Design Of Web Services Research Articles

WST: a tool supporting timed composite Web Services Model transformation

In this paper we introduce a tool called the Web Service Translation tool (WST), which we are developing to implement a methodology for the design, validation and verification of Web Services with timed restrictions. This methodology works by making several translations, from phase to phase in the software development life cycle, where the system is represented at each phase by XML models. We use XSL Transformations (XSLT), which is a language for transforming XML documents. The purpose of these translations is to generate XML code automatically for a Web Service system and to obtain Web Services description models with Timed Automata for validating and verifying composite Web Services with time restrictions.

Design Principles of Web-based Services in Large-Scale e-Logistics Processes

E-logistics is defined to be the mechanism of automating the logistics processes and providing an integrated, end-to-end fulfillment and supply chain management service to the players of logistics processes. In this article, we take a look at the design of Web-based Services in the area of e-logistics. We describe our ongoing research investigations aimed at defining a user-centered design approach that uses the concept of persona to analyze and model the future users. It aims also at deriving a conceptual design and prototypes from the different persona. The approach has been applied to identify, define and design Web services in a large-scale complex logistics system used by a large food company.

AdaFF: Adaptive Failure-Handling Framework for Composite Web Services

In this paper, we propose a novel Web service composition framework which dynamically accommodates various failure recovery requirements. In the proposed framework called Adaptive Failure-handling Framework (AdaFF), failure-handling submodules are prepared during the design of a composite service, and some of them are systematically selected and automatically combined with the composite Web service at service instantiation in accordance with the requirement of individual users. In contrast, existing frameworks cannot adapt the failure-handling behaviors to user's requirements. AdaFF rapidly delivers a composite service supporting the requirement-matched failure handling without manual development, and contributes to a flexible composite Web service design in that service architects never care about failure handling or variable requirements of users. For proof of concept, we implement a prototype system of the AdaFF, which automatically generates a composite service instance with Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) according to the users' requirement specified in XML format and executes the generated instance on the ActiveBPEL engine.

Older Adults and Diffusion of Assistive Web-Base Technologies

Recent surveys show that the number of people over the age of 65 is increasing worldwide and there is a considerable discussion about the scope of improving the older adults’ autonomy and independence, using recent developments in information technology. One of such development is web services and it is rapidly becoming a major means of accessing healthcare in the community and many government services for the older adults. However several researchers argue that age-related cognitive impairments have a detrimental effect on use of such web services by older adults. However, little and systematic applied research has been conducted on how age related cognitive impairments might affect the usage of web services by older adults. Undoubtedly, understanding the relationship between the cognitive changes that accompany aging and their impact on older adults’ usage of web services will be beneficial for designing web services for this group. The article demonstrates how such understanding has been employed to develop an assistive technology to improve older adults’ interaction with online forms (e.g. state benefit application form). However, the article acknowledges that this new assistive technology does not guarantee that people with age-related cognitive impairments accept it, as diffusion of innovation research shows that getting a new technology adopted, even when it has noticeable advantage, is often very difficult. Consequently, the article identifies critical factors that need to be considered when adopting this new assistive technology, drawing on Rogers’s theory of Diffusion of Innovations.

Pragmatic web service design: An agile approach with the service responsibility and interaction design method

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) are increasingly deployed to achieve distributed systems that are modular, flexible and extensible. However, designing for SOA can be challenging; there are issues involving the granularity of the cooperating services, problems with proprietary data models being exchanged, and there are no currently accepted conventions for describing a service or its interactions at an abstract level. This paper gives an overview of the Service Responsibility and Interaction Design Method (SRI-DM), an agile approach for engineering a Web Service design based on capturing a scenario as a use-case, factoring this into a set of Service Responsibility and Collaboration Cards, and constructing a Sequence diagram illustrating their interactions in fulfilling the scenario. Through two case studies the paper shows how using SRI-DM can expose many of the problems of over-engineering SOA and help to create simpler, more pragmatic web service designs.

UniPrime2: a web service providing easier Universal Primer design

The UniPrime2 web server is a publicly available online resource which automatically designs large sets of universal primers when given a gene reference ID or Fasta sequence input by a user. UniPrime2 works by automatically retrieving and aligning homologous sequences from GenBank, identifying regions of conservation within the alignment, and generating suitable primers that can be used to amplify variable genomic regions. In essence, UniPrime2 is a suite of publicly available software packages (Blastn, T-Coffee, GramAlign, Primer3), which reduces the laborious process of primer design, by integrating these programs into a single software pipeline. Hence, UniPrime2 differs from previous primer design web services in that all steps are automated, linked, saved and phylogenetically delimited, only requiring a single user-defined gene reference ID or input sequence. We provide an overview of the web service and wet-laboratory validation of the primers generated. The system is freely accessible at: http://uniprime.batlab.eu. UniPrime2 is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Licence.

Design Web Services: Towards Service Reuse at the Design Level

Service oriented software development has gained more and more importance in the area of e-business. Most researchers focus on the semantic description of Web services and automated composition but pay little attention to how to design Web services for supporting service reuse effectively, thus a substantial amount of modeling and programming is still required. In this paper, a pattern oriented service design method is presented by which all components of different abstraction levels are uniform in regard to their specifications and composition mechanism. Pattern oriented service design model provides a traceable and explicit link from business components to software components so that the top-down service reuse at design level is supported, and the service maintainer profits from the traceability because the impact of requirement or design modifications can be better assessed. The semantic information of component specification can support semantics based component reuse. The pattern oriented service design model can improve development productivity by offering a better chance of reuse through better modularity.

A lightweight fault tolerance framework for Web services

In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a lightweight fault tolerance framework for Web services. With our framework, a Web service can be rendered fault tolerant by replicating it across several nodes. A consensus-based algorithm is used to ensure total ordering of incoming application requests to the replicated Web service, and to ensure consistent membership view among the replicas. The framework is built by extending an open-source implementation of the WS-ReliableMessaging specification, and all reliable message exchanges in our framework conform to the specification. As such, our framework does not depend on any proprietary messaging and transport protocols, which is consistent with the Web services design principles. Our performance evaluation shows that our implementation is nearly optimal and the framework incurs only moderate runtime overhead.

Service and Document Based Interoperability for European eCustoms Solutions

Innovative eCustoms solutions play an important role in the pan-European eGovernment strategy. The underlying premise is interoperability postulating a common understanding of processes, services and the documents that are exchanged between business and government organizations as well as between governmental authorities of different EU member states. This article provides a stringent approach for deriving documents and services from current eCustoms procedures based on the UN/CEFACT standards framework and for embedding these in a service oriented architecture for Collaborative eGovernment. In doing so, we put a special focus on document engineering by applying the UN/CEFACT Core Component Technical Specification (CCTS), a conceptual framework for modeling document components in a syntax neutral and technology independent manner. By relying on CCTS, we want to tackle the challenge of handling different document configurations imposed by divergent national legislations, different customs procedures (export, import, transit, and excise) and different industries. The resulting conceptual model is transferred to XML schema serving as a basis for Web Services design and implementation. These Web Services are designed for seamless interoperable exchange of electronic customs documents between heterogeneous IS landscapes both on business and government side. Beyond the theoretical deduction practical insights are gained from a European research project implementing the artifacts proposed in a real-world setting.

IT Framework for Disaster Mitigation Information Sharing

The robust, loosely coupled network-based Web-service design and standard module-integrating protocol we propose serve as a general-purpose framework for information sharing supporting post-disaster rescue and restoration. Results of experiments confirmed the feasibility of our proposals. A noteworthy feature of our work is the simplicity of its elements and implementation.

A Petri net approach for the design and analysis of Web Services Choreographies

A Web Service is a self-describing, self-contained modular application that can be published, located, and invoked over a network, e.g. the Internet. Web Services composition provides a way to obtain value-added services by combining several Web Services. The composition of Web Services is, therefore, suitable to support enterprise application integration. WS-CDL (Web Services Choreography Description Language) is a W3C candidate recommendation for the description of peer-to-peer collaborations for the participants in a Web Services composition. In this paper we focus our attention on the development of a methodology for the design and validation of composite Web Services using WS-CDL as the language for describing Web Services interactions and Petri nets as a formalism that allows us to simulate and validate the described systems. We specifically intend, then, to capture timed and prioritized collaborations in composite Web Services, so the model of Petri nets that we use is a prioritized version of Time Petri nets.

Method of design and specification of web services based on quality system documentation

In this paper, we present a method for development and specification of web services based on the quality system documentation. The general assumption is that service oriented architecture is based on business services and these business services mostly correspond to exchanged documentation in a real business system. Documentation of a quality system is recognized in form of documents that describe business processes in a real business system and identify exchanged documentation with environment. Presented method uses documentation of quality system and documentation flow for web service specification. We developed the CASE tool for web service specification based on a new approach, and we compare it to other existing tools.

Design and implementation of an on-demand feature extraction web service to facilitate development of spatial data infrastructures

One of the main problems in urban and environmental management concerns the unavailability of reliable spatial data in a spatial data infrastructure (SDI) environment. The main reason for the problem of spatial data availability is the time-consuming nature of their manual production. The present paper proposes the development of on-demand data production Web services for the Internet using feature extraction techniques from satellite images as a solution to the problem. Such services allow users to connect to an on-demand data production Web service to produce the required data automatically if the users cannot find the required spatial data. In order to address and investigate this suggestion, a prototype system is developed. We have developed and implemented a system for automatic road extraction and describe it in special detail with a case study. Web service technologies and OGC (open geospatial consortium) frameworks are utilized for the development of the system to satisfy data and access interoperability in a SDI environment. The paper explains that the on-demand feature extraction Web service can facilitate the development of SDI by resolving the problem of spatial data availability. It also describes further research and different topics that should be considered in the development of SDIs to make such Web services operational.

A Calculus for Generation, Verification and Refinement of BPEL Specifications

Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (WS-BPEL) is the emerging standard for designing Web Services compositions. In this context, formal methods can contribute to increased reliability and consistency in the BPEL design process. In this paper we propose an approach based on the HAL Toolkit that allows verification of the correctness of the behavior of a π-based specification of interacting Web Services, and generates the BPEL processes that have the same behavior. This correlation based on two-way mapping between the π-based orchestration calculus and BPEL. This approach facilitates the verification and refinement process and may be applied to any BPEL implementation.

A Hybrid Architecture for Implementing Efficient Geospatial Web Services: Integrating .Net Remoting and Web Services Technologies

Open GIS Consortium (OGC) Geospatial Web services have been introduced to overcome spatial non-interoperability problem associated with most geospatial processing systems. Although OGC geospatial Web services provide interoperability among heterogeneous geospatial processing systems, in some cases they can not provide required performance and efficiency. This paper proposes a hybrid architecture which can efficiently provide interoperability and high performance for transferring geospatial data. It is suggested that making use of Web services technologies for implementing OGC geospatial Web services would significantly facilitate sharing geospatial data in heterogeneous environments like Web. In addition, making use of a proprietary and platform-dependant technologies can provide best performance and efficiency in homogeneous environments like an internal network. In this context, design and development of an OGC geospatial Web service using hybrid architecture of Web services Technologies and .NET Remoting technology (as proprietary and .NET specific technology) is described. Based on our evaluations and practical tests, the hybrid architecture proved to be an efficient solution for development of geospatial Web services.

Leveraging Web Services for Implementing Vertical Industry Standards: A Model for Service-Based Interoperability

With deeper levels of external process integration and a growing number of electronic business relationships, enterprises are striving to become more interoperable with their business partners. While two-way integration linkages have mostly been realized as point-to-point connections with a handful of business partners, new integration technologies such as Web services and XML give enterprises the opportunity to pursue more cost-efficient and scalable ways of external business process integration. This research develops a model for service-based B2B interoperability that leverages Web service technologies for implementing industry standards. The authors instantiate the conceptual model in a B2B scenario in the automotive industry, where a consortium of automotive manufacturers and suppliers are currently redesigning their interorganizational engineering change management processes. From the evaluation, the authors suggest that the specification of standards related to pragmatics, semantics and syntax has to be complemented by additional design rules which define how industry standards are mapped to a public Web service design. The paper concludes with a revised model for service-based interoperability and discusses implications for B2B standardization.

How can an ICT tool strengthen network capabilities? Evidence from the role of knowledge codification in the KMP experience

Drawing from research on knowledge-creation processes within networks, we propose an enrichment of the notion of network capabilities based on empirical results given by the design of an interfirm web service of competencies. Our study, through the development of this ICT solution, analyse the impact of a codification process on the development and the strengthening of network capabilities. The findings show that beyond the aim of fostering information exchanges, the codification process is not neutral and impacts massively both relational and cognitive network's dimensions in order to increase its knowledge-creation potential.

Automating the Composition of Transactional Web Services

Composite applications leveraging the functionalities offered by Web services today are the underpinnings of enterprise computing. However, current Web services composition systems make only use of functional requirements in the selection process of component Web services while transactional consistency is a crucial parameter of most business applications. The transactional challenges raised by the composition of Web services are twofold: integrating relaxed atomicity constraints at both design and composition time and coping with the dynamicity introduced by the service oriented computing paradigm. In this paper, we propose a new process to automate the design of transactional composite Web services. Our solution for Web services composition does not take into account functional requirements only but also transactional ones based on the acceptable termination states model. The resulting composite Web service is compliant with the consistency requirements expressed by business application designers and its execution can easily be coordinated using the coordination rules provided as an outcome of our approach. An implementation of our theoretical results augmenting an OWL-S matchmaker is further detailed as a proof of concept.

Model Checking Techniques applied to the design of Web Services


 
 
 In previous work we have presented the generation of WS-CDL and WS-BPEL documents. In this paper we show the unification of both generations. The aim is to generate correct WS-BPEL skeleton documents from WS-CDL documents by using the Timed Automata as an intermediary model in order to check the correctness of the generated Web Services with Model Checking Techniques. The model checker used is UPPAAL, a well known tool in theoretical and industrial cases that performs the verification and validation of Timed Automata. Note that our interest is focused on Web services where the time constraints play a critical role.
 
 

Visual languages and quality evaluation in multichannel adaptive information systems

Multichannel Adaptive Information Systems (ISs) are becoming the new paradigm for building complex interorganization ISs based on the use of different devices, Web services, and XML specifications. Modeling Multichannel Adaptive ISs requires complex interactions between the users and the system front-end due to the different capabilities of existing devices. Unfortunately, the expressive power and effectiveness of visual languages have not been fully exploited in this new area. In this paper we address two related issues. First we propose a visual language that allows for adapting the presentation layer to different physical devices; then we describe a technique to evaluate possible tradeoffs between usability and other qualities of service in Web services design.