Offer Web Services Research Articles

THE ROLE OF CONVENIENCE, COMPATIBILITY AND MEDIA RICHNESS IN ACCEPTING MOBILE WEB IN MALAYSIA

Our lifestyle has changed and keeps changing with emerging software and hardware technologies. In the same way, mobile devices are changing the way people accessing the Internet. More users have changed from using desktop computers to mobile devices. A mobile device such as smartphones and tablets are widely used devices in accessing the Internet all over the world. From an early investigation, it is found that although mobile devices are highly flexible, accessible, and convenient, their usage to access websites is still average. The objective of this study is to conceptualize the factors that drive users to access websites through mobile devices. This study presents the scenario and the current situation of mobile web usage among mobile device users. It further critically discusses the role of three constructs namely, convenience, compatibility, and media richness in explaining the user’s intention to use the mobile web. The study adopts the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to understand what factors affect usage intention of the mobile web, an important topic for current and future research. The limitations lie in the depth of investigation where the empirical investigation should be conducted in future studies to prove the findings of this conceptual study. This study aims to explain the factors that will influence the intention to access mobile websites. Determining those factors will help web designers to develop mobile web pages that will be preferred by its users. Improving user’s experience of accessing the web through mobile devices will enable web service providers to offer web services more effectively that will satisfy the needs of the users.

Industry Payments to Cardiologists.

Industry Payments to Cardiologists.

LP-WSC: a linear programming approach for web service composition in geographically distributed cloud environments

In recent years, cloud computing has emerged as the most popular technologies for accessing and delivering enterprise applications as the services to the end users over the Internet. Since different enterprises may offer web services with various capabilities, these web services can be combined with other to provide the complete functionality of a large software application to meet the users’ requests. Therefore, the service composition as an NP-hard optimization problem to combine the distributed and heterogeneous web services is introduced as a challenging issue. In this work, we propose a linear programming approach to web service composition problem which is called ‘LP-WSC’ to select the most efficient service per request in a geographically distributed cloud environment for improving the quality-of-service criteria. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of our approach under three scenarios with varying the number of atomic services per set. The experimental results indicate that the proposed approach significantly reduces the cost of selection and composition of the services and also increases the availability of services and the reliability of the servers compared with the other approaches.

Energy management for the homogeneous server clusters offering web services

The population of the Internet users has exceeded 2.4 billion. Data centers provide Internet services to fulfill the demand from these users. Many data centers adopt the cluster-based server systems to host the required Internet services. These server systems consume significant amount of energy, but much of the power is used to maintain service capacity during idle or low workload periods. This paper surveys some recent approaches addressing this issue. As learned from the traditional telephone call center planning processes, a queueing model is adopted to model the server clusters with homogeneous architecture. By analyzing the model, a set of the factors affecting the energy cost is identified. Based on the identified factors, an on-line energy management technique is then deigned. The proposed approach is simulated with a real-world workload trace. The simulation result shows that approximately 70 to 75 % of the originally consumed energy can be saved.

Mobile Web Services: State of the Art and Challenges

For many years mobile devices were commonly recognized as Web consumers. However, the advancements in mobile device manufacturing, coupled with the latest achievements in wireless communication developments are both key enablers for shifting the role of mobile devices from service consumers to service providers. This paradigm shift is a major step towards the realization of pervasive and ubiquitous computing. Mobile Web service provisioning is the art of hosting and offering Web services from mobile devices, which actively contributes towards the direction of Mobile Internet. In this paper, we provide the state of the art of mobile service provisioning as it currently stands. We focus our discussions on its applicability, reliability, and challenges of mobile environments and resource constraints. We study the different provisioning architectures, enabler technologies, publishing and discovery mechanisms, and maintenance of up-to-date service registries. We point out the major open research issues in each provisioning aspect. Performance issues due to the resource constraints of mobile devices are also discussed.

An Integrated System for Disabled People Developed with the Agent Platform PANGEA

New trends in multi-agent systems call for self-adaptation and high dynamics, hence the new model of open MAS or virtual organization of agents. However, as existing agent platforms are not yet equipped to support this behavior, it is necessary to create new systems and mechanisms to facilitate the development of these new architectures. This article presents PANGEA, an agent platform to develop open multi-agent systems, specifically those including organizational aspects such as virtual agent organizations. The platform allows the integral management of organizations and offers tools to the end user. Additionally, it includes a communication protocol based on the IRC standard, which facilitates implementation and remains robust even with a large number of connections. The introduction of a CommunicationAgent and a Sniffer make it possible to offer Web Services for the distributed control of interaction. In order to test PANGEA, an integral system was developed to help the disabled, gathering a set of easily deployable and integrated services under a single architecture.

Web Service Provisioning on Android Mobile Host

This paper discusses Web Service provisioning from Android Smart Phone. Web Service provisioning is the art of hosting and offering Web Services for Android based mobile device. This is due to advancements in mobile device manufacturing and wireless communication ability. This has changed the role of the mobile devices of Web service consumers to Web service providers. Today there is not a single real-time reasonable approach exists to host lightweight Web Services on Android smart phone. This paper describes the design and implementation details of the Android mobile host. Implementation of Android mobile host uses open source technologies such as Android, Java programming language, Android libraries, and SQLite database. The goal is to create an efficient and reliable Android mobile host as a web service provider that includes web services deployed on the mobile host and clients access the content. The main aim is to create lightweight weight framework for Android host that takes care of resource limitations and battery life. The manuscript presents a detailed performance evaluation of REST architecture and compares the results with SOAP standard.

The Moderating Effect of Usage Experience on the Antecedents and Consequences of Customer Satisfaction: The Case of Non-Profit Organizations Offering Web Services

The purpose of this study is to test the moderating effect of usage experience on antecedents to customer satisfaction, as well as that on the relationship between satisfaction and loyalty. A survey (n=1,092) was conducted on members from one of the biggest websites for non-profit barter market services in Taiwan. Our results show that the relationship among service quality, customer satisfaction and loyalty differ for consumers with more usage experience and those with less usage experience. Implications indicate that non-profit organizations that plan to offer web services should develop and provide services to high- and low-experience customers with different focus and strategy. In particular, they may start with their innovation and improvement for enhancing service assurance and reliability. In contrast, issues relevant to service delivery and other quality dimensions may regard as design topics for retaining experienced customers.

Flow Synchronization in Supply Network, using Holonic, Isoarchic and Multicriteria Control

An improved model for an isoarchic control system of supply network is presented. New criteria in the multicriteria AHP decision model, for supply network isoarchic control, are proposed. The objective is to develop isoarchic control in generalized supply chain system, based on a set of companies combined in a partnership network and interacting through set of entities that offer web services, by taking into account the flow synchronization aspect. After presenting the PROSIS model (Product, Resource, Order & Simulation Isoarchic system), the multicriteria method (AHP: Analytic Hierarchy Process) is described with some expansions of the multicriteria model applied to the flow synchronization in an isoarchic control.

Decentralized allocation of CPU computation power for web applications

With increasing demand for web services, the efficient management of web server resources is becoming increasingly important for the delivery of a desired quality of service to the customers. The diversity and scale of web services make the task of resource management challenging for several reasons. Since a number of different enterprizes are involved in offering web services to the customers and providing resources (e.g. virtual machines in a cloud) to host service applications, the information in such systems is highly decentralized. In these systems it is difficult for any one entity to have centralized information about the customer service contracts of all service providers and the infrastructure of all server owners. It is also often impossible to know all of above information due to privacy issues of various enterprizes. For these reasons it is desirable to have decentralized resource management in such systems. In this paper we investigate decentralized allocation of Central Processing Unit (CPU) computation power of server nodes among multiple service applications. Each application is provided at multiple grades of service with each grade offering a different average response time for the service. Each application is hosted on a group of server nodes. For a given application placement on the server nodes, the goal is to allocate the CPU computation power of these nodes among the applications so as to maximize the aggregate utility of all applications. We present an analytical formulation of the above problem and propose a decentralized algorithm for solving it. In the proposed algorithm each application and each server node performs local optimization based on its own information and does not need to reveal its private information. It is shown that with limited communication between applications and server nodes, the algorithm obtains an optimum centralized CPU allocation.

Designing for collective intelligence

A collective intelligence application is one that harnesses the knowledge and work of its users to provide the data for the application and to improve its usefulness. The most hyped examples of collective intelligence applications have been labeled as "Web 2.0" applications. Web 2.0 is an amorphous term used to define a computing paradigm that uses the Web as the application platform and facilitates collaboration and information sharing between users. Classic examples of Web 2.0 applications include: wikis, blogs (or Weblogs), social network services, and social bookmarking. Collective intelligence is not a new concept. As long ago as 1968, computer visionaries foresaw the ability of computers to be applied to cooperation in creative endeavors by allowing people capable of solving specific problems to share their ideas. However, collective intelligence has been gaining momentum as new tools supporting collaboration have become available. The concept of collective intelligence is now being explored by businesses interested in using it for collaborative innovation and by researchers interested in addressing systemic problems like climate change. Collective intelligence is a fundamentally different way of viewing how applications can support human interaction and decision making. Most traditional applications have focused in improving the productivity or decision making of the individual user. The emphasis has been on providing the tools and data necessary to fulfill a specific job function. Under the collective intelligence paradigm, the focus is on harnessing the intelligence of groups of people to enable greater productivity and better decisions than are possible by individuals working in isolation. The shift to a collective intelligence paradigm requires software developers to have different ways of thinking about how their how software might be used and what features would enable better visualization and use of information among groups of people. The new breed of collective intelligence applications needs to center around user defined data that can be reused to support decision making, team building, or to improve understanding of the world around us. The users of these systems should play a central role in defining what data is important and how the data is used. The essential features of collective intelligence applications are similar to the design patterns for Web 2.0 applications except that collective intelligence applications can be custom applications designed for small highly specialized domains instead of the larger Web audience served by most Web 2.0 applications. The seven principle collective intelligence application requirements are (adapted from O'Reilly): 1. Task specific representations: Domain specific collective intelligence applications should support views of the task that are tailored to the particular domain. 2. Data is the key: Collective intelligence applications are data centric and should be designed to collect and share data among users. 3. Users add value: Users of collective intelligence applications know the most about the value of the information it contains. The application should provide mechanisms for them to add to, modify, or otherwise enhance the data to improve its usefulness. 4. Facilitate data aggregation: The ability to aggregate data adds value. Collective intelligence applications should be designed such that data aggregation occurs naturally through regular use. 5. Facilitate data access: The data in collective intelligence applications can have use beyond the boundaries of the application. Collective intelligence applications should offer Web services interfaces and other mechanisms to facilitate the re-use of data. 6. Facilitate access for all devices: The PC is no longer the only access device for internet applications. Collective intelligence applications need to be designed to integrate services across handheld devices, PCs, and internet servers. 7. The perpetual beta: Collective intelligence applications are ongoing services provided to its users thus new features should be added on a regular basis based on the changing needs of the user community. The processes involved in designing and implementing specialized collective intelligence applications are discussed below in the context of DDtrac, a Web-based application that allows for the easy collection and summary of special education data.

Towards a Unifying View of QoS-Enhanced Web Service Description and Discovery Approaches

The number of web services increased vastly in the last years. Various providers offer web services with the same functionality, so for web service consumers it is getting more complicated to select the web service, which best fits their requirements. That is why a lot of the research efforts point to discover semantic means for describing web services taking into account not only functional characteristics of services, but also the quality of service (QoS) properties such as availability, reliability, response time, trust, etc. This motivated us to research current approaches presenting complete solutions for QoS enabled web service description, publication and discovery. In this paper we present comparative analysis of these approaches according to their common principals. Based on such analysis we extract the essential aspects from them and propose a pattern for the development of QoS-aware service-oriented architectures. The number of web services increased vastly in the last years. Various providers offer web services with the same functionality, so for web service consumers it is getting more complicated to select the web service, which best fits their requirements. That is why many research efforts point to discovering semantic approaches for describing web services including both functional and non-functional properties. This will give consumers the opportunity to find web services according to their QoS requirements such as availability, reliability, response time, trust, etc. Most of the current solutions are based on Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) and Universal Description and Discovery Interface (UDDI) registry. WSDL documents provide functional description of web services without semantic specifications concerning QoS. UDDI registry provides catalog-based searching without control over the quality of registered services. UDDI APIs allow publishing and discovering data for a particular service, but do not provide an opportunity for a quality-based retrieval. The problem becomes more complicated when the discovery process returns several web services with the same functionality. Such mentioned disadvantages motivated us to research principal current approaches for QoS-aware web service description and discovery in order to find better solutions giving more accurate and productive service retrieval. These approaches have common principals that can be summarized as follows:

Research and implement of SOA-oriented enterprise services bus

For the quickly growing requirements of information sharing and business integration in enterprise,it tends to use SOA architecture to integrate enterprise applications because enterprise service bus can shield the heterogeneous enterprise applications.Current products of SOA-oriented Enterprise Service Bus(s-ESB)can mainly offer Web services container but unified adapter mechanism to integrate some kinds of enterprise applications.It restricts the availability and scalability of s-ESB.In this paper,it firstly brought forward a new SOA-based enterprise application integration environment which clarified the status and function of s-ESB in constructing Web services-based application supporting platform.Then,it presented an architecture for s-ESB,and then analyzed some key technologies including protocols adaptation,service adaptation and common services etc.At last,s-ESB is proved to be feasible and effective by prototype system.

E-Health: A New Kind of Telemedicine

ABSTRACT This paper examines e-health in detail. E-health is the use of distant communication technologies in the healthcare context and the use of advanced information and communication technologies (i.e., the Internet) that meet the needs of citizens, patients, healthcare practitioners and professionals. The goal of the authors is to show that e-health services have improved telemedicine to the point of substantially transforming its very meaning. As such, e-health expands and redefines the operational usage of telemedicine services. E-health, for instance, is much more oriented to the wide-range possibilities of service delivery (i.e., e-health offers Web services such as WebMD.com, which receives a very high number of visitors). Besides, legal and licensing matters are no longer issues in e-health, in the same way that health insurance is not an obstacle with e-health, which may also be the cure to the paucity of knowledge that telemedicine services used to provide. Nevertheless, e-health also presents major limitations, among which are the lack of real-time interaction between the patient and provider and the inaccessibility to e-health by a certain number of disadvantaged and isolated groups. Finally, this paper ends with a discussion section, in which an extensive summary and suggestions for future research are given.

Extending Apache Axis for Monitoring Web Service Offerings

The Web Service Offerings Infrastructure (WSOI) is a monitoring and management infrastructure for the Web Service Offerings Language (WSOL). It extends Apache Axis, an open-source tool for hosting Web services. We present technical details of several WSOI solutions for monitoring Web Services. To pass management information among management parties, we built WSOI serializer and WSOI deserializer modules converting data between formats of Axis’ MessageContext properties and SOAP headers. To perform different monitoring activities for different WSOL service offerings, we implemented Web Service Offering Descriptor (WSOD) as a complement to Axis’ Web Service Deployment Descriptor (WSDD) component. To represent run-time values of WSOL-related management information, we developed WSOI management information model. All these solutions were verified with a prototype implementation of WSOI 2.0 and validated on case studies.

Providing web services to mobile users: the architecture design of an m-service portal

In order to reduce costs and gain competitive advantages, many companies are offering web services that enable software components to be accessed by their customers and trading partners over the internet. With the latest advances in mobile computing and communication technologies, web services are increasingly used to expose functionalities of many legacy systems so that more business-oriented mobile applications can be developed. In this paper, we first use a generic technical architecture. Then, we provide a classification matrix for grouping various mobile services. The architecture design of an m-service portal is proposed, followed by the description of an m-service prototype in support of e-procurement developed by the authors. Potential enhancement to the m-service portal using agent technology is also discussed. Finally, we suggest some further research issues of dynamic web services in the context of m-service portals and context-aware m-services.

Management applications of the Web Service Offerings Language (WSOL)

We discuss Web Service Management (WSM) and Web Service Composition Management (WSCM) applications of the Web Service Offerings Language (WSOL) and how the language supports these applications. WSOL is a language for the formal specification of classes of service, various constraints (functional constraints, Quality of Service—QoS, and access rights), and management statements (prices, monetary penalties, and management responsibilities) for Web Services. Describing a Web Service in WSOL, in addition to the Web Services Description Language, enables monitoring, metering, accounting, and management of Web Services. Metering of QoS metrics and evaluation of constraints can be the responsibility of the provider Web Service, the consumer, and/or one or more mutually trusted third parties (SOAP intermediaries or probes). Further, manipulation (switching, deactivation, reactivation, deletion, or creation) of classes of service can be used for dynamic (run-time) adaptation and management of Web Service compositions. To demonstrate the usefulness of WSOL for WSM and WSCM, we have developed a corresponding management infrastructure, the Web Service Offerings Infrastructure (WSOI). WSOI enables monitoring of WSOL-enabled Web Services and dynamic manipulation of their classes of service.

Role of trust in e‐business success

Success of an e‐business rests on many factors. One of the important contributors is trust. Trust is something that an e‐business must strive to achieve over a period of time. Acquiring customer trust depends on many things that an e‐business controls. However, customer's trust as such is not under the control of the e‐business. Some contributing factors for gaining customer trust are: appeal of the Web site, product or service offerings, branding, quality of service and trusted seals. Trust can be viewed from many angles such as transaction, information content, product, technology and institution. This paper analyses the role of trust from the transaction perspective and highlights the things that an e‐business could do for building customer trust.