Moshe Chai Barukh

ProcessBase: A Hybrid Process Management Platform

Traditional structured process-support systems increasingly prove too rigid amidst today’s fast-paced and knowledge-intensive environments. Commonly described as “unstructured” or “semi-structured” processes, they cannot be pre-planned and likely to be dependent upon the interpretation of human-workers during process execution. On the other hand, there has been a plethora of Social and Web 2.0 services to support workers with enhanced collaboration, however these tools are often used ad-hoc with little or no customisable process support. In order to address these challenges, we thus present: “ProcessBase”, an innovative Hybrid-Processes platform that holistically combines structured, semi-structured and unstructured activities. Our task-model proposed encapsulates a spectrum of process specificity, including: structured to ad-hoc Web-service tasks, automated rule-tasks, human-tasks as well as lifecycle state-tasks. In addition, our hybrid process-model enables the “evolution/agility” from unstructured to increasingly structured process design; as well as the notion of “cases” representing repeatable process patterns and variations. We further propose an incremental process-knowledge acquisition technique for curation, which is thereby utilised to facilitate efficient “re-use” in the form of a context-driven recommendation system.

A Taxonomy and Survey of Cloud Resource Orchestration Techniques

Cloud services and applications prove indispensable amid today’s modern utility-based computing. The cloud has displayed a disruptive and growing impact on everyday computing tasks. However, facilitating the orchestration of cloud resources to build such cloud services and applications is yet to unleash its entire magnitude of power. Accordingly, it is paramount to devise a unified and comprehensive analysis framework to accelerate fundamental understanding of cloud resource orchestration in terms of concepts, paradigms, languages, models, and tools. This framework is essential to empower effective research, comprehension, comparison, and selection of cloud resource orchestration models, languages, platforms, and tools. This article provides such a comprehensive framework while analyzing the relevant state of the art in cloud resource orchestration from a novel and holistic viewpoint.

Scalable SaaS-Based Process Customization with CaseWalls

The rising popularity of SaaS allows individuals and enterprises to leverage various services (e.g. Dropbox, Github, GDrive and Yammer) for everyday processes. However, these disparate services do not in general communicate with each other, rather used in an ad-hoc manner with little or no customizable process support. This inevitably leads to “shadow processes”, often only informally managed by e-mail or the like. In this paper, we propose a framework to simplify the integration of disparate services and effectively build customized processes. The implementation of the proposed techniques includes an agile services integration platform, called: CaseWalls. We provide a knowledge-based event-bus for unified interactions between disparate services, while allowing process participants to interact and collaborate on relevant cases.

Process-driven Configuration of Federated Cloud Resources

Existing cloud resource providers offer heterogeneous resource deployment services to describe and deploy resource configurations. Describing and deploying federated cloud resource configurations over such deployment services is challenging due to dynamic application requirements and complexity of cloud environments. While solutions exist to solve this problem, they offer limited facilities to cater for resource provisioning over federated cloud services. This paper presents a novel cloud resource deployment framework that leverages a unified configuration knowledge-base where process-based notation is used to describe complex configurations over federated cloud services. Based on these notations, a deployment engine generates deployment scripts that can be executed by external cloud resource deployment services such as Puppet and Chef. The paper describes the concepts, techniques and current implementation of the proposed system. Experiments on a real-life federated cloud resource show significant improvements achieved by our approach compared to traditional techniques.

A Toolkit for Simplified Web-Services Programming

The Internet has truly transformed into a global deployment and development platform. For example, Web 2.0 inspires large-scale collaboration; Social-computing empowers increased awareness; as well as Cloud-computing for virtualization of resources. As a result, developers have thus been presented with ubiquitous access to countless web-services. However, while this enables tremendous automation and re-use opportunities, new productivity challenges have also emerged: The same repetitive, error-prone and time consuming integration work needs to get done each time a developer integrates a new API. In order to address these challenges, we designed and developed ServiceBase, a “programming” knowledge-base to abstract, organize, incrementally curate and thereby re-use service-related programming-knowledge. Empowered by this knowledge we then provide: (a) A set of APIs that expose a common and high-level interface to developers for integrating services in a simplified manner; (b) An extended version of the GIT repository, creating a plug-n-play environment for services; (c) A mind-map based visualization tool to help explore the base.

DataSheets: A Spreadsheet-Based Data-Flow Language

We are surrounded by data, a vast amount of data that has brought about an increasing need for combining and analyzing it in order to extract information and generate knowledge. A need not exclusive of big software companies with expert programmers; from scientists to bloggers, many end-user programmers currently demand data management tools to generate information according to their discretion. However, data is usually distributed among multiple sources, hence, it requires to be integrated, and unfortunately, this process is still available just for professional developers. In this paper we propose DataSheets, a novel approach to make the data-flow specification accessible and its representation comprehensible to end-user programmers. This approach consists of a spreadsheet-based data-flow language that has been tested and evaluated in a service-centric composition framework.

CloudMap: A Visual Notation for Representing and Managing Cloud Resources

With the vast proliferation of cloud computing technologies, DevOps are inevitably faced with managing large amounts of complex cloud resource configurations. This involves being able to proficiently understand and analyze cloud resource attributes and relationships, and make decisions on demand. However, a majority of cloud tools encode resource descriptions and monitoring and control scripts in tedious textual formats. This presents complex and overwhelming challenges for DevOps to manually read, and iteratively build a mental representation especially when it involves a large number of cloud resources. To alleviate these frustrations we propose a model-driven notation to visually represent, monitor and control cloud resource configurations; managed underneath by existing cloud resource orchestration tools such as Docker. We propose a mindmap-based interface and set of visualization patterns. We have employed an extensive user-study to base design decisions, and validate our work based on experimentation with real-world scenarios. The results show significant productivity and efficiency improvements.

Business Process Paradigms

This chapter provides an overview of the technological landscape surrounding business process management and sets the stage for understanding the different aspects of analyzing business processes with the aim of improving them. The goal of this chapter is to develop an advanced recognition of the potential gaps and thereby an appreciation for key areas of improvement needed to target successful future growth in process analytics. After presenting an overview of the quintessential facets/dimensions often used to describe process types, the chapter examines the various identified implementation technologies and surveys the relevant support tools categorized according to process paradigm.

Service graph base: A unified graph-based platform for representing and manipulating service artifacts

The number of Web-Services publicly accessible through APIs have rapidly grown in recent years. Although, while these services are key in providing access to data as well as a variety of functionality, often their full potential remains yet to be fully exploited. Due to the different standards used to implement and expose Web services, it is usually cumbersome for developers to reuse them within third-party applications. In this paper, we present Service Graph Base, a unified graph-based platform for representing and manipulating service artifacts. It allows professional developers to add service knowledge to a graph base, which can be done either automatically or manually. By adopting the language-neutral RDF-based Graph Model and developing a uniformly-interfaced service editor for service native artifacts extraction, services are represented as RDF graphs in Service Graph Base. Once they are in the graph base, common SPARQL queries can be used to provide intelligent exploration over the base, thereby providing a unified approach regardless of the actual service type. In our work, we have harvested 4,925 Yahoo! pipes and 300 WSDLs for service artifacts extraction and service query. Experiments showed that 99.35% Yahoo! pipes and 100% WSDLs were successfully represented as RDF graphs.

Service Component Architecture (SCA)

In this chapter, we introduce a framework known as Service Component Architecture (SCA) that provides a technology-agnostic capability for composing applications from distributed services. Building a successful SOA solution in practice can be complex, due to the lack of standards and specifications, especially when integrating many different technology environments. This chapter explores techniques for adopting a consensus on how to describe an assembly of services, and how to implement and access them regardless of the technology.