Yanbo Han

VINCA – A Visual and Personalized Business-Level Composition Language for Chaining Web-Based Services

The paper presents a service composition language called VINCA, which differs from many existing ones in its emphasis on enabling business users to visually “program” from business view-point their personalized applications on the basis of Web-based services. VINCA embodies an integrated approach to mediating between diverse, rapidly changing user requirements and composites of individual services scattered over the Internet. The approach is targeted at application scenarios that require Web-based services be quickly assembled by non-computer professionals to fulfill certain spontaneous requirements. VINCA is developed within a real-world project for developing a service mediation platform for the Olympic Games Beijing 2008, on which an effective information system providing personalized and one-stop information services to the general public, should be based. In this paper, we introduce the main features and design rationales of VINCA with a scenario, and also discuss its implementation and application.

A Cloud-Based BPM Architecture with User-End Distribution of Non-Compute-Intensive Activities and Sensitive Data

While cloud-based BPM (Business Process Management) shows potentials of inherent scalability and expenditure reduction, such issues as user autonomy, privacy protection and efficiency have popped up as major concerns. Users may have their own rudimentary or even full-fledged BPM systems, which may be embodied by local EAI systems, at their end, but still intend to make use of cloud-side infrastructure services and BPM capabilities, which may appear as PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) services, at the same time. A whole business process may contain a number of non-compute-intensive activities, for which cloud computing is over-provision. Moreover, some users fear data leakage and loss of privacy if their sensitive data is processed in the cloud. This paper proposes and analyzes a novel architecture of cloud-based BPM, which supports user-end distribution of non-compute-intensive activities and sensitive data. An approach to optimal distribution of activities and data for synthetically utilizing both user-end and cloud-side resources is discussed. Experimental results show that with the help of suitable distribution schemes, data privacy can be satisfactorily protected, and resources on both sides can be utilized at lower cost.

A service interoperability assessment model for service composition

This work presents an assessment model of service interoperability for service composition, which helps users to judge whether their composite services can be invoked properly. The model provides a clean and easy way to evaluate interoperability between autonomous services in open and large-scale distributed environments. This paper first summarizes and analyzes different levels of service interoperability, then proposes a multifactor decision model to assess interoperability, and finally discusses some patterns to use the model.

CAFISE: an approach to enabling adaptive configuration of service grid applications

Aiming at building up more powerful, open-standard-based and generic infrastructures for application integration, service grids address the challenges in large-scale coordinated sharing and on-demand composition of network-based application services. The related endeavors have opened up new ways of application development, deployment and integration. In connection with the new level of scale, openness and dynamism brought forward by service grids, adaptive service configuration is of essential importance to applications. This paper proposes an approach called CAFISE, which tries to better facilitate on-demand configuration and dynamic reconfiguration of service grid applications. In CAFISE, a business design and its supporting software system are considered in a coherent way, and a convergent relation, which helps to map business-level configurations to software-level configurations, is highlighted. The paper is particularly devoted to presenting and discussing the principles, reference model, modeling language and supporting application framework of CAFISE. Since practical usefulness is highly valued in the development of CAFISE, the application of the approach to a real-world scenario is also presented in the paper.

A service modeling approach with business-level reusability and extensibility

This paper introduces a novel service modeling approach called VINCA/spl I.bar/BS, which can be used by business people to extend the functionality of a service based software platform from a business perspective. VINCA/spl I.bar/BS approach introduces the domain analysis approaches into service modeling and uses the domain requirement commonalities to define our VINCA business service models, which are user understandable, business level reusable service abstractions omitting concrete business details. These service models can be instantiated by different business people according to their actual business requirements that consequently add new functionalities to the platform. The approach has been successfully validated in a service based e-government project.

An Algorithm for Calculating Process Similarity to Cluster Open-Source Process Designs

This paper proposes an algorithm for calculating process similarity in order to cluster process designs. A weighted graph is introduced for comparing processes in the intermediate form. The graph similarity is the weighted sum of similarity between sets of services and sets of service links that can be calculated based on the service similarity. The evaluation and application of the algorithm is discussed at the end of this paper.

Personalized Active Service Spaces for End-User Service Composition

End-user service composition is a promising way to ensure flexible, quick and personalized information provision and utilization, and consequently to better cope with spontaneous business requirements. For end-users to compose services directly, issues like service granularity, service organization and business-level semantics are critical. End-users will certainly be at loss if they have to select from a long list of available Web services expressed in IT jargons. This article introduces the concept of personalized active service spaces and focuses on the use of business services, service dependency rules, and service personalization rules to support end-user service composition. It addresses two key issues in end-user composition: how to utilize the user preference and context to restrict the scope of applicable services for selection, and how to capture and utilize dependencies or usage patterns between services in order to provide guidance and enforce temporal/sequential restrictions on service invocations for end-user service compositions

Facilitating Dynamic Service Compositions by Adaptable Service Connectors

Dynamic changes of services and requirements require service connection relationships adaptable in service compositions. This paper presents an adaptable service connector model and related language and tools. The model presents service connection relationships as an explicit component with which service connections can be reconfigured and changes of services involved in the interaction can be handled; this makes the service connection relationships more adaptive. With the language and tools supporting the model, services can be dynamically chained, which make service-oriented applications adapt to volatile business requirements and dynamic changeable services. The related case study and evaluation are also presented in this paper.

An Approach to Domain-Specific Reuse in Service-Oriented Environments

Domain engineering is successful in promoting reuse. An approach to domain-specific reuse in service-oriented environments is proposed to facilitate service requesters to reuse Web services. In the approach, we present a conceptual model of domain-specific services (called domain service). Domain services in a certain business domain are modeled by semantic and feature modeling techniques, and bound to Web services with diverse capabilities through a variability-supported matching mechanism. By reusing pre-modeled domain services, service requesters can describe their requests easily through a service customization mechanism. Web service selection based on customized results can also be optimized by reusing the pre-matching results between domain services and Web services. Feasibility of the whole approach is demonstrated on an example.

A Service-Based Approach to Traffic Sensor Data Integration and Analysis to Support Community-Wide Green Commute in China

With the increasing abundance of traffic data from sensors and devices, the integration and analysis of such streaming data are gaining importance in many application scenarios. This paper proposes a service-based approach for integrating and analyzing the traffic sensor data to support green commute in China by automatically discovering carpooling companions within a community. Our focuses are on modeling and design of the carpooling discovery services, algorithms for implementing the services, and performance enhancement when the data volume scales up. The proposed approach is verified with experiments using real-world data.