Service-oriented View Research Articles

Tokenization, blockchain and web 3.0 technologies as research objects in innovation management

Tokenization, blockchain and web 3.0 technologies as research objects in innovation management

Examining online consumers’ behavior: A service-oriented view

Retailers’ websites are an important interface between retailers and their customers. The various features and elements that retailers include on their websites play a critical role in attracting customers and ensuring their satisfaction with the online shopping process. By conducting a three-phased study, we identify how the elements of a website shape customers’ salient beliefs. These salient beliefs, in turn, determine the level of customers’ satisfaction with the website. This study provides both theoretical insights into the beliefs of online shoppers and practical insights for retail website operators. Specifically, we argue that when retail websites are constructed to include several specific elements that appeal to the key salient beliefs of information quality, service quality, and system quality, retailers will increase customers’ satisfaction with the online shopping process.

Service-oriented Product-driven Manufacturing

To address the ongoing trend from supplier-driven to customer-driven manufacturing, shortened product life cycles and increased product variations at lower investment costs are required. Future manufacturing systems therefore have to provide higher reactivity to market trends and support flexible processes with enhanced scalability and effective change-over between product variants. In this paper, we propose a knowledge-based, bottom-up production approach based on a service-oriented view of loose coupled automation facilities offering their capabilities to an intelligent product that autonomously controls its production process in order to meet the upcoming flexibility and changeability requirements.

The design and implementation of OGSA-DQP: A service-based distributed query processor

Service-based approaches are rising to prominence because of their potential to meet the requirements for distributed application development in e-business and e-science. The emergence of a service-oriented view of hardware and software resources raises the question as to how database management systems and technologies can best be deployed or adapted for use in such an environment. This paper explores one aspect of service-based computing and data management, viz., how to integrate query processing technology with a service-based architecture suitable for a Grid environment. The paper addresses this by describing in detail the design and implementation of a service-based distributed query processor. The query processor is service-based in two orthogonal senses: firstly, it supports querying over data storage and analysis resources that are made available as services, and, secondly, its internal architecture factors out as services the functionalities related to the construction and execution of distributed query plans. The resulting system both provides a declarative approach to service orchestration, and demonstrates how query processing can benefit from a service-based architecture. As well as describing and motivating the architecture used, the paper also describes usage scenarios, and, using a bioinformatics application, presents performance results that benchmark the system and illustrate the benefits provided by the service-based architecture.

A Model of Grid Service Capacity

Computational grids (CGs) are large scale networks of geographically distributed aggregates of resource clusters that may be contributed by distinct organizations for the provision of computing services such as model simulation, compute cycle and data mining. Traditionally, the decision-making strategies underlying the grid management mechanisms rely on the physical view of the grid resource model. This entails the need for complex multi-dimensional search strategies and a considerable level of resource state information exchange between the grid management domains. In this paper we argue that with the adoption of service oriented grid architectures, a logical service-oriented view of the resource model provides a more appropriate level of abstraction to express the grid capacity to handle incoming service requests. In this respect, we propose a quantification model of the aggregated service capacity of the hosting environment that is updated based on the monitored state of the various environmental resources required by the hosted services. A comparative experimental validation of the model shows its performance towards enabling an adequate exploitation of provisioned services.

Computational network federations: a middleware architecture for network-based computing

Computational Network Federations (CNFs) enable an arbitrary set of heterogeneous hosts which are connected via any type of network to form dynamic virtual distributed systems that cooperate to execute an application, or serve as generalized application service platforms to end users. CNFs motivate a view of the Internet as a vast unified host: a repository of information, application services, and an omnipresent supercomputing resource regardless of the type of access device or access methodology. CNFs provide a powerful way of virtualizing generalized enterprise networks (or even the Internet), and an economic and resilient model for deploying enterprise applications, (such as CRM) and peer-2-peer services (e.g., chatrooms). This paper describes a middleware architecture that enables network-based computing, communications, and services through a unified, access, and platform-independent approach. CNFs borrow from the capabilities of grid computing and aim toward intelligent computational service networks that are ubiquitous, secure, and adaptive to user and access-method idiosyncrasies. CNFs encompass a set of abstractions and interfaces that provide: 1) a unified service-oriented view of the network to the user; 2) a homogeneous host abstraction to applications; and 3) a shared-memory abstraction to software developers. This paper outlines the architecture of CNFs and describes in more detail i-DVM, a distributed multithreaded meta-OS that forms the core of a CNF and implements the virtual machine abstraction and location transparency.

Agent based process management: applying intelligent agents to workflow

This paper presents an Agent-based Process Management System (APMS) architecture that combines recent developments in autonomous agent technology and distributed computing platforms. It argues that a service-oriented view is required in order to meet the requirements of open distributed enterprises, now and in the future. This approach embraces and fully supports the decentralisation of responsibility and local autonomy, within and across enterprises. The paper begins by summarising existing approaches to workflow. It describes the APMS approach which extends workflow with the abilities to anticipate process requirements, to resource processes dynamically, and to adapt to exceptions. An important feature of APMS is the absence of a centralised business process representation. Finally, the paper describes an implementation of the APMS architecture, and discusses the engineering issues related to realising such a system within a large organisation.