Seema Degwekar

Constraint specification and processing in Web services publication and discovery

Much effort is being made by the IT industry towards the establishment of a Web services infrastructure and the refinement of its component technologies to enable the sharing of heterogeneous application resources. Traditional roles of the service provider, service requestor and service broker and their interactions are now being improved upon to enable more effective services. The implementation of the Web service broker is currently limited to being an interface to the service repository for service registration, browsing and/or programmatic access. In this work, we have extended the functionality of the Web services broker to include constraint specification and processing, which enables the broker to find a good match between a service providers capabilities and a service requestors requirements. This paper presents the extension made to the Web Services Description Language to include constraint specifications in service descriptions and requests, the architecture of a constraint-based broker, the constraint matching technique, some implementation details, and preliminary evaluation results.

Dynamic Inter-Enterprise Workflow Management in a Constraint-Based E-Service Infrastructure

This paper presents an infrastructure and a mechanism for achieving dynamic Inter-enterprise workflow management using e-services provided by collaborative e-business enterprises. E-services are distributed services that can be accessed programmatically on the Internet, using SOAP messages and the HTTP protocol. In this work, we categorize e-services according to their business types and manage them in a UDDI-enabled constraint-based Broker Server. E-service requests are specified in the activities of a process model according to some standardized e-service templates and are bound to the proper service providers at run-time by using a constraint-based, dynamic service binding mechanism. The workflow management system is dynamic in the sense that the actual business organizations, which take part in a business process, are not determined until run-time. We have extended the traditional workflow process modeling by including e-service requests in activity specifications and extended the Web Service Description Language (WSDL) by including constraints in both service specifications and service requests so that the selection of e-service providers can be more accurately performed.

Constraint-based brokering (CBB) for publishing and discovery of web services

Much effort is being made by the IT industry towards the development of a Web Service infrastructure to enable the discovery and sharing of heterogeneous applications and data resources. The existing implementation of Web Service registries does not have constraint specification and processing capabilities to achieve intelligent service discovery. In this work, we have extended the Web Service Description Language to allow service providers to specify their service constraints, and developed a Constraint-based Web Service Broker capable of matching a service requestor’s requirement specification against providers’ constraints to find their desired services. This paper presents the extended Web Service Description Language, the architecture and implementation of the Broker, the constraint matching technique, and the result of a performance evaluation.

Knowledge sharing in a collaborative business environment

In recent years, business organisations have perceived a growing need to collaborate with one another to solve common problems and to stay competitive. An important form of collaboration is sharing of human/ organisational knowledge. In this work, we use different types of business rules and structures of these rules to capture multi-faceted business policies, strategies, regulations, constraints, processes and operating procedures. The occurrence of any event of interest to these organisations can initiate the processing of multiple rules and rule structures. We present a rule specification language and an event-triggered knowledge sharing system for the specification and processing of distributed events, triggers, heterogeneous business rules and rule structures in an enhanced web service infrastructure.

Distributed processing of event data and multi-faceted knowledge in a collaboration federation

This paper presents the goal, accomplishments and research issues of an NSF project. The project aims to develop a distributed event-triggered knowledge sharing network (ETKnet) for government organizations to share, not only data and application operations, but also knowledge embedded in organizational and inter-organizational policies, regulations, data and security constraints as well as collaborative processes and operating procedures. A unified knowledge and process specification language has been developed to formally specify multi-faceted human and organizational knowledge in terms of three types of knowledge rules and rule structures. A user-friendly interface is provided for collaborating organizations to define events of interest as well as application operations, knowledge rules, rule structures and triggers. Events are published in a global registry for browsing, querying, event subscription and notification. Rules and rule structures are automatically translated into Web services for distributed processing in ETKnet. Event data are dots that can be connected dynamically across organizational boundaries through the interoperation of knowledge rules, processes and application operations.

ETKnet: A Distributed Network System for Sharing Event Data and Multi-faceted Knowledge in a Collaboration Federation

This chapter presents a distributed event-triggered knowledge network (ETKnet) developed for use by government organizations to share not only data and application operations but also knowledge embedded in organizational and inter-organizational policies, regulations, data, and security constraints as well as collaborative processes and operating procedures. A unified knowledge and process specification language has been developed to formally specify multi-faceted human and organizational knowledge in terms of three types of knowledge rules and rule structures. A user-friendly interface is provided for collaborating organizations to define events of interest as well as automated and manual operations, operation structures, knowledge rules, rule structures, and triggers. Through this interface, these organizations can also perform task management, administrative management, configuration management, and ontology management. Events are published in a global registry for browsing, querying, event subscription, and notification. Rules and rule structures are automatically translated into Web services for discovery and distributed processing in ETKnet. Event data are dots that can be connected dynamically across organizational boundaries through the interoperation of knowledge rules and processes.