Seung Hwan Ryu

Supporting the dynamic evolution of Web service protocols in service-oriented architectures

In service-oriented architectures, everything is a service and everyone is a service provider. Web services (or simply services) are loosely coupled software components that are published, discovered, and invoked across the Web. As the use of Web service grows, in order to correctly interact with them, it is important to understand the business protocols that provide clients with the information on how to interact with services. In dynamic Web service environments, service providers need to constantly adapt their business protocols for reflecting the restrictions and requirements proposed by new applications, new business strategies, and new laws, or for fixing problems found in the protocol definition. However, the effective management of such a protocol evolution raises critical problems: one of the most critical issues is how to handle instances running under the old protocol when it has been changed. Simple solutions, such as aborting them or allowing them to continue to run according to the old protocol, can be considered, but they are inapplicable for many reasons (for example, the loss of work already done and the critical nature of work). In this article, we present a framework that supports service managers in managing the business protocol evolution by providing several features, such as a variety of protocol change impact analyses automatically determining which ongoing instances can be migrated to the new version of protocol, and data mining techniques inferring interaction patterns used for classifying ongoing instances migrateable to the new protocol. To support the protocol evolution process, we have also developed database-backed GUI tools on top of our existing system. The proposed approach and tools can help service managers in managing the evolution of ongoing instances when the business protocols of services with which they are interacting have changed.

A systematic review and comparative analysis of cross-document coreference resolution methods and tools

Information extraction (IE) is the task of automatically extracting structured information from unstructured/semi-structured machine-readable documents. Among various IE tasks, extracting actionable intelligence from an ever-increasing amount of data depends critically upon cross-document coreference resolution (CDCR) - the task of identifying entity mentions across information sources that refer to the same underlying entity. CDCR is the basis of knowledge acquisition and is at the heart of Web search, recommendations, and analytics. Real time processing of CDCR processes is very important and have various applications in discovering must-know information in real-time for clients in finance, public sector, news, and crisis management. Being an emerging area of research and practice, the reported literature on CDCR challenges and solutions is growing fast but is scattered due to the large space, various applications, and large datasets of the order of peta-/tera-bytes. In order to fill this gap, we provide a systematic review of the state of the art of challenges and solutions for a CDCR process. We identify a set of quality attributes, that have been frequently reported in the context of CDCR processes, to be used as a guide to identify important and outstanding issues for further investigations. Finally, we assess existing tools and techniques for CDCR subtasks and provide guidance on selection of tools and algorithms.

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.

Similarity function recommender service using incremental user knowledge acquisition

Similar entity search is the task of identifying entities that most closely resemble a given entity (e.g., a person, a document, or an image). Although many techniques for estimating similarity have been proposed in the past, little work has been done on the question of which of the presented techniques are most suitable for a given similarity analysis task. Knowing the right similarity function is important as the task is highly domain- and data-dependent. In this paper, we propose a recommender service that suggests which similarity functions (e.g., edit distance or jaccard similarity) should be used for measuring the similarity between two entities. We introduce the notion of “similarity function recommendation rule” that captures user knowledge about similarity functions and their usage contexts. We also present an incremental knowledge acquisition technique for building and maintaining a set of similarity function recommendation rules.

Experts community memory for entity similarity functions recommendation

Abstract Similarity search (or similar entity search) is the process of finding all entities similar to a given entity (e.g., a person, a document, or an image). Although many techniques for similarity analysis have been proposed in the past, little work has been done on the question of which of the presented techniques are most suitable for a given similarity search task. Knowing the right similarity function is important as the task is highly domain- and data-dependent. In this article, we provide an approach for recommending which similarity functions (e.g., edit distance or jaccard similarity) should be used for measuring the similarity between two entities. The approach employs an incremental knowledge acquisition technique for capturing domain experts’ knowledge about similarity functions and their usage contexts (e.g., entity class, attribute name and some keywords). In addition, for situations where domain experts have little or no knowledge about datasets, we analyze the features of the datasets and then suggest similarity functions based on the identified features. We also demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposed approach on several real-world datasets from different domains.

Model-Based Business Process Query Techniques and Languages

This chapter looks at the business process querying techniques and languages and provides an overview of the various techniques for querying business processes. After discussing different techniques for querying the business process execution logs and their related artifacts, the chapter provides an overview of different approaches for utilizing business process querying techniques for ensuring business process compliance to their specifications and business rules.

Business Process Data Analysis

This chapter looks at business process data analysis and provides an overview of different aspects of business data analysis techniques and approaches from process/dataspaces to data provenance and data-based querying techniques. After providing an overview of warehousing process data, data services, and dataspaces, the chapter discusses the importance of supporting big data analytics over process execution data. It presents a holistic view of the process executions over various information systems and services (i.e., process space) followed by a brief overview of process mining to highlight the interpretation of the information in the enterprise in the context of process mining. Finally, the chapter focuses on process artifacts and introduces crosscutting aspects in processes data such as time and provenance.

Integrating feature analysis and background knowledge to recommend similarity functions

Existing approaches in similarity analysis is little concerned with the right choice of similarity functions. We present an approach for suggesting which similarity functions (e.g., edit distance) are most appropriate for a given similarity search task. We identify data features (e.g., misspellings) that are considerable when choosing similarity functions. We also introduce the concept of similarity function background knowledge that associates data features with similarity functions, and apply the knowledge to recommend suitable similarity functions.

TEXUS: Table Extraction System for PDF Documents

Tables in documents are a rich and under-exploited source of structured data in otherwise unstructured documents. The extraction and understanding of tabular data is a challenging task which has attracted the attention of researchers from a range of disciplines such as information retrieval, machine learning and natural language processing. In this demonstration, we present an end-to-end table extraction and understanding system which takes a PDF file and automatically generates a set of XML and CSV files containing the extracted cells, rows and columns of tables, as well as a complete reading order analysis of the tables. Unlike many systems that work as a black-boxed, ad-hoc solution, our system design incorporates the open, reusable and extensible architecture to support research into, and development of, table-processing systems. During the demo, users will see how our system gradually transforms a PDF document into a set of structured files through a series of processing modules, namely: locating, segmenting and function/structure analysis.

Building a Process Description Repository with Knowledge Acquisition

Although there is an abundance of how-to guides online, systematically utilising the collective knowledge represented in such guides has been limited. This is primarily due to how-to guides (effectively, informal process descriptions) being expressed in natural language, which complicates the process of extracting actions and data. This paper describes the use of Ripple-Down Rules (RDR) over the Stanford NLP toolkit to improve the extraction of actions and data from process descriptions in text documents. Using RDR, we can incrementally and rapidly build rules to refine the performance of the underlying extraction system. Although RDR has been widely applied, it has not so far been used with NLP phrase structure representations. We show, through implementation and evaluation, how the use of action-data extraction rules and knowledge acquisition in RDR is both feasible and effective.