Yasuharu Namba

Using web service transformations to implement cooperative fault tolerance

Developing techniques to increase the availability of web services in the event of failure has become increasingly important given their key role in providing access to online information, financial, and retail resources. This paper describes an approach to improving availability by using failover between similar but not identical services, and the use of cooperative fault tolerance between the providers of these services. With this approach, a similar service can be used as a backup, with the protocol and service differences between the two services masked by the use of transformation web services that are generated semi-automatically. The basic idea of cooperative fault-tolerance using similar services is presented based on an example involving two stock broker services. The software architecture and the process for generating the transformation web services using a code generation tool are also described, along with experimental results from the stock broker example. These results suggest that the transformation overhead is modest compared with the typical cost of communication.

Building Natural Language Interface - Its Methodology and Tools

Abstract This paper presents methodology and tools for building natural language interface between users and application systems. The goal of this research is to allow any system designer to implement a natural language interface. A basic premise of this research is that there are command languages for application systems. The methodology proposes ten steps, including acquiring knowledge for semantic analysis and usability enhancement. The tools consists of seven components which require domain knowledge and a dictionary for the relation between natural language and command language.