Roberto Furnari

Fault tolerant web service orchestration by means of diagnosis

Web Service orchestration frameworks support a coarse-grained kind of exception handling because they cannot identify the causes of the occurring exceptions as precisely as needed to solve problems at their origin. This paper presents a framework for Web Service orchestration which employs diagnostic services to support a fine grained identification of the causes of the exceptions and the consequent execution of effective exception handlers. Our framework is particularly suitable for intelligent exception handling in Enterprise Application Integration.

Context-aware workflow management

We describe the CAWE framework for the management of contextaware workflow systems, based on Web Services. The framework is based on a hierarchical workflow representation supporting a synthetic and extensible specification of context-sensitive workflows, which can be executed by standard workflow engines. We have exploited the CAWE framework to develop a prototype application handling a medical guideline specifying the activities to be performed in order to monitor patients treated with blood thinners.

Monitoring Choreographed Services

Web Service choreography management challenges the research on Service Oriented Architectures: different from Web Service composition, where a central orchestrator process invokes the Web Service suppliers, a choreographed service is decentralized and it is based on the coordination of a set of Web Service suppliers having a partial view of the overall service. In this paper, we present a framework which supports the monitoring of the progress of a choreographed service, the early detection of faults and the notification of the Web Services affected by the faults.

Interacting with social networks of intelligent things and people in the world of gastronomy

This article introduces a framework for creating rich augmented environments based on a social web of intelligent things and people. We target outdoor environments, aiming to transform a region into a smart environment that can share its cultural heritage with people, promoting itself and its special qualities. Using the applications developed in the framework, people can interact with things, listen to the stories that these things tell them, and make their own contributions. The things are intelligent in the sense that they aggregate information provided by users and behave in a socially active way. They can autonomously establish social relationships on the basis of their properties and their interaction with users. Hence when a user gets in touch with a thing, she is also introduced to its social network consisting of other things and of users; she can navigate this network to discover and explore the world around the thing itself. Thus the system supports serendipitous navigation in a network of things and people that evolves according to the behavior of users. An innovative interaction model was defined that allows users to interact with objects in a natural, playful way using smartphones without the need for a specially created infrastructure. The framework was instantiated into a suite of applications called WantEat, in which objects from the domain of tourism and gastronomy (such as cheese wheels or bottles of wine) are taken as testimonials of the cultural roots of a region. WantEat includes an application that allows the definition and registration of things, a mobile application that allows users to interact with things, and an application that supports stakeholders in getting feedback about the things that they have registered in the system. WantEat was developed and tested in a real-world context which involved a region and gastronomy-related items from it (such as products, shops, restaurants, and recipes), through an early evaluation with stakeholders and a final evaluation with hundreds of users.

A Model for Feature-Based User Model Interoperability on the Web

In this paper we present a model for User Model (UM) interoperability among feature-based adaptive applications on the Web. In order to enhance the interaction capabilities of such systems, we propose to exploit Web standards for interoperability, i.e. Web Services technologies and Semantic Web languages, together with negotiation techniques based on dialogue. Our model is based on a Service Oriented Architecture(SOA), where a central UDDI registry, enhanced with UM specific capabilities, can be used to support the cooperation between user-adaptive applications. The proposed framework support a discovery mechanism, a simple request/response-based pattern of communication and a dialogue model.

A SOA-Based Model Supporting Adaptive Web-Based Applications

Service oriented architecture (SOA) supports the integration of distributed and heterogeneous services by offering Web service composition standards which describe service composition as a business process. However, the composition model proposed in SOA does not explicitly deal with personalization and context-awareness. In order to address such limitations, we have developed the CAWE conceptual framework. In this paper, we describe the personalization support offered by our framework to the development of context-aware, adaptive Web-based systems. CAWE handles the integration of heterogeneous services and information sources; moreover, it manages long-lasting interactions with multiple cooperating users and it personalizes the business logic of the application by adapting the workflow activities to be carried out.

The context aware workflow execution framework

The development of self-adapting web applications based on composite architectures, such as service-oriented architectures (SOA), is challenged by the lack of support to the specification of explicit adaptation policies for the context aware management of the business, interaction and presentation logics. To address this limitation, we propose a vertical architecture extending SOA with advanced adaptation features. This paper presents the Context Aware Workflow Execution framework (CAWE), which enriches SOA with (1) context-aware workflow management; (2) dialogue management capabilities supporting the adaptation of the interaction with the user and (3) context-dependent user interface generation. This paper also briefly presents a prototype application developed by exploiting the CAWE framework.

Interaction protocol mediation in web service composition

This article presents a mediation framework supporting the integration of web services in orchestrated and choreographed services and the conciliation of interaction protocol mismatches. Our framework supports a loosely-coupled interaction among web services, based on the publish and subscribe pattern. Moreover, it manages web services as event-driven systems, in order to enable them to perform their operations in context-dependent way. By decoupling the web service interaction, our framework addresses several interaction protocol mismatches, ranging from differences in the signatures of the messages, to the order and number of the messages to be exchanged, including cross-protocol mismatches involving more than two peers.

Enhancing Web Service Composition by Means of Diagnosis

This paper proposes a framework based on Service Oriented Architecture which integrates diagnostic services in the architecture of a composite service in order to improve the recovery from the occurring exceptions. Our framework supports a fine-grained selection of exception handlers suitable to repair the problem without modifying the basic mechanism offered by standard orchestration engines such as the WS-BPEL compliant ones.

A SOA-Based Framework to Support User Model Interoperability

This paper presents an approach to achieve User Model (UM) interoperability exploiting Web Service technologies for syntactic interoperability, and Semantic Web languages for semantic interoperability, together with negotiation techniques based on dialogue. We propose a SOA-based framework where a central UDDI registry, enhanced with UM specific capabilities, is used to support and promote the cooperation between UM-based applications.