Distributed applications and interoperable systems (Extended papers from DAIS’10)

Abstract

This special issue contains selected papers from the 10th IFIP International Conference on Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems (DAIS ’10), held in Amsterdam in the Netherlands on June 7–9 in 2010. For the 10th anniversary, the conference was organized for the first time in cooperation with ACM SIGSOFT and ACM SIGAPP. Furthermore, the program co-chairs Frank Eliassen and Rüdiger Kapitza initiated this special issue. The presented works address various aspects of distributed applications, including their design, implementation and operation, the supporting middleware, appropriate software engineering methodologies and tools. The selection of papers was compiled by inviting 8 out of the 17 full conference papers that were originally presented at the conference. In a three-stage review process 5 out of the 8 papers were finally accepted for this special issue. Walraven et al. 1 propose a coordination architecture for flexible and policy-driven composition of cross-organizational features in distributed service systems. The underlying approach of this architecture is to specify the features and their composition at a higher level that abstracts the internal implementation mechanisms of the organizations involved. Felber et al. 2 present a collaborative search companion system, CoFeed, that collects user search queries and that considers feedback to build user-centric and document-centric profiling information. Over time, the system constructs ranked collections of elements that maintain the required information diversity and enhance the user search experience by presenting additional results tailored to the user's interest space. Zaplata et al. 3 propose a concept for the development of future context-aware applications based on the novel approach of structured context prediction. As a framework, this approach allows integration of domain-specific knowledge and facilitates the application, combination and implementation of suitable prediction methods. Romero et al. 4 focus on home environments and propose a middleware solution, called DigiHome, that applies the Service Component Architecture (SCA) component model to integrate data and events generated by heterogeneous devices in such environments. DigiHome exploits the extensibility of SCA to incorporate the representational state transfer architectural style and, in this way, leverages on the integration of multiscale systems of systems (from wireless sensor networks to the Internet). Additionally, the platform applies complex event processing technology that detects application-specific situations. Careton et al. 5 extend the ambient-oriented programming paradigm to program radio frequency identification (RFID) applications. They considered RFID tags as intermittently connected mutable proxy objects hosted on mobile-distributed computing devices and detail their prototype implementation. We thank the editors of Software – Practice and Experience for hosting this special issue, the authors for their excellent work of extending and improving their original conference publications and especially the DAIS program committee members who served for the special issue for taking the time and providing high value feedback during the three review rounds.