Sophie Robin

CALIN: a user interface based on a simple natural language

In the framework of an application dealing with classified advertisement matching, a dedicated user interface has been designed and implemented. Its major originality relies on the users language which is neither an artificial one, nor the usual natural language, but in fact the ad language. Beyond the language itself, the interface provides some facilities such as paraphrasing or explanations when needed. An expert system approach has been adopted and the interface is built up from the knowledge given by experts. They are in charge of describing what are acceptable ads, from both syntax and semantics points of view … Although designed in the context of ad matching, that interface may interestingly be adapted to other retrieving systems. We especially think that an adlike language is well-suited to ask questions since it is based on natural simple expressions. A given sentence involves terms that stand for elementary conditions applying to instances of a logical object contained inside the information system. This approach defines a complete interface, involving both a language and aiding capabilities. Moreover, the query language, although less powerful, represents a compromise between artificial languages and the usual natural language, with respect to ergonomics and analysis complexity.

Instrumentation for synchrotron-radiation macromolecular crystallography

X-ray diffraction is an extremely important tool for structure determination of biological macromolecules, to the extent that currently around 85% of Protein Data Bank entries result from X-ray measurements. Many of these structure determinations use synchrotron radiation for data collection. This article aims to give synchrotron users an overview of the functioning of a synchrotron beamline and how the performance of various instruments combines to allow the collection of diffraction data.

Adapting Web Services to Maintain QoS Even When Faults Occur

The paper addresses the problem of maintaining the quality of service (QoS) of an orchestration of Web services (WS), which can be affected by exogenous events (i.e., faults). The main challenge in dealing with this problem is that typically the service where a failure is detected is not the one where a fault has occurred: faults have cascade effects on the whole orchestration of services. The paper presents a novel methodology to treat the problem that is not based on Web service (re)composition, but on an adaptive re-execution of the original orchestration. Specifically, an orchestrator Manager exploits an abstract representation of the whole orchestration and a diagnostic module to localize the source of the detected failure. Then, the Manager drives the re-execution of the orchestration by deciding which service activities can be skipped, and which others must be re-executed.

Surveillance de compositions de web services: Deux approches distribuées à base de chroniques pour la surveillance et le diagnostic

The ability to create self-healing software is a challenging task for research. This article describes an architecture dedicated to the monitoring and the diagnosis of web services. One of the main difficulties in this context is that faults may propagate from a service to another, which makes of diagnosis a crucial issue in order to react properly. Our main contribution is to extend the chronicle recognition approach to a distributed context such as choreographies of web services. Two cases are studied. In the first one, interactions between services are static and described a priori in WS-CDL; in the second one, the model of interactions is dynamic and built online. This work has been achieved and funded within the framework of the WS- DIAMOND European project.