M.B. Blake

A Web Service Recommender System Using Enhanced Syntactical Matching

Service-oriented computing (SOC) enables organizations and individual users to discover openly-accessible capabilities realized as services over the Internet. However, service registries can potentially be very large preventing organizations from discovering services in real-time. In fact, consumers may not be aware of the services that can be of most benefit to them. In our work, we introduce a web service recommender system that proactively discovers and manages web services. This paper focuses on the underlying search and ranking algorithms that enable the recommendations. As an innovation, we have analyzed real, fully-operational web services currently available on the Internet and, as a result, have discovered insights into how real web service messages are defined. Using these general naming tendencies coupled with enhanced syntactical methods, we are able to aggregate services by their messages and accurately suggest candidate services to users as a part of daily routines.

Generalized Semantics-Based Service Composition

Service-oriented computing (SOC) has emerged as the eminent market environment for sharing and reusing service-centric capabilities. The underpinning for an organizations use of SOC techniques is the ability to discover and compose Web services. Although industry approaches to composition have a strong notion of business processes, these approaches largely use syntactic descriptions. As such composition is limited since the true functionality of ambiguous service operations cannot be inferred. Alternatively, academia uses semantic approaches to disambiguate services, but, at the same time, most of these approaches neglect the process rigor needed for complex compositions. In this paper we present a generalized semantics-based technique for automatic service composition that combines the rigor of process-oriented composition with the descriptiveness of semantics. Our generalized approach extends the common practice of linearly linked services by introducing the use of a conditional directed acyclic graph (DAG) where complex interactions, containing control flow, information flow and pre/post conditions, are effectively represented. Furthermore, the composition can be represented semantically as OWL-S documents. Our contributions are applied for automatic workflow generation in context of the currently important bioinformatics domain.

Web services-based data management: evaluating the performance of UDDI registries

With the advancement of Web services technologies, online businesses have the ability to offer their capabilities to larger, lesser known communities of potential collaborators. Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) specification and supporting technologies support open frameworks for businesses to store, advertise and retrieve pertinent services. Many researchers investigate approaches that ubiquitously create higher-level processes by composing services discovered in and retrieved from UDDI registries. However, there are few studies that consider the impact of registry performance on future service automation. This work focuses on evaluating the performance of UDDI registries considering variability and concurrent load of publish and inquiry requests.

Binding Now or Binding Later: The Performance of UDDI Registries

In service-oriented environments, the fluidity of the marketplace introduces changes in service offerings and subsequent connection failures for users still bound to outdated services. One focus of Web services research is the real-time acquisition of new capabilities via service discovery using universal description, discovery, and integration (UDDI) registries. Another equally valuable usage of UDDI registries, as addressed in this paper, is the real-time assurance of service responsiveness. UDDI registries can be incorporated into business process execution routines to assure that the underlying services are active at operations time. In this paper, several UDDI modes of operation are evaluated through performance tests of different UDDI implementations. The results of the investigations can be applied as a decision aid for organizations to choose the most efficient utilization of UDDI for the management of responsiveness in their own service-oriented processes

Forming agents for business process orchestration

Distributed component-based services and semantic Web services are promising technologies for next generation inter-enterprise integration. The dynamic nature of this domain presents a complex problem for potential software agent-based approaches that support this cross-organizational integration. Currently, there are few studies that measure the impact of the dynamic environmental effects on service composition. On an on-going basis, composite services or workflow processes of Web services may be constantly changing in terms of responsiveness of services, accessibility of services and their meta-information, business process schema changes, etc. This paper describes an approach, model, and supporting software toward the efficient formation of agent teams and interaction protocols for business process orchestration in response to certain environmental conditions.

Proactive Service Discovery and Execution Using Agents

Service-oriented computing (SOC) suggests that the Internet will be an open repository of many modular capabilities realized as Web services. Organizations may be able to leverage this SOC paradigm if their employees are able to ubiquitously incorporate such capabilities and their resulting information into their daily practices. It is impractical to assume that human users will be able to search vast distributed repositories at real-time. In addition, automated search tools may invasively present too much information. This paper presents an architecture, software agent-based groupware using e-services (SAGE), that incorporates the use of intelligent agents to integrate human users with Web services. SAGE provides background search and discovery approaches thus enabling human users to exploit service-based capabilities that were previously too time-consuming to locate and integrate. We present a multi-agent system where each agent learns the rule-based preferences of a human user and manages the incorporation of Web services

An Agent-Based Approach for Composition of Semantic Web Services

The paradigm of service-oriented computing (SOC) introduces emerging concepts for distributed- and e-business processing enabling the sharing and reuse of service-centric capabilities. The underpinning for an organizations use of SOC techniques is the ability to discover and compose Web services. Leading industry approaches rely heavily on syntactical approaches for managing service-based business processes. As such, these approaches are limited since the true functionality of ambiguous capabilities (i.e. web service operations) cannot be inferred. We introduce approaches that disambiguate services by interleaving process-based control with semantic annotations. In this paper, we introduce a generalized architecture where intelligent software agents control process-oriented composition that leverages the descriptiveness of semantics. An outcome of this work is the specification of a multiple agent system where a query agent interacts with multiple repository agents to perform business-oriented service composition.

Towards a General Framework for Web Service Composition

Service-oriented computing (SOC) has emerged as the eminent market environment for sharing and reusing service-centric capabilities. The underpinning for an organizations use of SOC techniques is the ability to discover and compose Web services. In this paper we present a generalized semantics-based technique for automatic service composition that combines the rigor of process-oriented composition with the descriptiveness of semantics. Our generalized approach extends the common practice of linearly linked services by introducing the use of a conditional directed acyclic graph (DAG) where complex interactions, containing control flow, information flow and pre/post conditions, are effectively represented.