W.J.A.M. van den Heuvel

Web services management: a survey

Solutions based on service-oriented architectures are promising in that they leverage common services and enable collaborative business processes that cross organizational boundaries. However, because Web services applications can span multiple hosts, operating systems, languages, and enterprises, its problematic to measure, control, and manage application availability and performance. In addition to discussing the relationship of Web services management to traditional distributed systems management, this survey explores various Web services management approaches and their underlying architectural concepts.

Tackling the challenges of service composition in e-marketplaces

The Web has becomes the means for enterprises to deliver electronic services to businesses and customers, and for service providers to discover services and build complex applications by using existing services. The number of e-services is growing rapidly,. This has raised the opportunity for e-service oriented marketplaces to provide the facilities for developing value-added services by combining existing e-services. We explore the characteristics of service composition, show how it differs in fundamental ways from traditional issues surrounding workflow integration, data integration, and application integration. We provide a framework for classifying different scenarios of service composition, discuss the unique requirements of service composition, and outline our solution for the challenging issues in service composition.

Web service selection in virtual communities

Virtual communities increasingly make use of standard Internet-enabled Web services to support their collaborative activities. Such Web services need to offer the right amount of functionality to meet community requirements. However, both requirements and enabling services are continuously in flux. A critical challenge therefore is that the community can efficiently ensure that Web service changes are both technically feasible and socially acceptable. In this paper, we outline a selection approach for virtual communities that takes into account both the feasibility and the acceptability of Web services. To this purpose, we adopt a semiotic view on the selection process, showing that for the adequate selection of Web services three subprocesses are required: (1) syntactic discovery, (2) semantic matching, and (3) pragmatic interpretation. We then present a meta-model of Web service selection support that is grounded in this view. This model can be used to detect gaps in Web service selection support. This knowledge is essential for the construction of better selection support methodologies. We apply the meta-model to analyze a case on a courseware development community.

A rule based approach to the service composition life-cycle

Web services are becoming the prominent paradigm for distributed computing and electronic business. This has raised the opportunity for service providers and application developers to develop value-added services by combining existing Web services. However the current Web service composition solutions, even for the applications developed on the basis of the standard Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL for short), are rather restricted and inflexible as they lack proper support for generating dynamic compositions and for managing the service composition life cycle. The ReServCom project proposed here aims to remedy this situation by introducing a rule based approach for Web service composition which combines best practices from rule base systems and software engineering to support parameterization, dynamic binding, and flexible service compositions.

Service deployment for virtual enterprises

The ubiquity of the WWW offers far reaching opportunities for emerging Web-based applications based on service invocations. Although network-centric technologies will make the diverse services easily accessible via the Web, the development of e-commerce services (e-services) and networked services which share existing e-services is still an ad-hoc, very demanding, and time consuming task. We propose an integrated framework for e-services spanning legacy systems and modern enterprise business processes so that business transactions can be automated across the networked enterprises. Networked enterprise applications can thus be developed by fusing together services provided by individual enterprises.

Exploring a multi-faceted framework for SOC: how to develop secure Web-service interactions?

Service oriented computing (SOC) demands an infrastructure that seamlessly integrates all connection points between business processes, services and associated support resources. Parts of the infrastructure may be supported by existing standards such as XACML and BPEL. However, an integral and sound framework that takes into account all these issues and serves as the formal underpinning of this infrastructure is currently lacking. A multi-faceted framework to enforce minimal levels of security not only at the level of the network (e.g., using encryption), but also of business processes, is of paramount importance. To address this challenge, we explore an event-driven framework for service oriented computing (EFSOC) that is organized in four tiers: the event tier, the business process tier, the resource tier, and the access control tier. The event tier encompasses definitions of business-related events, and supports their propagation throughout the business process flow. The business process tier specifies the dynamic interactions between business processes and services. The resource tier describes how service invocations interact with organizational resources, while the access control tier defines access roles that are allowed to invoke certain services.

Research and practice in federated information systems

EFIS 2000 was held at Dublin City University in June 2000. The principal aim of this third workshop was to bring together new insights from academic research with industry-driven developments and perspectives in the area of federated information systems. This report describes the observations of the workshop together with the outcome and future research possibilities.

Supporting the evolution of workflow patterns for virtual communities

Virtual communities that make use of network information systems (NIS) have a need for specification support that agrees with their communal character. System specification changes must be acceptable to all members for a community to thrive. This requirement holds in particular for workflow-enabling communication tools that are part of the NIS. In the first place, it means that workflow processes can be modelled at an abstraction level that makes sense to the community members. To this purpose, a layered architecture of workflow patterns is described that is rooted in Language/Action theory. Patterns for all levels can be stored in a component library and be (re)-used effectively by communities to speed up their NIS development and evolution. To ensure the acceptability of changes in workflow patterns, the evolution process must be supported by a method for legitimate user-driven specification.

Privacy calculus and its utility for personalization services in e-commerce

Modern consumers increasingly embrace the personalization of services. Whether to disclose private information to companies for the sake of receiving personalized service is largely contingent to relative valuations and the utility of private information. Unfortunately, there is a lack of balanced research that analyzes and reconciles the contradiction between privacy and personalization service. In this study, based on the multi-attribute utility theory (MAUT), we introduce a utility model of privacy in personalization. Our simulation results validate our white-box utility model by demonstrating significant distinctions of calculating benefits and costs among three groups of consumers.

Methods, tools and applications for web-based integration of supply chains: introduction to the minitrack

The web promises to enable smooth crossorganizational B2B integration. Recent web technologies such as XML-based industry standards, web-services (including web-service composition, coordination and transaction standards), agent technology, B2B integration hubs and the semantic web provide powerful tools to increase the efficiency of supply chains. Eventually, these technologies should enable the transformation of current static supply chains into dynamic virtual networks of enterprises. Although web-technologies remain evolving at a high pace, a (growing) gap can be observed between the state-of-the-art theories and practical applications. Most supply chains also include small and medium sized enterprises that may not be able to quickly adopt the recent technologies. Such companies may become the ’weakest link’ blocking a supply chain as a whole to increase its efficiency and flexibility. Some claim that recent technologies such as agent and web-services may lower barriers for B2B integration. Others have said that these technologies are not yet ready for large scale applications to supply chains and propose Hub-based solutions, that are able to bridge technology gaps through custom made adapters and (semi-) automatic translations. Currently, there exists a lack of empirically validated methods, tools and applications concerning the adoption of the latest web-based technologies to create efficient and flexible supply chains for supporting cross-organizational financial and logistic business processes. The minitrack serves as a platform to present and discuss research that addresses this gap. The minitrack focuses at solutions in the financial and logistics supply chains as in these area’s there is a huge potential for application of emerging integration technologies and interesting problems and examples can be identified. Out of several papers that were submitted, this minitrack carefully selected two excellent papers hat address and challenge the wide range of research topics and solutions that were briefly outlined in the above. The first paper in this minitrack discusses the use of web coordination bonds as a Simple Enhancement to the current Web Services Architecture. The authors propose Web Coordination Bonds, analogous to the chemical bonds, as a set of such core artifacts for effective collaboration among web services. The paper demonstrates how Bonds can be employed to create (model) and enforce (deploy and execute) producer-consumer and shared-resource relationships, workflow scenarios, and atomic transactions. The second paper in this minitrack deals with a Cooperative System to Support Inventory Leveling Negotiations. Negotiation between a party holding excess and the demanding party is a crucial issue in preventing excess inventory in logistics supply chains. The authors present a system to support cooperative negotiations aiming at levelling inventories of products and services, while stimulating the integration among them. The system proposed in the paper will be used by severalAgencies within Brazilian Federal Government Defense Ministry, acting as a market for excess capacity of services and goods. Proceedings of the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 2004