William Song

Group-Oriented (t, n) Threshold Digital Signature Schemes with Traceable Signers

In this paper, we propose two group-oriented (t, n) threshold digital signature schemes with traceable signers. One needs the assistance of a mutually trusted center, the other does not need the assistance of a mutually trusted center. We also discuss the security and the feature of both schemes and show that the new schemes can withstand conspiracy attacks without attaching a secret number and can avoid to the forgery attacks. In addition, we show that, by the new schemes, any outsider can trace back to find who the signers are.

Policy-Based Web Service Selection in Context Sensitive Environment

Web service selection is a key issue in the service-oriented computing. Generally, Web services are provided with different QoS values, so they can be selected dynamically in service composition process. However, the conventional context free QoS selection model does not consider the context sensitive constraints and the changeability of QoS values. This paper proposes a policy-based context sensitive QoS model to effectively calculate QoS values and select web services. By introducing context to the QoS model, web service composition can be used widely and flexibly in the real world business.

A conceptual modeling approach to virtual organizations in the grid

One of the key problems with virtual organizations in the context of the (Semantic) Grid is we don’t know how to describe the components used in virtual organizations because they appear to be dynamic, dispersed, transient, type-vague (or we don’t know their types), heterogeneous, semantically informal, and disorderly. The existing semantic modeling approaches lack effective modeling facilities for modeling virtual organization components. Our observations were suggesting focusing on the following aspects: First, we should model both static resources and dynamic states of a virtual organization. Second, we should build up the virtual organizations with abundant static resource. Third, we should combine the semantic modeling with the users’ requirements description for virtual organizations due to its importance. In this paper, we analyze the current situation of the virtual organization research and propose our experimental semantic description model for virtual organizations. We also present the design architecture for the Realcourse application.

A Method for Transforming Existing Web Service Descriptions into an Enhanced Semantic Web Service Framework

Web Services as a new distributed system technology has been widely adopted by industries in the areas, such as enterprise application integration (EAI), business process management (BPM), and virtual organisation (VO). However, lack of semantics in the current Web Service standards has been a major barrier in service discovery and composition. In this chapter, we propose an enhanced context-based semantic service description framework (CbSSDF+) that tackles the problem and improves the flexibility of service discovery and the correctness of generated composite services. We also provide an agile transformation method to demonstrate how the various formats of Web Service descriptions on the Web can be managed and renovated step by step into CbSSDF+ based service description without large amount of engineering work. At the end of the chapter, we evaluate the applicability of the transformation method and the effectiveness of CbSSDF+ through a series of experiments.

An Investigation on Using Web Services for Micro-Payment

E-commerce development and applications have been bringing the Internet to business and marketing and reforming our current business styles and processes. As Business to Business (B2B) has been a main stream of the e-commerce activities for a decade, business to customer (B2C) is still a new area to explore. Among the business to customer activities, a strong impact is security, i.e., how to protect secrets of various parties in business transactions. Different security methods apply to different businesses and meet different customers’ needs. The methods with low cost and easy to implement may be less secure, whereas the methods providing high level security can be unaffordable to many small enterprises and individuals. In particular, people, while browsing or surfing on the Web, wish to pay a very small amount and “buy” (perhaps just download) an interesting item from the Web. The “click-and-pay‘” or “click-and-buy” does not require high security protection and should be convenient to use (buy and pay). Micro-payment issue emerges from the context to meet the need of applicability of low secure and cost in e-purchase. Payments of small amounts may enable many exciting applications on the Internet, such as selling information, small software and services. Users are willing to pay a small amount of money for the information, software and services. While the payment is small, expensive security protection is unnecessary. What users require may include negligible delay, rapid click-through, and automatic billing. Micro-payment is a service intensive activity, where many payment tasks involve different forms of services, such as payment method selection for buyers, security support software, product price comparison, etc. In this paper, we intend to investigate and analyze various aspects of micro-payment system using the web service technology. We will discuss business patterns for micro-payment systems using Web Services approaches.

An Examination on Service Science: A View from e-Service

Since it was proposed in 2003, service science has become a keen topic in the communities of web services, semantic web, and e-businesses. According to a recent proposal by IBM, it covers service science, service management, and service engineering (SSME). Although there have been many discussions and reports on this topic, it is still quite unclear these debates would contribute to the establishment of service science as a research subject. This chapter intends to address this issue by comparing related studies on service science or SSME, discussing interrelationships among the components of service science (SSME), outlining its evolutionary process in terms of the enterprise modeling approach, and illustrating a number of possible research subtopics.

An Investigation on Interdisciplinary Structure of Service Science

In this paper, we intend to take a further examination on service science as a new discipline in terms of a structurally anatomic analysis. We consider that such analysis will contribute to a better organization and advancement of this subject as a typical interdisciplinary one but little has been done so far. We propose a two layer structure to describe service science where the lattice structure is used to depict the four parts and their interrelationships at the upper layer that leads to a four interlinked sub-topics frame for the lower layer.

Context-sensitive QoS model: a rule-based approach to web service composition

Generally, web services are provided with different QoS values, so they can be selected dynamically in service composition process. However, the conventional context free composition QoS model does not consider the changeability of QoS values and the context sensitive constraints during composition process. In this paper, we propose a rule based context sensitive QoS model to support the changeability of QoS values and the context sensitive constraints. By considering context in the QoS model, web service composition can be used widely and flexibly in the real world business.

Developing and Managing SLAs for Business Applications in Information Systems

Use of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) is crucial for a business organization to provide the value added goods and services to customers to achieve the business goals successfully. Efficient structural representation and management of SLAs can solve the problems of quality of service evaluation during service development and deployment. Existing specifications and structures for SLAs do not fully formalize and support for different automatic and dynamic behavioural aspects needed within the Business Organizations for SLAs. We address the issues on how to formalize and document the structures of SLAs for better utilization and improved results in various business domains. Our main focus is on the contents and processes of SLAs during service discovery, service delivery and scheduling of the services effectively and efficiently.

CbSSDF: A Two-Layer Conceptual Graph Approach to Web Services Description and Composition-A Scenario Based Solution Analysis and Comparison with OWL-S

Web services as a new distributed system technology have been widely adopted by industries in the areas, such as enterprise application integration EAI, business process management BPM, and virtual organization VO. However, lack of semantics in the current Web service standards has become a major barrier in service discovery and composition. To tackle the semantic issues of Web services, this paper proposes a comprehensive semantic service description framework-CbSSDF and a two-step service discovery mechanism based on CbSSDF-to help service users to easily locate their required services. The authors give a detailed explanation of CbSSDF, and then evaluate the framework by comparing it with OWL-S to examine how the proposed framework can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of service discovery and composition. The evaluation is carried out by analysing the different proposed solutions based on these two frameworks for achieving a series of tasks in a scenario.