A dual-layered model for web services representation and composition

Nowadays more and more companies and organizations implement their business services in the Internet due to the tremendous progress made recently in the field of Web services. It becomes possible to publish, locate and invoke applications across the Web. Thus, the ability to select efficiently and integrate at runtime services located in different sites on the Web is an important issue. In some situations, if no single Web service can satisfy the request of the user, there should be a possibility to combine existing services together in order to meet the user’s request. This paper provides a dual-layered model for web services, where the first model layer captures the high-level functional specifications (namely goals, achievement contexts, and external behaviours), and the second model layer captures the low-level functional specifications (namely interfaces). This model allows the service composition process to be performed on both high-level and low-level specifications. We also introduce the composition operators (both high-level and low-level) to allow composition of virtual services.     

The LEMO annotation framework: weaving multimedia annotations with the web

Cultural institutions and museums have realized that annotations contribute valuable metadata for search and retrieval, which in turn can increase the visibility of the digital items they expose via their digital library systems. By exploiting annotations created by others, visitors can discover content they would not have found otherwise, which implies that annotations must be accessible and processable for humans and machines. Currently, however, there exists no widely adopted annotation standard that goes beyond specific media types. Most institutions build their own in-house annotation solution and employ proprietary annotation models, which are not interoperable with those of other systems. As a result, annotation data are usually stored in closed data silos and visible and processable only within the scope of a certain annotation system. As the main contribution of this paper, we present the LEMO Annotation Framework. It (1) provides a uniform annotation model for multimedia contents and various types of annotations, (2) can address fragments of various content-types in a uniform, interoperable manner and (3) pulls annotations out of closed data silos and makes them available as interoperable, dereferencable Web resources. With the LEMO Annotation Framework annotations become part of the Web and can be processed, linked, and referenced by other services. This in turn leads to even higher visibility and increases the potential value of annotations.     

A high performance backoff protocol for fast execution of composite web services

Using web services to expose applications over the Internet is now a widely accepted practice. Currently, there are several ongoing efforts that provide ways to effectively compose web services distributed across different organizations. One of the problems underlying the deployment of such composite services on the web, however, is service co-allocation that arises when a composite service needs to ensure all the required component services to be available for execution at the same time. Motivated by this, this paper presents a new decentralized protocol, named web service co-allocation protocol (WSCP), which can facilitate fast execution of composite web services. The proposed framework is an enhancement of the famous two phase commit protocol through the incorporation of tentative hold phase as well as the employment of a new high performance backoff protocol developed to better address the dynamics of the service co-allocation problem. The simulation results show that the proposed approach yields significant improvements over existing protocols.     

Recommending multimedia web services in a multi-device environment

In the last years, the Web community has shown a broad interest in Web services that handle multimedia contents. To improve the usability of these services different tools have been proposed in the literature, and in this context agent-based recommender systems appear to be a promising solution. However, the recommender systems presented in the past do not take into account, in their recommendation algorithms, the effect of the device exploited by the user, while it is clear that the same user shows a different behavior in the presence of different devices. This paper tries to give a contribution in this setting, in order to match more accurately user preferences and interests. In particular, a new agent-based system is proposed, whose architecture allows to compute recommendations of multimedia Web services, considering the effect of the currently exploited device. Some experimental results confirm the high quality of the recommendations generated by the proposed approach.     

一种支持QoS的语义Web服务发现框架研究

随着Web服务的广泛使用,Web服务的发现机制显得尤为重要.现有的Web服务发现方法,因缺乏对服务质量(QoS)的描述而难以为用户选择最佳服务.主要提出一种考虑QoS的语义Web服务发现框架,采用分类和反馈机制,及相应的匹配级别和过滤机制,以便用户查找到与自己需求最接近的服务,提高服务的查找率.     

A robotic service framework supporting automated integration of ubiquitous sensors and devices

In recent years, due to the emergence of ubiquitous computing technology, a new class of networked robots called ubiquitous robots has been introduced. The Ubiquitous Robotic Companion (URC) is our conceptual vision of ubiquitous service robots that provides its user with the services the user needs, anytime and anywhere, in the ubiquitous computing environments. There are requirements to be met for the vision of URC. One of the essential requirements is that the robotic systems must support ubiquity of services. This means that a robot service must always be available even though there are changes in the service environment. More specifically, a robotic system needs to be interoperable with sensors and devices in its current service environments automatically, rather than statically pre-programmed for its environment. In this paper, the design and implementation of an infrastructure for URC called Ubiquitous Robotic Service Framework (URSF) is presented. URSF enables automated integration of networked robots in a ubiquitous computing environment by the use of Semantic Web Services Technologies.     

探索开放式多媒体教室创新管理模式

多媒体教室是现代高校教育中的一项重要的教学设施,是保证高校教育的现代化和信息化发展的重要因素．多媒体教室的应用直接关系到教学质量的好坏和学生的学习成果。因此高校应该注重对多媒体教室的管理运行方式,确保多媒体教室能够充分的得到利用,发挥其最大的效用,本文重点探讨了传统多媒体教室管理模式的优缺点,并提出了开放式多媒体教室创新管理的相应策略。     

Meta web service: building web-based open decision support system based on web services

Web services are currently one of the trends in network-based business services, which intuitively will be applied to build a semantic web-based decision support system (DSS). Since web services are self-contained, modular business process applications, based on open standards, enable integration models for facilitating program-to-program interactions. Decision modules in a semantic web-based DSS can be viewed as a web service. However, according to the current features, web services know only about themselves, they are neither autonomous, nor are they designed to use ontologies; they are passive until invoked, and they do not provide for composing functionalities. These lead to the motivation on building a sophisticated web service to contain these features and to utilize web services on behalf of the user. This paper aims to propose a new concept of Meta Web Service, a web service-based DSS. The meta web service understands the user's problem statement with ontology, performs web service discovery, web service composition, and automatically generates codes for composite web service execution. Case-based reasoning is applied to quickly find past histories of successful service compositions. A prototype of research web service has been developed to show the feasibility of the proposed idea.     

Non-redundant web services composition based on a two-phase algorithm

Recently, there has been growing interest in developing web services composition search systems. Current solutions have the drawback of including redundant web services in the results. In this paper, we proposed a non-redundant web services composition search system called NRC, which is based on a two-phase algorithm. In the NRC system, the Link Index is built over web services according to their connectivity. In the forward phase, the candidate compositions are efficiently found by searching the Link Index. In the backward phase, the candidate compositions decomposed into several non-redundant web services compositions by using the concept of tokens. Results of experiments involving data sets with different characteristics show the performance benefits of the NRC techniques in comparison to state-of-the-art composition approaches.     

A requirements monitoring framework for enterprise systems

Requirements compliant software is becoming a necessity. Fewer and fewer organizations will run their critical transactions on software that has no visible relationship to its requirements. Businesses wish to see their software being consistent with their policies. Moreover, partnership agreements are pressuring less mature organizations to improve their systems. Businesses that rely on web services, for example, are vulnerable to the problems of their web service providers. While electronic commerce has increased the speed of on-line transactions, the technology for monitoring requirements compliance—especially for transactions—has lagged behind. To address the requirements monitoring problem for enterprise information systems, we integrate techniques for requirements analysis and software execution monitoring. Our framework assists analysts in the development of requirements monitors for enterprise services. The deployed system raises alerts when services succeed or fail to satisfy their specified requirements, thereby making software requirements visible. The framework usage is demonstrated with an analysis of ebXML marketplace specifications. An analyst applies goal analysis to discover potential service obstacles, and then derives requirements monitors and a distributed monitoring system. Once deployed, the monitoring system provides alerts when obstacles occur. A summary of the framework implementation is presented, along with analysis of two monitor component implementations. We conclude that the approach implemented in the framework, called ReqMon, provides real-time feedback on requirements satisfaction, and thereby provides visibility into requirements compliance of enterprise information systems.

An ECA-based framework for decentralized coordination of ubiquitous web services

Emerging ubiquitous computing network is expected to consist of a variety of heterogeneous and distributed devices. While web services technology is increasingly being considered as a promising solution to support the inter-operability between such heterogeneous devices via well-defined protocol, currently there is no effective framework reported in the literature that can address the problem of coordinating the web services-enabled devices. This paper considers a ubiquitous computing environment that is comprised of active, autonomous devices interacting with each other through web services, and presents an ECA (Event-Condition-Action)-based framework for effective coordination of those devices. Specifically, we first present an XML-based language for describing ECA rules that are embedded in web service-enabled devices. An ECA rule, when triggered by an internal or external event to the device, can result in the invocation of appropriate web services in the system. Subsequently, we consider the situation in which the rules are introduced and managed by multiple, independent users, and propose effective mechanisms that can detect and resolve potential inconsistencies among the rules. The presented ECA-based coordination approach is expected to facilitate seamless inter-operation among the web service-enabled devices in the emerging ubiquitous computing environments.     

QCWS: an implementation of QoS-capable multimedia web services

QoS (Quality of Service), which defines service quality such as latency, availability, timeliness and reliability, is important for web applications that provide real-time information, multimedia content, or time-critical services. Many web applications are best implemented by servers with a guaranteed server processing capacity. In this research, we study the QoS control issues using the current Web services standards. We propose a QoS-capable Web service architecture, QCWS, by deploying a QoS broker between Web service clients and providers. The functions of the QoS broker module include tracking QoS information about servers, making selection decisions for clients, and negotiating with servers to get QoS agreements. We have implemented a QCWS prototype using IBM WSDK, enhanced with simple QoS capabilities. We have measured the performance running under different service priorities.     

Automated processing for map generalization using web services

In map generalization various operators are applied to the features of a map in order to maintain and improve the legibility of the map after the scale has been changed. These operators must be applied in the proper sequence and the quality of the results must be continuously evaluated. Cartographic constraints can be used to define the conditions that have to be met in order to make a map legible and compliant to the user needs. The combinatorial optimization approaches shown in this paper use cartographic constraints to control and restrict the selection and application of a variety of different independent generalization operators into an optimal sequence. Different optimization techniques including hill climbing, simulated annealing and genetic deep search are presented and evaluated experimentally by the example of the generalization of buildings in blocks. All algorithms used in this paper have been implemented in a web services framework. This allows the use of distributed and parallel processing in order to speed up the search for optimized generalization operator sequences.

CSCW支持技术:Web Service与CORBA的比较研究

Web Service和CORBA是支持CSCW的两种主流的分布式技术。结合CSCW支持的CAD系统实例讨论了CORBA和web Service的体系结构和应用模型。对两项技术的对比表明,CORBA更适宜于追求实时性和可控性但网络环境单纯的应用,而Web Service则更适宜于网络环境复杂但实时性和可控性要求不高的应用。     

一种策略驱动的Web服务质量保障框架

随着面向服务计算技术的发展和应用,提供非功能属性保障能力成为服务在企业应用中获得成功的关键因素.同传统的分布式计算技术不同的是,服务是动态发现和绑定的,这要求服务双方必须动态协商并保障各种非功能属性.使用WS-Policy语言来显式描述Web服务的非功能性的能力和需求,并提出了一种策略驱动的服务保障框架来完成非功能属性的动态保障,最后在SOAP引擎SOAPExpress中实现了这一框架,结果表明它可以有效满足企业应用对Web服务质量的需求.     

An architecture for adaptive multimedia content delivery

In this paper, we propose an architecture for multimedia content delivery considering Quality of Service (QoS), based on both the policy-based network and the best-effort network. The architecture consists of four fundamental elements: multimedia content model, application level QoS policy, QoS adaptation mechanism, and delivery mechanism. Applications based on current architecture loses their meaning by drastically degrading quality when network congestion occurs. Despite of this all-or-nothing architecture, applications based on our adaptive architecture can reduce its quality and then negotiate with the network entity, keeping its quality measure as much as possible even when network congestion occurs. We may consider a quality measure for Web pages, total page transmission time, and transmission order of inline objects as a segregation. We then define a language to specify application level QoS policies for Web pages and implement a delivery mechanism and a QoS adaptation mechanism to fulfill these policies. Kaname Harumoto, Ph.D.: He received the M.E. and Ph.D. (Eng.) degrees from Osaka University, Osaka, Japan, in 1994 and 1998, respectively. From 1994 through 1999, he was with the Department of Information Systems Engineering, Grauuate School of Engineering, Osaka University. Since November 1999, he has been an Assistant Professor in Computation Center (currently, the name has changed to Cybermedia Center), Osaka University. His research interests include database systems, especially in advanced network environments. He is a member of IEEE. Tadashi Nakano: He received the B.E. degree from Osaka University in 1999. Currently, he is a Ph.D. candidate in Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka University. His current reeearch interests include multimedia content delivery architecture. Shinji SHIMOJO, Ph.D.: He received the M.E. and a Dr.E. degrees from Osaka University in 1983 and 1986, respectively. From 1986 through 1989, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information and Computer Sciences, Faculty of Engineering Science, Osaka University. From 1989 through 1998, he was an Associate Professor and since 1998, he has been a Professor in Computation Center (currently, the name has changed to Cybermedia Center), Osaka University. He was engaged in the project of object-oriented multimedia presentation system called Harmony. His current interests cover wide diversity of multimedia applications such as News On Demand System, multimedia database and networked virtual reality. He is a member of ACM and IEEE.     

Service selection algorithms for Web services with end-to-end QoS constraints

Web services are new forms of Internet software that can be universally deployed and invoked using standard protocols. Services from different providers can be integrated into a composite service regardless of their locations, platforms, and/or execution speeds to implement complex business processes and transactions. In this paper, we study the end-to-end QoS issues of composite services by utilizing a QoS broker that is responsible for selecting and coordinating the individual service component. We design the service selection algorithms used by QoS brokers to construct the optimal composite service. The objective of the algorithms is to maximize the user-defined utility function value while meeting the end-to-end delay constraint. We propose two solution approaches to the service selection problem: the combinatorial approach, by modeling the problem as the Multiple Choice Knapsack Problem (MCKP), and the graph approach, by modeling the problem as the constrained shortest path problem in the graph theory. We study efficient solutions for each approach.This research was supported in part by NSF CCR-9901697.