Integrating biological research through Web services

Web services might be a way to solve the integration problem because Web services technology provides a higher layer of abstraction that hides implementation details from applications. Using this technology, applications invoke other applications' functions through well-defined, easy-to-use interfaces. To test the potential of a Web services solution, we implemented a microarray data-mining system that uses Web services in drug discovery - a research process that attempts to identify new avenues for developing therapeutic drugs. Although our implementation focuses on a problem within the life sciences, we strongly believe that Web services could be a boon to any research field that requires analyzing volumes of data and conducting complex data mining.     

Adaptive Service Composition in Flexible Processes

In advanced service oriented systems, complex applications, described as abstract business processes, can be executed by invoking a number of available Web services. End users can specify different preferences and constraints and service selection can be performed dynamically identifying the best set of services available at runtime. In this paper, we introduce a new modeling approach to the Web service selection problem that is particularly effective for large processes and when QoS constraints are severe. In the model, the Web service selection problem is formalized as a mixed integer linear programming problem, loops peeling is adopted in the optimization, and constraints posed by stateful Web services are considered. Moreover, negotiation techniques are exploited to identify a feasible solution of the problem, if one does not exist. Experimental results compare our method with other solutions proposed in the literature and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach toward the identification of an optimal solution to the QoS constrained Web service selection problem     

A structural-semantic web service selection approach to improve retrievability of web services

Service-Oriented Computing promotes building applications by consuming and reusing Web Services. However, the selection of adequate Web Services given a client application is still a major challenge. The effort of assessing and adapting candidate services could be overwhelming due to the “impedance” of Web Service interfaces expected by clients versus the actual interfaces of retrieved Web Services. In this work, we present a novel structural-semantic approach to help developers in the retrieval and selection of services from a service registry. The approach is based on a comprehensive structural scheme for service Interface Compatibility analysis, and WordNet as the semantic support to assess identifiers of operations and parameters. We also empirically analyze, compare and contrast the performance of three service selection methods: a pure structural approach, a pure semantic approach, and the structural-semantic (hybrid) approach proposed in this work. The experimental analysis was performed with two data-sets of real-world Web Services and a service discovery support already published in the literature. Results show that our hybrid service selection approach improved effectiveness in terms of retrievability of Web Services compared to the other approaches.     

Healing Web applications through automatic workarounds

We develop the notion of automatic workaround in the context of Web applications. A workaround is a sequence of operations, applied to a failing component, that is equivalent to the failing sequence in terms of its intended effect, but that does not result in a failure. We argue that workarounds exist in modular systems because components often offer redundant interfaces and implementations, which in turn admit several equivalent sequences of operations. In this paper, we focus on Web applications because these are good and relevant examples of component-based (or service-oriented) applications. Web applications also have attractive technical properties that make them particularly amenable to the deployment of automatic workarounds. We propose an architecture where a self-healing proxy applies automatic workarounds to a Web application server. We also propose a method to generate equivalent sequences and to represent and select them at run-time as automatic workarounds. We validate the proposed architecture in four case studies in which we deploy automatic workarounds to handle four known failures in to the popular Flickr and Google Maps Web applications. This work has been supported by the project PerSeoS funded by the Swiss National Fund.     

Service-Oriented Computing: Bringing Business Systems to the Web

The notion of "service" has spurred major evolutions for both information systems and the Web. A software application is no longer considered a monolithic component; it can be divided into services that are smaller components defined by their function and accessible through well-defined interfaces and protocols. As a result, IT actors are using service-oriented architectures (SOAs) to remodel the information systems of many companies while the Web is increasingly becoming a programmable place. In both domains, developers build composite client applications to consume these services. Even boundaries between enterprise services and Internet services are vanishing. Some companies, such as Strikelron provide enterprise services that were previously always hosted internally - like customer relationship management solutions. As a consequence, companies now have the technologies required to bring their business online. With Web services, private business processes can be exposed to partners through public composite Web applications. When new projects emerge, companies need guidance to properly handle such work. In this context, we aim to provide companies solutions - through a methodology, an architecture, and technical choices - that will help them solve generic problems such as security and application conception     

Design of service interfaces for e-business applications using data normalization techniques

Web Services are being increasingly used for implementing large-scale e-business applications, but at present there is a lack of comprehensive methodologies based on sound engineering principles that can guide designers of service-oriented applications. This lack of methodological support is likely to lead to poorly designed and difficult to maintain e-business applications. In this paper we describe a design method for service-oriented applications that applies data engineering principles and the theoretical framework of data normalization to service design to produce a set of orthogonal services with normalized interfaces. We consider the impact of increasing service granularity on cohesion and coupling of service operations, and discuss associated design trade-offs. We use a travel example based on the Open Travel Alliance specification to illustrate how a document-oriented standard can be transformed into a set of well-designed service interfaces.     

A Comparative Study of Map Exploration Interfaces for Multi-Touch Tabletops

With the advent of multi-touch tabletops, software developers are creating innovative interfaces for applications such as interactive map systems. In this article, we summarized three representative interfaces from prevalent electronic map applications and literatures—gesture based, widget based, and hybrid, which supported both gestures and widgets—and then compared the effectiveness and the efficiency of these three interfaces by experiments. The results show that the hybrid interface had a better performance, requiring less task-completion time and operations, and causing less arm fatigue. The widget-based interface had the least distance traversed by fingers, but it required many tapping operations. The gesture-based interface was easier to learn compared to the widget-based interface, but the distance traversed during finger movements was the longest. Based on the findings from our experiments, we discuss the implications for the design of map exploration interfaces on multi-touch tabletops.     

Integrating Library Services

ABSTRACT

The migration of information resources and library use from predominantly print/on-site use to electronic/online use has created a fragmented set of systems for libraries and users. In addition, the growing complications associated with doing research in libraries as compared to the ease of use of Web-based search engines is causing libraries to review system design and review their approach to the provision of information and services. Popular trends including information portals, federated/meta-search systems, and link resolvers are being used in attempts to re-integrate library systems and provide better search interfaces. Despite their advantages, each of these applications falls short of creating the seamless experience that patrons are becoming used to finding on the Web. As a possible solution to this, a specific suggestion of an information service based Web service application is discussed to help connect users to libraries at a point of information need. doi:10.1300/J136v12n03_10     

Building a Usable and Accessible Semantic Web Interaction Platform

Semantic Web applications take off is being slower than expected, at least with respect to “real-world” applications and users. One of the main reasons for this lack of adoption is that most Semantic Web user interfaces are still immature from the usability and accessibility points of view. This is due to the novelty of these technologies, but this also motivates the exploration of alternative interaction paradigms, different from the “traditional” Web or Desktop applications ones. Our proposal is realized in the Rhizomer platform, which explores the possibilities of the object–action interaction paradigm at the Web scale. This paradigm is well suited for heterogeneous resource spaces such as those common in the Semantic Web. Resources, described by metadata, correspond to the objects in the paradigm. Semantic web services, which are dynamically associated to these objects, correspond to the actions. The platform is being put into practice in the context of a research project in order to build an open application for media distribution based on Semantic Web technologies. Moreover, its usability and accessibility have been evaluated in this real setting and compared to similar systems.     

Integrating and customizing heterogeneous e-commerce applications

A broad spectrum of electronic commerce applications is currently available on the Web, providing services in almost any area one can think of. As the number and variety of such applications grow, more business opportunities emerge for providing new services based on the integration and customization of existing applications. (Web shopping malls and support for comparative shopping are just a couple of examples.) Unfortunately, the diversity of applications in each specific domain and the disparity of interfaces, application flows, actor roles in the business transaction, and data formats, renders the integration and manipulation of applications a rather difficult task. In this paper we present the Application Manifold system, aimed at simplifying the intricate task of integration and customization of e-commerce applications. The scope of the work in this paper is limited to web-enabled e-commerce applications. We do not support the integration/customization of proprietary/legacy applications. The wrapping of such applications as web services is complementary to our work. Based on the emerging Web data standard, XML, and application modeling standard, UML, the system offers a novel declarative specification language for describing the integration/customization task, supporting a modular approach where new applications can be added and integrated at will with minimal effort. Then, acting as an application generator, the system generates a full integrated/customized e-commerce application, with the declarativity of the specification allowing for the optimization and verification of the generated application. The integration here deals with the full profile of the given e-commerce applications: the various services offered by the applications, the activities and roles of the different actors participating in the application (e.g., customers, vendors), the application flow, as well as with the data involved in the process. This is in contrast to previous works on Web data integration that focused primarily on querying the data available in the applications, mostly ignoring the additional aspects mentioned above. Received: 30 October 2000 / Accepted 14 March 2001 Published online: 2 August 2001     

Algebraic optimization of recursive queries

Over the past few years, much attention has been paid to deductive databases. They offer a logic-based interface, and allow formulation of complex recursive queries. However, they do not offer appropriate update facilities, and do not support existing applications. To overcome these problems an SQL-like interface is required besides a logic-based interface.

In the PRISMA project we have developed a tightly-coupled distributed database, on a multiprocessor machine, with two user interfaces: SQL and PRISMAlog. Query optimization is localized in one component: the relational query optimizer. Therefore, we have defined an eXtended Relational Algebra that allows recursive query formulation and can also be used for expressing executable schedules, and we have developed algebraic optimization strategies for recursive queries. In this paper we describe an optimization strategy that rewrites regular (in the context of formal grammars) mutually recursive queries into standard Relational Algebra and transitive closure operations. We also describe how to push selections into the resulting transitive closure operations.

The reason we focus on algebraic optimization is that, in our opinion, the new generation of advanced database systems will be built starting from existing state-of-the-art relational technology, instead of building a completely new class of systems.     

Applying model-driven engineering to the development of Rich Internet Applications for Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence (BI) applications have been gradually ported to the Web in search of a global platform for the consumption and publication of data and services. On the Internet, apart from techniques for data/knowledge management, BI Web applications need interfaces with a high level of interoperability (similar to the traditional desktop interfaces) for the visualisation of data/knowledge. In some cases, this has been provided by Rich Internet Applications (RIA). The development of these BI RIAs is a process traditionally performed manually and, given the complexity of the final application, it is a process which might be prone to errors. The application of model-driven engineering techniques can reduce the cost of development and maintenance (in terms of time and resources) of these applications, as they demonstrated by other types of Web applications. In the light of these issues, the paper introduces the S^m4RIA-B methodology, i.e., a model-driven methodology for the development of RIA as BI Web applications. In order to overcome the limitations of RIA regarding knowledge management from the Web, this paper also presents a new RIA platform for BI, called RI@BI, which extends the functionalities of traditional RIAs by means of Semantic Web technologies and B2B techniques. Finally, we evaluate the whole approach on a case study—the development of a social network site for an enterprise project manager.     

DOLCE ergo SUMO: On foundational and domain models in the SmartWeb Integrated Ontology (SWIntO)

Increased availability of mobile computing, such as personal digital assistants (PDAs), creates the potential for constant and intelligent access to up-to-date, integrated and detailed information from the Web, regardless of one's actual geographical position. Intelligent question-answering requires the representation of knowledge from various domains, such as the navigational and discourse context of the user, potential user questions, the information provided by Web services and so on, for example in the form of ontologies. Within the context of the SmartWeb project, we have developed a number of domain-specific ontologies that are relevant for mobile and intelligent user interfaces to open-domain question-answering and information services on the Web. To integrate the various domain-specific ontologies, we have developed a foundational ontology, the SmartSUMO ontology, on the basis of the DOLCE and SUMO ontologies. This allows us to combine all the developed ontologies into a single SmartWeb Integrated Ontology (SWIntO) having a common modeling basis with conceptual clarity and the provision of ontology design patterns for modeling consistency. In this paper, we present SWIntO, describe the design choices we made in its construction, illustrate the use of the ontology through a number of applications, and discuss some of the lessons learned from our experiences.     

iMashup: a mashup-based framework for service composition

The Web has undergone a tremendous change from a primarily publication platform towards a participatory and"programmable"platform,where a large number of heterogeneous Web-delivered services(including SOAP and RESTful Web services,RSS and Atom feeds)are emerging.It results in the creation of Web mashup applications with rich user experiences.However,the integration of Web-delivered services is still a challenging issue.It not only requires the developers’tedious eforts in understanding and coordinating heterogeneous service types,but also results in the time-consuming development of user interfaces.In this paper,we propose the iMashup composition framework to facilitate mashup development and deployment.We provide a unified mashup component model for the common representation of heterogeneous Web-delivered service interfaces.The component model specifies necessary properties and behaviors at both business and user interface level.We associate the component model with semantically meaningful tags,so that mashup developers can fast understand the service capabilities.The mashup developers can search and put the proper mashup components into the Web browser based composition environment,and connect them by data flows based on the tag-based semantics.Such an integration manner might prevent some low-level programming eforts and improve the composition efciency.A series of experimental study are conducted to evaluate our framework.     

Web services: problems and future directions

Recently, Web services have generated great interests in both vendors and researchers. Web services, based on existing Internet protocols and open standards, can provide a flexible solution to the problem of application integration. With the help of WSDL, SOAP, and UDDI, Web services are becoming popular in Web applications. However, the current Web services architectures are confronted with a few stubborn problems, for instance, security. In this paper, we shall give an overview of these problems. We believe that solving these problems will become crucial to success of Web services. In the end, we predict distinct advances in semantic Grid services.     

基于服务网格的制造资源集成

提出了一种基于服务网格的制造资源集成方法，通过将服务网格技术引入制造行业，实现了制造资源的虚拟化，为制造资源提供了统一的接口和互操作协议、屏蔽平台及所使用技术的异构性。平台采用基于服务的协同工作流技术，在动态变化的环境中，能够根据用户需求优化业务逻辑及其执行过程，选择、配置和调度相应的制造资源完成指定的任务，实现跨组织的资源共享和任务协同。     

Putting labs online with Web services

This paper describes an online experiment system that is based on Web services designed to support interoperable, machine-to-machine interaction over a network, and can also integrate heterogeneous resources. A service-oriented architecture was devised for online experiment systems, enabled by Web service protocols, and a methodology for wrapping the operations of the instruments into Web services. Although these methods aren't suitable for time-critical missions or applications that need real-time control, they do work for controlling standard commercial instruments over low-speed or unreliable communication networks. Using this framework, an online experiment system for students can be created that incorporates a great variety of instruments and that users can access without installing special software.     

Distributed text search using suffix arrays

Text search is a classical problem in Computer Science, with many data-intensive applications. For this problem, suffix arrays are among the most widely known and used data structures, enabling fast searches for phrases, terms, substrings and regular expressions in large texts. Potential application domains for these operations include large-scale search services, such as Web search engines, where it is necessary to efficiently process intensive-traffic streams of on-line queries. This paper proposes strategies to enable such services by means of suffix arrays. We introduce techniques for deploying suffix arrays on clusters of distributed-memory processors and then study the processing of multiple queries on the distributed data structure. Even though the cost of individual search operations in sequential (non-distributed) suffix arrays is low in practice, the problem of processing multiple queries on distributed-memory systems, so that hardware resources are used efficiently, is relevant to services aimed at achieving high query throughput at low operational costs. Our theoretical and experimental performance studies show that our proposals are suitable solutions for building efficient and scalable on-line search services based on suffix arrays.     

A novel mobile device user interface with integrated social networking services

Modern mobile devices support accessing Web-based social networking services from the user interface (UI) of Web browsers, applications, and mobile widgets. While effectively accessing these services, people may find it tedious to switch between multiple user interfaces in order to be aware of the latest content. Aiming for an improved user experience, we experimented with integration of these services into mobile devices' main user interface. The integrated content is presented beyond application silos and automatically filtered to highlight the relevant elements. A mobile system called LinkedUI was developed and deployed in one lab test and one field study. Three findings emerge from these studies. Firstly, it is feasible to construct an alternative device UI that supports integration of Web content across applications and services via hyperlinking. Time, publisher (e.g., contacts), content types, and geographical locations are key dimensions for association of content. Secondly, the alternative device UI enables better usability of accessing social networking services than accessing them from individual Web sites on mobile devices. It helps people to be aware of the latest content during microbreaks. Thirdly, automatic filtering, on the basis of one user's data, is one promising approach to identifying relevant content. Given filtered content, most people using the automatic filtering approved the functionality and experienced a better sense of control that is arguably due to the reduced information volume.