.

A survey on reuse in the business process management domain

Business process management (BPM) is an important technological support to improve organisation competitiveness. BPM can benefit from reuse approaches and techniques at several stages of the business process life cycle in order to increase dynamism, flexibility and competitiveness. Existing reuse techniques from areas such as software engineering can be extended to this emerging domain. This paper presents the results of a literature review of reuse in the BPM domain. It aims to provide an overview and an overall discussion of most relevant research projects that have been developed applying reuse in BPM.

Towards a base ontology for privacy protection in service-oriented architecture

The service consumers confidence in the protection of their privacy is an important factor for the success of electronic services (e-services). It may increase if the service provider offers a description of its data practices. This description can be compared to what the consumer defines as appropriate practices. To allow the exchange of privacy-related descriptions and automatically compare them, the parties involved in the interaction should be able to use a common vocabulary. The goal of this paper is to present a base privacy ontology for e-services and a privacy framework for service-oriented architecture (SOA). The ontology offers a base vocabulary that can be extended to create ontologies specific to a given service domain and operating environment. The framework uses ontologies so that it can support service selection considering the consumers privacy requirements. It extends SOA with provider policies and consumer preferences based on privacy ontologies.

A Fault Tolerant Web Service Architecture

Web services have been pointed as a suitable technology for the development and execution of distributed applications. However, the Web service architecture still lacks facilities to support fault tolerance. The goal of this paper is to propose a fault tolerant Web service architecture. The architecture provides service mediation and monitoring. The main contribution of this paper is the use of Web service standards to include fault tolerance in the Web service architecture.

Quality of Service Management for Web Service Compositions

Typically, scientific applications have to be distributed across computational grid infrastructures. These applications can use existent grid services. Service components in this kind of application may have different computational platforms that should interoperate. This interoperability is supported by the Web service technology. Thus, currently, some Web service standards are used in several service-oriented grid infrastructures. The Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) is an example of a standard that can be used in this context to support the definition of scientific workflows. However, its approach for building service compositions does not consider quality of service (QoS) issues. This paper proposes an approach for building service compositions according to QoS characteristics expressed using the Web services policy framework (WS-policy).

Privacy Protection Mechanisms for Web Service Technology

The successful use of Web service technology in areas such as healthcare and government depends on its support to privacy preservation. As there is currently no privacy standard for Web services, several solutions have recently been proposed in the literature to deal with privacy in Web services. However, there is no solution that provides a suitable mechanism to describe privacy properties in Web services. When loosely-coupled components are involved, such as in Web service environments, a rich description of components is needed to determine whether they can interact in a manner that preserves privacy. The goal of this paper is to present privacy protection mechanisms for Web services, which use policies defined in the Web Services Policy Framework (WS-Policy) and an ontology defined in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) in order to support Web service interactions with suitable privacy preservation levels.

Using contract and ontology for privacy protection in Service-Oriented Architecture

Privacy protection in Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an open problem. As privacy protection can be considered as a contractual issue, the solution for the problem of privacy protection in SOA requires the use of electronic contracts. This is important, as the service consumers confidence of the protection of their privacy is a factor for the success of electronic services (e-services). This confidence may increase if the service consumer and provider can establish a contract, which states how the provider deals with information collected from the consumer. The service consumer can sign the contract if the privacy protection practices described in it meet what the consumer defines as appropriate practices. The goal of this paper is to use contract and ontology for privacy protection in SOA. Privacy contracts follow an approach based on feature modeling. In addition, they use a base ontology that provides a common privacy vocabulary.