Ibrahim Cingil

A broader approach to personalization

Personalization generally refers to making a Web site more responsive to the unique and individual needs of each user. We propose a broader approach to personalization that provides for interoperability and automation by using the recent data exchange, meta data and privacy standards from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), namely, Extensible Markup Language (XML) [12], Resource Description Framework (RDF) [9, 10] and Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) [8]. First we briefly discuss these standards. Extensible Markup Language (XML). XML has gained a great momentum and is emerging as the standard for data exchange on the Internet. XML data is self describing through content oriented tags and this enables a computer to understand the meaning of data and hence enhances the ability of remote applications to interpret and operate on documents fetched over the Internet. One of XMLs strengths is its extensibility. Anyone can invent new tags for particular subject areas and they define what they mean in document type definitions (DTDs). But if every business uses its own XML definition for describing its data, it is not possible to achieve interoperability. In other words, a tagged document is not very useful without some agreement among inter-operating applications so as to what the tags mean and it is common DTDs which provide for this. A DTD specifies the structure of an XML document by specifying the names of its elements, sub-elements and attributes. XML-Query Language (XML-QL). The need to query XML documents to extract data is well addressed in the literature and one of the available languages is XML-QL [4]. XML-QL has a WHERE-CONSTRUCT clause, like the SELECT-WHERE of SQL, that can express queries, which extract pieces of data from XML documents, as well as transformations, which, for example, can map XML data between DTDs and can integrate XML data from different sources. Although XML-QL shares some functionalities with XMLs style sheet mechanism, it supports more data-intensive operations, such as joins and aggregates, and has better support for constructing new XML data, which is required by transformations. There is a need to use recursive functions in certain queries and XML-QL has been extended in this respect in [3]. Resource Description Framework (RDF). RDF is a foundation for processing metadata for providing interoperability between applications that exchange machine understandable information and currently is a recommendation by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). RDF imposes a syntax and structural constraints in describing …

A survey and comparison of business-to-business e-commerce frameworks

Business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce is booming thanks to the ubiquity of the Internet, which dwarfs the coverage of EDI VANs. B2B e-commerce needs to seamlessly and dynamically handle the interactions among a vast variety of organizations without ad hoc and proprietary integrations. A number of B2B e-commerce frameworks have emerged as a result. In this paper we present a brief survey and a comparison of some of these frameworks.

Design and Implementation of a Distributed Workflow Management System: METUFlow

Workflows are activities involving the coordinated execution of multiple tasks performed by different processing entities, mostly in distributed heterogeneous environments which are very common in enterprises of even moderate complexity. Centralized workflow systems fall short to meet the demands of such environments.

Improving the Functionality of UDDI Registries through Web Service Semantics

In this paper we describe a framework for exploiting the semantics of Web services through UDDI registries. As a part of this framework, we extend the DAML-S upper ontology to describe the functionality we find essential for e-businesses. This functionality includes relating the services with electronic catalogs, describing the complementary services and finding services according to the properties of products or services. Once the semantics is defined, there is a need for a mechanism in the service registry to relate it with the service advertised. The ontology model developed is general enough to be used with any service registry. However when it comes to relating the semantics with services advertised, the capabilities provided by the registry effects how this is achieved. We demonstrate how to integrate the described service semantics to UDDI registries.

An Architecture for Supply Chain Integration and Automation on the Internet

Electronic commerce is happening at a very fast pace and business-to-business ecommerce is taking the lead, a very important part of which is the supply chain integration and automation. There is a high demand for well accepted interoperability standards which need to be fitted together for supply chain integration to meet the business demands such as being able to integrate catalogs from different companies. This will facilitate product comparisons and producing customized catalogs. Given an anchor product anywhere on the supply chain, it should be possible to obtain information on related products that complement or add value to this anchor product. Yet another key issue is the full automation of the supply chain processes. However since a single dominant electronic commerce standard is unlikely, the supply chain integration and automation should be able to accommodate different standards like OBI or OTP. This will make it possible for users to conform to the standards of their choice.Another important fact is that rigid supply chains can co-exist with supply chains formed on the fly where participants can transact business spontaneously since the Web is able to make the information instantly available to all trading partners. Facilitating resource discovery that is discovering information on possible partners and their catalogs on the Internet and transacting business automatically also becomes an important issue.The architecture developed within the scope of this paper addresses these issues. We have used the emerging technologies and standards as the infrastructure of the system proposed; and integrated these to meet the needs of supply chain integration and automation and demonstrated how each of the mentioned functionality can be achieved.

A platform for agent behavior design and multi agent orchestration

Agents show considerable promise as a new paradigm for software development. However for wider adoption and deployment of agent technology, powerful design and development tools are needed. Such tools should empower software developers to cater agent solutions more efficiently and at a lower cost for their customers with rapidly changing requirements and differing application specifications. In this paper, an agent orchestration platform that allows the developers to design a complete agent-based scenario through graphical user interfaces is presented. The scenario produced by the platform is a rule based system in contrast to the existing systems where agents are coded through a programming language. In this way, the platform provides a higher level of abstraction to agent development making it easier to adapt to rapidly changing user requirements or differing software specifications. The system is highly transportable and interoperable. The platform helps to design a multi-agent system either from scratch, or by adapting existing distributed systems to multi agent systems. It contains tools that handle the agent system design both at the macro level, that is, defining the interaction between agents and at the micro level which deals with internal design of agents. Agent behaviour is modeled as a workflow of basic agent behaviour building blocks (such as receiving a message, invoking an application, making a decision or sending a message) by considering the data and control dependencies among them, and a graphical user interface is provided to construct agent behaviours. The platform allows agent templates to be constructed from previously defined behaviours. Finally through a Scenario Design Tool, a multi-agent system is designed by specifying associations among agents. The scenario is stored in a knowledge base by using the Agent Behaviour Representation Language (ABRL) which is developed for this purpose. Finally to be able to demonstrate the execution of the system on a concrete agent platform, we mapped the ABRL rules to JESS and executed the system on JADE.

A workflow-based electronic marketplace on the Web

In this paper, we describe an architecture for an open marketplace exploiting the workflow technology and the currently emerging data exchange and metadata representation standards on the Web. In this market architecture electronic commerce is realized through the adaptable workflow templates provided by the marketplace to its users. Having workflow templates for electronic commerce processes results in a component-based architecture where components can be agents (both buying and selling) as well as existing applications invoked by the workflows. Other advantages provided by the workflow technology are forward recovery, detailed logging of the processes through workflow history manager and being able to specify data and control flow among the workflow components. In the architecture proposed, the resources expose their metadata using Resource Description Framework (RDF) to be accessed by the resource discovery agents and their content through Extensible Markup Language (XML) to be accessed by the selling agents by using Document Object Model (DOM). The common set of Document Type Definitions (DTDs) are used to eliminate the need for an ontology. The marketplace contains an Intelligent Directory Service (IDS) which makes it possible for agents to find out about each other through a match making mechanism. References to the related Document Type Definitions (DTDs) are stored in IDS. The IDS also contains the template workflows for buying and selling processes.

A Component-Based Workflow System with Dynamic Modifications

Adapting to changes in its environment dynamically is a very important aspect of workflow systems. In this paper, we propose a component-based workflow system architecture specifically designed for this purpose. To allow for easy modification of workflow instances, an instance is designed as an object that contains all the necessary data and control information as well as its execution history. This feature facilitates to dynamically modify the process definition on instance basis at run time. The system is designed to consist of functional components like, Basic Enactment Service, History Manager, Workflow Monitoring Tool, Dynamic Modification Tool, etc. The clients of the system are coded as network-transportable applets written in Java so that the end user can activate workflow system components by connecting to the Workflow Domain Manager over the Internet. In this paper we also present a workflow process definition language FLOWDL, its graphical representation FLOWGRAPH and a workflow process modification language FLOWML and illustrate how the modification process is handled.