Yu-N Cheah

Dynamic service placement and replication framework to enhance service availability using team formation algorithm

The motivation of this work is to reduce the complexity in managing and administering services in the ever growing distributed environment via automated service placement and replication with team formation algorithm. The team formation algorithm is designed in a way that it would continuously search for resources with better performance and pool resources together to achieve better availability. The main intention of this work is not to replace the human administrators but to provide a better alternative in managing services in dynamic distributed environment. Instructions from the administrators are still required but at a different level. Administrators are freed from making low level decisions such as to decide the actual placement of the services and design the failover capabilities for each of the services. The evaluation results showed that the framework is capable of managing resources according to the requirements given by administrator, even during in the event of multiple consecutive resources failure. The proposed solution had the probability of 72.1% of its services that are still available after 83.3% of the available resources were shut down while conventional failover solution using three redundant units had only the probability of 40.8% of services that are still available.

Dynamic service placement and redundancy to ensure service availability during resource failures

Service placement algorithms have been introduced to automatically manage services in distributed environments. However, most of these algorithms aim to improve service performance or to reduce operation cost and do not consider the reliability and availability of their resources. Most of them do not consider events when machines in their resource pool malfunction. These malfunctioned machines could cause services to halt or, worse, to produce transient and intermittent errors. Presently, most of the solutions proposed to improve service availability are based on having redundancy units that do not consider the amount of work and resources needed to create replicas, which greatly increases the complexity of the management of a distributed system. In this paper, we survey state-of-the-art techniques that could improve service availability in distributed environments and propose an autonomie algorithm based on team building concept that dynamically performs service placement to improve service availability even in the event of resource failures.

An ontology-mediated scenario composer for knowledge acquisition in intelligent systems

The acquisition of decision-quality tacit knowledge from domain experts has been an important issue in the realm of knowledge management and intelligent systems. We present a Tacit Knowledge Acquisition Info-structure (TKAI) that allows remote domain experts to record their tacit knowledge via a novel tacit knowledge acquisition construct called Scenarios. In this info-structure, an ontology is employed to enforce standardisation in view that tacit knowledge is deemed to be hierarchical in structure and personal in nature. The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is also featured to encode the acquired scenario instances and to facilitate their transfer over the Internet for the global sharing of the acquired tacit knowledge. XML also allows the translation of scenario instances into other representational languages that are deemed more appropriate for specific tasks.

Resource selection using fuzzy logic for Dynamic Service Placement and Replication

One of the core components of the DSPR framework is the resource evaluation function. The Dynamic Service Placement and Replication (DSPR) framework is designed to manage services on distributed environment by repetitively searching for the best combination of distributed machines from a resource pool until the best working group is attained to satisfy the requirements of the service. In this research, a fuzzy logic based resource evaluation technique is proposed for the DSPR framework. The proposed technique is then compared with existing resource evaluation methods such as rule-based, utility-based and constraint-based. Besides that, the ability of DSPR to increase service availability in the event of multiple continuous failures is measured. The performance difference between using DSPR and conventional system with failover capability in the event of disaster was carried out. These experiments justify the suitability of using the proposed resource evaluation techniques compare to the existing work.

Hybrid approach towards ontology mapping

It is common for different ontologies to exist for similar domains, which leads to ontology heterogeneity. This can be addressed by ontology mapping. Issues related to ontology mapping include the lack of efforts to hybridize the various ontology mapping algorithms that are available. Another problem concerns the mapping approaches themselves, i.e. these are either concept-based or instance-based (and not a combination of these). In this paper, we present an approach for ontology mapping. Our approach employs a library of ontology mapping algorithms. A number of these algorithms are selected and linked or hybrided to produce a composite algorithm. Furthermore, we also present a result aggregation engine which can either present results of the individual algorithms separately or fuse the results of the composite algorithm.

An e-book personalization architecture with digital rights and encryption procedures

In this paper we report in building an electronic book (e-book) representation with Digital Rights Management (DRM) architecture. E-book personalization is being featured with DRM capabilities. The knowledge about DRM architecture can be further formalised, more specifically for ebook packaging. E-book requires the secure business model that includes e-book transaction. DRM framework is to provide the significant field for producers/consumers. E-book associates the DRM components: the capabilities for e-book personalization/DRM. It includes five components: (1) create/publish such as legal contracting, writing/editing the content, (2) market/distribute such as packaging, storing, translating and shipping e-book content, (3) sell to consumer such as selling, fulfilling and processing payments, (4) consume content such as reading, storing and disposing of e-books, and (5) support consumer such as returning, replacing and troubleshooting. At a macro level, the e-book is being evaluated based on the commercialization of the e-book market, and while at a micro level, it is evaluated based on the technical infrastructure is required to distribute the e-book package from publisher to consumer.

A services-oriented platform for synergisation of research and development strengths

There have been many R&D projects conducted under PPSKOMP (School of Computer Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia) since its establishment in 1995 until today. In PPSKOMP, there are eight major research groups established, which are: Artificial Intelligence Lab, Computer Aided Translation Unit, Computer Vision Research Group, Health Information Research Group, Information Systems Engineering, Multimedia Research Group, Network Research Group, and Parallel and Distributed Computing. Many knowledge resources and processing components have been developed by researchers and available in each of this research group. However, these resources are resided and accessible only in respective research group and mostly developed using different methodologies, paradigm and platform. In this paper, we present a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) framework which capable to resolve this problem and enable the synergisation of research and development strengths in PPSKOMP.

Identifying social factors and representation for knowledge based coalition formation system

In order to form a collaborative team working on a specific task, we need to identify individuals that will be able to form groups and work together based on certain criteria such as their knowledge and personal role. Coalition formation is an approach dedicated to achieve optimal group arrangement. We are working in the direction of identifying strategies to build a coalition formation system taking into consideration the social factors. Computational cultural dynamics (CCD) is a research area that intertwines computer technology with behavioural and social sciences. We find that this research has potential to be further expanded to study and build a group setting. At the same time, the value of knowledge is seen as an important factor to determine the success of such coalition especially from the social aspect. Therefore, with the motivation to achieve a CCD perspective of a knowledge based coalition formation, social factors are studied, where the knowledge derived from this process will be identified, represented and stored. In this paper, we present a framework for the knowledge based coalition formation focusing on structuring the social factors chosen to initiate the knowledge process of the coalition formation system.

An aApproach to facilitate searching on heterogeneous semantic web sources

The advancement of information technology has brought together diverse sources of information. This makes it difficult for information to be utilized due to its broad range and different formats. At the same time, there are too many different sources to be looked into. Therefore, in this paper, we look into applying an approach to solve the problem of searching from heterogeneous semantic web sources.