Quan Z. Sheng

Quality driven web services composition

The process-driven composition of Web services is emerging as a promising approach to integrate business applications within and across organizational boundaries. In this approach, individual Web services are federated into composite Web services whose business logic is expressed as a process model. The tasks of this process model are essentially invocations to functionalities offered by the underlying component services. Usually, several component services are able to execute a given task, although with different levels of pricing and quality. In this paper, we advocate that the selection of component services should be carried out during the execution of a composite service, rather than at design-time. In addition, this selection should consider multiple criteria (e.g., price, duration, reliability), and it should take into account global constraints and preferences set by the user (e.g., budget constraints). Accordingly, the paper proposes a global planning approach to optimally select component services during the execution of a composite service. Service selection is formulated as an optimization problem which can be solved using efficient linear programming methods. Experimental results show that this global planning approach outperforms approaches in which the component services are selected individually for each task in a composite service.

The Self-Serv environment for Web services composition

Self-Serv aims to enable the declarative composition of new services from existing ones, the multiattribute dynamic selection of services within a composition, and peer-to-peer orchestration of composite service executions. Self-Serv adopts the principle that every service, whether elementary or composite, should provide a programmatic interface based on SOAP and the Web Service Definition Language. This does not exclude the possibility of integrating legacy applications, such as those written in CORBA, into the services business logic. To integrate such applications, however, first requires the development of appropriate adapters. The paper considers how the mechanism for composing services in Self-Serv is based on two major concepts: the composite service and the service container.

Declarative composition and peer-to-peer provisioning of dynamic Web services

The development of new services through the integration of existing ones has gained a considerable momentum as a means to create and streamline business-to-business collaborations. Unfortunately, as Web services are often autonomous and heterogeneous entities, connecting and coordinating them in order to build integrated services is a delicate and time-consuming task. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a system through which existing Web services can be declaratively composed, and the resulting composite services can be executed following a peer-to-peer paradigm, within a dynamic environment. This system provides tools for specifying composite services through. statecharts, data conversion rules, and provider selection, policies. These specifications are then translated into XML documents that can be interpreted by peer-to-peer inter-connected software components, in order to provision the composite service without requiring a central authority.

ContextUML: a UML-based modeling language for model-driven development of context-aware Web services

Context-aware Web services are emerging as a promising technology for the electronic businesses in mobile and pervasive environments. Unfortunately, complex context-aware services are still hard to build. In this paper, we present a modeling language for the model-driven development of context-aware Web services based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML). Specifically, we show how UML can be used to specify information related to the design of context-aware services. We present the abstract syntax and notation of the language and illustrate its usage using an example service. Our language offers significant design flexibility that considerably simplifies the development of context-aware Web services.

Facilitating the rapid development and scalable orchestration of composite web services

The development of new Web services through the composition of existing ones has gained a considerable momentum as a means to realise business-to-business collaborations. Unfortunately, given that services are often developed in an ad hoc fashion using manifold technologies and standards, connecting and coordinating them in order to build composite services is a delicate and time-consuming task. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a system in which services are composed using a model-driven approach, and the resulting composite services are orchestrated following a peer-to-peer paradigm. The system provides tools for specifying composite services through statecharts, data conversion rules, and multi-attribute provider selection policies. These specifications are interpreted by software components that interact in a peer-to-peer way to coordinate the execution of the composite service. We report results of an experimental evaluation showing the relative advantages of this peer-to-peer approach with respect to a centralised one.

SELF-SERV: a platform for rapid composition of web services in a peer-to-peer environment

The automation of Web services interoperation is gaining a considerable momentum as a paradigm for effective Business-to-Business collaboration [2]. Established enterprises are continuously discovering new opportunities to form alliances with other enterprises, by offering value-added integrated services. However, the technology to compose Web services in appropriate time-frames has not kept pace with the rapid growth and volatility of available opportunities. Indeed, the development of integrated Web services is often ad-hoc and requires a considerable eort of low level programming. This approach is inadequate given the size and the volatility of the Web. Furthermore, the number of services to be integrated may be large, so that approaches where the development of an integrated service requires the understanding of each of the underlying services are inappropriate. In addition, Web services may need to be composed as part of a short term partnership, and disbanded when the partnership is no longer profitable. Hence, the integration of a large number of Web services requires scalable and flexible techniques, such as those based on declarative languages. Also, the execution of an integrated service in existing approaches is usually centralised, whereas the underlying services are distributed and autonomous. This calls for the investigation of distributed execution paradigms (e.g., peer-to-peer models), that do not suffer of the scalability and availability problems of centralised coordination [3]. Motivated by these concerns, we have developed the SELF-SERV platform for rapid composition of Web services [1]. In SELF-SERV, Web services are declaratively composed, and the resulting composite services are executed in a peer-to-peer and dynamic environment. In this paper we overview the design and implementation of the SELF-SERV system.

Web services composition: A decade's overview

Service-oriented computing (SOC) represents a paradigm for building distributed computing applications over the Internet. In the past decade, Web services composition has been an active area of research and development endeavors for application integration and interoperation. Although Web services composition has been heavily investigated, several issues related to dependability, ubiquity, personalization, among others, still need to be addressed, especially giving the recent rise of several new computing paradigms such as Cloud computing, social computing, and Web of Things. This article overviews the life cycle of Web services composition and surveys the main standards, research prototypes, and platforms. These standards, research prototypes, and platforms are assessed using a set of assessment criteria identified in the article. The paper also outlines several research opportunities and challenges for Web services composition.

Enabling Next-Generation RFID Applications: Solutions and Challenges

Radio-frequency identification technology provides promising benefits such as inventory visibility and business process automation. However, if companies are to realize these benefits, researchers must address major challenges such as data processing, integration architecture design, security, and privacy.

Trust management of services in cloud environments: Obstacles and solutions

Trust management is one of the most challenging issues in the emerging cloud computing area. Over the past few years, many studies have proposed different techniques to address trust management issues. However, despite these past efforts, several trust management issues such as identification, privacy, personalization, integration, security, and scalability have been mostly neglected and need to be addressed before cloud computing can be fully embraced. In this article, we present an overview of the cloud service models and we survey the main techniques and research prototypes that efficiently support trust management of services in cloud environments. We present a generic analytical framework that assesses existing trust management research prototypes in cloud computing and relevant areas using a set of assessment criteria. Open research issues for trust management in cloud environments are also discussed.

Web Information Systems Engineering – WISE 2005

Web Mining.- Mining Communities on the Web Using a Max-Flow and a Site-Oriented Framework.- A Web Recommendation Technique Based on Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis.- Constructing Interface Schemas for Search Interfaces of Web Databases.- Web Information Retrieval.- Temporal Ranking of Search Engine Results.- Evaluation of Result Merging Strategies for Metasearch Engines.- Decomposition-Based Optimization of Reload Strategies in the World Wide Web.- Metadata Management.- An Ontological Approach for Defining Agents for Collaborative Applications.- Improving Web Data Annotations with Spreading Activation.- Semantic Partitioning of Web Pages.- Ontology and Semantic Web.- A Formal Ontology Reasoning with Individual Optimization: A Realization of the Semantic Web.- oMAP: Combining Classifiers for Aligning Automatically OWL Ontologies.- Semantic Web Technologies for Interpreting DNA Microarray Analyses: The MEAT System.- XML.- Extracting Global Policies for Efficient Access Control of XML Documents.- Querying and Repairing Inconsistent XML Data.- Towards Automatic Generation of Rules for Incremental Maintenance of XML Views of Relational Data.- Web Service Method.- A Methodological Approach for Incorporating Adaptive Navigation Techniques into Web Applications.- A Web Service Support to Collaborative Process with Semantic Information.- Server-Side Caching Strategies for Online Auction Sites.- Web Service Structure.- Maintaining Consistency Under Isolation Relaxation of Web Services Transactions.- Binding and Execution of Web Service Compositions.- Handling Transactional Properties in Web Service Composition.- Collaborative Methodology.- XFlow: An XML-Based Document-Centric Workflow.- Optimization of XSLT by Compact Specialization and Combination.- Extracting Web Data Using Instance-Based Learning.- P2P, Ubiquitous and Mobile.- PRoBe: Multi-dimensional Range Queries in P2P Networks.- An Infrastructure for Reactive Information Environments.- LoT-RBAC: A Location and Time-Based RBAC Model.- Document Retrieval Applications.- Document Re-ranking by Generality in Bio-medical Information Retrieval.- Representing and Reasoning About Privacy Abstractions.- Conceptual Query Refinement: The Basic Model.- Short Paper Session 1: Web Services and E-Commerce.- Peer-to-Peer Technology Usage in Web Service Discovery and Matchmaking.- A Contract-Based Approach for Monitoring Collaborative Web Services Using Commitments in the Event Calculus.- Asynchronous Web Services Communication Patterns in Business Protocols.- Towards the Automation of E-Negotiation Processes Based on Web Services - A Modeling Approach.- Modeling of User Acceptance of Consumer E-Commerce Website.- Short Paper Session 2: Recommendation and Web Information Extraction.- A Collaborative Recommender System Based on User Association Clusters.- Space-Limited Ranked Query Evaluation Using Adaptive Pruning.- Automated Retraining Methods for Document Classification and Their Parameter Tuning.- NET - A System for Extracting Web Data from Flat and Nested Data Records.- Blog Map of Experiences: Extracting and Geographically Mapping Visitor Experiences from Urban Blogs.- Short Paper Session 3: P2P, Grid and Distributed Management.- Reliable Multicast and Its Probabilistic Model for Job Submission in Peer-to-Peer Grids.- Peer-Sensitive ObjectRank - Valuing Contextual Information in Social Networks.- Automatic Performance Tuning for J2EE Application Server Systems.- Xebu: A Binary Format with Schema-Based Optimizations for XML Data.- Maintaining Versions of Dynamic XML Documents.- Short Paper Session 4: Advanced Issues.- Identifying Value Mappings for Data Integration: An Unsupervised Approach.- Relaxing Result Accuracy for Performance in Publish/Subscribe Systems.- Using Non-random Associations for Predicting Latency in WANs.- An Online Face Recognition System Using Multiple Compressed Images over the Internet.- The Information Market: Its Basic Concepts and Its Challenges.- Poster Flash Session 1.- List Data Extraction in Semi-structured Document.- Optimization Issues for Keyword Search over Tree-Structured Documents.- Semantic Integration of Schema Conforming XML Data Sources.- Extract Salient Words with WordRank for Effective Similarity Search in Text Data.- Intensional P2P Mappings Between RDF Ontologies.- Meta-modeling of Educational Practices for Adaptive Web Based Education Systems.- An On-line Intelligent Recommendation System for Digital Products Using Fuzzy Logic.- Consensus Making on the Semantic Web: Personalization and Community Support.- Dictionary-Based Voting Text Categorization in a Chemistry-Focused Search Engine.- Poster Flash Session 2.- An Approach to Securely Interconnect Geo Web Services.- Automatic Keyword Extraction by Server Log Analysis.- Approximate Intensional Representation of Web Search Results.- A Unique Design for High-Performance Decentralized Resources Locating: A Topological Perspective.- Searching the Web Through User Information Spaces.- REBIEX: Record Boundary Identification and Extraction Through Pattern Mining.- Discovering the Biomedical Deep Web.- A Potential IRI Based Phishing Strategy.- Multiway Iceberg Cubing on Trees.- Industry-1: Semantic Web.- Building a Semantic-Rich Service-Oriented Manufacturing Environment.- Building a Semantic Web System for Scientific Applications: An Engineering Approach.- A SOAP Container Model for e-Business Messaging Requirements.- Industry-2: SOA.- An Empirical Study of Security Threats and Countermeasures in Web Services-Based Services Oriented Architectures.- Collaborative End-Point Service Modulation System (COSMOS).- A Process-Driven e-Business Service Integration System and Its Application to e-Logistics Services.- Industry-3: BPM.- BPM and SOA: Synergies and Challenges.- Web Performance Indicator by Implicit User Feedback - Application and Formal Approach.- Discovering the Most Frequent Patterns of Executions in Business Processes Described in BPEL.- CONFIOUS: Managing the Electronic Submission and Reviewing Process of Scientific Conferences.- Industry-4: Web Infrastructure.- Tool Support for Model-Driven Development of Web Applications.- Web Personalization: My Own Web Based on Open Content Platform.- An Effective Approach for Content Delivery in an Evolving Intranet Environment - A Case Study of the Largest Telecom Company in Taiwan.- Achieving Decision Consistency Across the SOA-Based Enterprise Using Business Rules Management Systems.- Tutorials and Panels.- Service Design, Implementation and Description (Tutorial).- WISE-2005 Tutorial: Web Content Mining.- An Introduction to Data Grid Management Systems.- Are We Ready for the Service Oriented Architecture?.- Poster.- Data Engineering Approach to Design of Web Services.