Event-Based Interaction Management for Composite E-Services in eFlow

The Web is rapidly becoming the platform through which many companies deliver e-services to businesses and individual customers. E-Services are typically delivered in their primitive forms, called basic services. However, today's business environment creates the opportunity for providing value-added, integrated services, delivered by composing existing e-services, possibly offered by different providers.In order to enable organizations to pursue this business opportunity we have developed eFlow, a model and architecture that support the specification, enactment, and management of composite e-services, modeled as processes that are enacted by a process engine. In this paper we focus on one of the most important and innovative aspects of eFlow: that of the integration between service composition and event management. In particular, we extend classic service composition model by allowing composite services to publish and receive events. This capability enables composite services to dynamically exchange data with other applications (in the form of event parameters), to synchronize service invocations with the occurrence of (external or internal) events, and to handle exceptions occurring during service execution. One of our main objectives has been that of defining a model that is easy to understand and easy to use. Indeed, all types of events are handled in the same fashion from the user perspective, and high-level constructs are provided to handle critical events such as those related to time management. Finally, we show how the proposed approach can be implemented by integrating existing technologies.     

XML-enabled workflow management for e-services across heterogeneous platforms

Advanced e-services require efficient, flexible, and easy-to-use workflow technology that integrates well with mainstream Internet technologies such as XML and Web servers. This paper discusses an XML-enabled architecture for distributed workflow management that is implemented in the latest version of our Mentor-lite prototype system. The key asset of this architecture is an XML mediator that handles the exchange of business and flow control data between workflow and business-object servers on the one hand and client activities on the other via XML messages over http. Our implementation of the mediator has made use of Oracle's XSQL servlet. The major benefit of the advocated architecture is that it provides seamless integration of client applications into e-service workflows with scalable efficiency and very little explicit coding, in contrast to an earlier, Java-based, version of our Mentor-lite prototype that required much more code and exhibited potential performance problems. Received: 30 October 2000 / Accepted: 19 December 2000 Published online: 27 April 2001     

Process-Based E-Service Composition for Modeling and Automating Zero Latency Supply Chains

E-services are teams of applications and humans (participating electronically) that work together to provide a service or a product. Virtual Enterprises (VEs) are business or organizations that provide products or services that are created and managed by combining and wrapping e-services provided by multiple independent enterprises. To operate efficiently VEs must form supply chains that utilize and manage e-services. In this paper, we propose a Service Oriented Process model (SOP) and describe the architecture and the basic design principles of the Collaboration Management Infrastructure (CMI), a system that supports SOP. SOP permits modeling of e-services and provides for e-service integration to construct efficient multi-enterprise supply chains. This is accomplished by modeling composite e-services as Multi-Enterprise Processes (MEPs). In particular, SOP supports service activities for modeling the services themselves, primitives for composing supply chains from services, and primitives for automating service coordination as required by a supply chain. The CMI system implements SOP and uses a semantic broker that has knowledge about the service capabilities an quality. Therefore, a MEP (and hence its supply chain) is capable of on-the-fly choice of the service providers that are best suited to its objectives (e.g., cheapest or fastest).     

Cross-Organizational Transaction Support for E-Services in Virtual Enterprises

In recent years, workflow management systems have become an accepted technology to support automation in process-centric environments. Lately, organizations concentrate more and more on their core business processes while outsourcing supporting processes to other organizations, thereby forming virtual enterprises. The organizations forming the virtual enterprise operate in a B2B e-commerce setting in which provider organizations perform e-services for consumer organizations. To apply workflow management technology in these virtual enterprises, current workflow management systems need to be extended to offer support for cross-organizational processes. Transaction support, already considered an important issue in intra-organizational workflow management systems, must be extended to deal with the cross-organizational aspects as well. This paper presents a high-level, compensation based transaction model and a flexible architecture to support thistransaction model, as required by cross-organizational workflow processes. Characteristic of the model is the flexibility in rollback semantics by combining rollback modes and rollback scopes. This is supported by a dynamically composed architecture that is configured using the agreements that are specified in an electronic contract that has been established between the participating organizations. The transaction model supported by the dynamically composed architecture is implemented in a prototype system, based on commercial workflow management technology.     

Requirements for intelligent network service operations

A service operation architecture and operation system platform are proposed that separate commonly used information from operations functions, and that use access control functions. This enables new applications to be developed more easily and increases operating efficiency. The operation system platform is related to several surrounding platforms, and requires standardized reference points such as CMIS/P and managed objects. A managed object methodology is a suitable approach for accessing the operation system platform, and managed object classes and methods are proposed for intelligent network service operations. This architecture and platform will allow telecommunication to meet the demands created by intelligent networks for enhanced customer services, more reliable operation systems, and lower development costs. On the basis of proposed platform, service surveillance prototype systems for free-phone services have already been developed, and the next versions of the service operations systems for virtual private networks services are being developed.     

The e-HUB evolution: From a Custom Software Architecture to a Software-as-a-Service implementation

New technological advances have enabled the creation of distributed collaborative industrial networks giving origin to new collaborative e-business models such as the Virtual Organisation (VO). These industrial networks require new Information and Communication Technologies Infrastructures (ICT-I) playing the intermediary role as the enablers of interoperation among their participant organisations. Furthermore, these networks require coordination and cooperation mechanism among its members which in turn can be supported through specific vertical applications deployed over a common platform. PyME CREATIVA was a project defined with the aim of playing the role of a service provider of an open technological platform named the e-HUB, providing a set of collaborative electronic solutions named the e-services, to support collaborative business processes among Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). Till today, the e-HUB platform has proved to be a complete IT architecture able to satisfy SMEs technological requirements to get involved in collaborative business opportunities, nevertheless with the technology progress new opportunities appear to improve the way these e-services are delivered to the SMEs. This paper provides an insight into the benefits and implications of evolving the e-HUB architecture into new one based-on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) premises.     

Improving the Public Health Information Network through Semantic Modeling

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) created the Public Health Information Network to advance fully capable, interoperable information systems in public health organizations. PHIN prioritizes public health information systems' functional requirements, capabilities, performance measures, and operational characteristics while letting the architects of those systems choose enabling approaches, methods, and concepts to meet the requirements. PHIN also provides a certification process for public health administrators to evaluate their information infrastructure's quality. The certification process is important because affected organizations often depend on certification for continued funding.     

Protection of Personal Data and Copyrighted Material on the Web: The Cases of Google and Internet Archive

This article analyzes what presently constitutes one of the most problematic aspects of search engines' and Internet archives' practices: the protection of personal data and copyrighted material. These issues are often sidelined in favour of the quickest possible development of ever more fashionable e-services. Yet the lack of consideration for these issues may hinder the development of various e-services as all kinds of legal claims and suits may be brought against service providers, particularly in the European Union, which is fond of drafting complex legislation in the field. This paper shows how typical search engines and Internet archives work and the legal issues to which their practices give rise. The examples used are Google and Internet Archive, and their policies. It is argued that many of the legal checks and balances they offer with respect to the protection of personal data and copyrighted material leave a great deal to be desired. The article concludes by providing a short list of possible remedies that could, at least provisionally, alleviate some of the most urgent problems.     

Transforming e-services evaluation data into business analytics using value models

The rapidly increasing penetration and use of the Internet, in conjunction with the explosion of various technologies based on it, gave rise to the development of numerous e-services, such as e-business, e-banking, e-government and e-learning ones. The websites providing these e-services collect large amounts of users’ activity and evaluation data. It is necessary to transform these data into useful business analytics that allow a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the e-service, the various types of value it generates, and its whole value generation mechanism, and at the same time provide guidance for its improvement and optimization. We propose and validate a methodology for transforming user evaluation data into useful business analytics, founded on the technology acceptance model, the IS success model and e-services. We define a three-layer value model for e-services, including concerning its efficiency, effectiveness and impact on users’ future behavior respectively. This value model is used for collecting and processing service evaluation data from users. We calculated two classes of business analytics: average users’ ratings to identify strengths and weaknesses of e-services; and the impacts of first- layer value measures on the second and third layer value ones. The latter allows a better understanding of the value generation mechanism for e-services and identification of improvement priorities. Our methodology has been applied and validated for an e-learning service provided by a university to technology professionals.     

基于事件通知的实时监测系统集成研究

在开发实时监测系统时,常涉及到硬件系统和软件系统,传统方案在实时性及系统可维护性方面较差,提供一种能够按要求主动通知数据变化的解决方案成为当务之急,事件通知便提供了解决此类问题的方法。针对实时监测中原有解决方案的缺点,提出了基于事件通知的实时监测体系结构,该结构能够很好地保证数据的实时性,将数据变化端和数据监测端解耦,提高系统可维护性。同时对该结构中的几个关键问题分别提出了解决办法。     

Aligning goals and services through goal and business modelling

E-services are used as the cornerstones for modelling interaction points of cooperating IT systems, within and between enterprises. So far, research and development of e-services have mainly focused on an operational perspective, such as the development of standards for message exchanges and service coordination. However, on a strategic level, the success of e-services depends on their ability to work as a medium for the exchange of business values. In this paper, we present an approach that utilizes goal and business models as the foundation for designing e-services. The approach can be used to ensure that the developed e-services support the desired goals and business values of involved actors. A case study from the Swedish health care sector is used to ground and apply the presented approach.     

Model-based automation of the design of user interfaces to digitalcontrol systems

Digital control systems, like those controlling the functions of buildings or industrial processes, pose a number of special problems for good user interface design. The general problems of providing usability, common to all systems, include difficulty in accessing and applying principles of good design. In addition, digital control systems can have multiple users, with multiple roles, and each installation has different configurations of systems, controls, and user interface devices. Providing interactions for the users of building control systems is often achieved by manually implementing each required display. This is an expensive solution, which often produces less than optimal results. We address these problems through the automation of user interface design. Our solution, called DIGBE (dynamic interface generation for building environments), separates the domain knowledge, interaction design, and presentation heuristics into multiple collaborating models. Each model contains knowledge about a particular aspect of interface design, and uses this knowledge to dynamically create each user interface that is needed to support the users of a control system. DIGBE demonstrates that it is possible to automatically and dynamically create consistent and individualized user interfaces from model-based design knowledge     

Government website service quality: a study of the Irish revenue online service

Online taxation systems have been among the most successful of e-government applications both in terms of citizen take-up and savings to the taxpayer. Understanding the factors that lead to high take-up is of potential interest to other public sector online service providers. This paper examines the quality of the online service provided by the Irish Revenue Commissioners’ tax filing and collection system, Revenue Online Service (ROS). A modified version of the recently operationalized E-S-QUAL instrument is used to examine online service quality from the point of view of the citizens and tax practitioners who use this eGovernment system. The findings show that efficiency and ease of completion are the dimensions of website service quality that most influence ROS users’ perceptions of value and convenience as well as their intentions to use and recommend the website to their peers. The practical implications of these findings include the fact that providers of public sector e-services should concentrate on communicating the functionality of their e-services. In addition, they should focus on reducing citizen concerns regarding misuse or mismanagement of personal data.     

Executing secured virtual machines within a manycore architecture

Manycore processors are a way to face the always growing demand in digital data processing. However, by putting closer distinct and possibly private data, they open up new security breaches. Splitting the architecture into several partitions managed by a hypervisor is a way to enforce isolation between the running virtual machines. Thanks to their high number of cores, these architectures can mitigate the impact of dedicating cores both to the virtual machines and the hypervisor, while allowing an efficient execution of the virtualized operating systems. We present such an architecture allowing the execution of fully virtualized multicore operating systems benefiting of hardware cache coherence. The physical isolation is made by the means of address space via the introduction of a light hardware module similar to a memory-management unit at the network-on-chip entrance, but without the drawback of relying on a page table. We designed a cycle-accurate virtual prototype of the architecture, controlled by a light blind hypervisor with minimum rights, only able to start and stop virtual machines. Experiments made on our virtual prototype shows that our solution has a low time overhead – typically 3% on average.     

THE GAIA2JADE PROCESS FOR MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT

In this paper we present the Gaia2JADE process concerning how one can implement a multi-agent system with the JADE framework using the Gaia methodology for analysis and design purposes. This process is particularly dedicated to the conversion of Gaia models to JADE code. It is described using the Software Process Engineering Metamodel (SPEM) and extends the one proposed by FIPA for describing the Gaia modeling process. Thus, it proposes to potential MAS developers a process that covers the full software development lifecycle. This work is based on the experience we have acquired by applying this process for implementing a real-word multi-agent system conceived for providing e-services to mobile users. With this paper, we share this experience with future multi-agent systems (MAS) developers, who would like to follow this process, taking into account several technical issues that emerged during the implementation phase, helping them to easily model and implement their systems.     

Dynamic and adaptive composition of e-services

The Web is rapidly becoming the platform through which many companies deliver services to businesses and individual customers. The number and type of on-line services increase day by day, and this trend is likely to continue at an even faster pace in the immediate future. Examples of e-services currently available include bill payment, delivery of customized news, or archiving and sharing of digital documents. E-Services are typically delivered individually. However, the e-service market creates the opportunity for providing value-added, integrated services, which are delivered by composing existing e-services. To support organizations in pursuing this business opportunity we have developed eFlow, a system that supports the specification, enactment, and management of composite e-services, modeled as processes that are enacted by a service process engine. Composite e-services have to cope with a highly dynamic business environment in terms of services and of service providers. In addition, the increased competition forces companies to provide customized services to better satisfy the needs of every individual customer. Ideally, service process should be able to transparently adapt to changes in the environment and to the need of different customers with minimal or no user intervention. In addition, it should be possible to dynamically modify service process definitions in a simple and effective way to manage cases where user intervention is indeed required. In this paper we show how eFlow achieves these goals.     

Designing wrapper components for e-services in integrating heterogeneous systems

Component-based approaches are becoming more and more popular to support Internet-based application development. Different component modeling approaches, however, can be adopted, obtaining different abstraction levels (either conceptual or operational). In this paper we present a component-based architecture for the design of e-applications, and discuss the concept of wrapper components as building blocks for the development of e-services, where these services are based on legacy systems. We discuss their characteristics and their applicability in Internet-based application development. Received: 30 October 2000 / Accepted: 9 January 2001 Published online: 28 June 2001     

空间网络数据库中最近邻查询的设计与实现

随着无线通讯技术、位置定位技术以及数据库技术的发展,使得能为移动用户提供相关的位置服务.K近邻查询是位置服务的一个重要功能.本文主要研究了空间网络数据库中的K近邻查询.以提出的集成道路网络距离与欧式距离的道路网络框架为基础,提出了一种新的KNN查询算法,通过网络扩展方法计算最近邻(NN),避免了不必要的磁盘I0s,减少了昂贵的最短路径计算,从而有效地提高了算法效率.实验结果说明,在目标点分布比较密集的情况下,算法显著优于其它的算法.