Web services as applications' integration tool: QikProp case study

Web services provide a standard means of interoperating between different software applications, running on a variety of platforms and/or frameworks. While the concepts of Web services are aimed at providing a standard means to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network, they do not solve the problem of between service requesters and providers. A trusted component is defined as a reusable software element possessing specified and guaranteed property qualities. The highly reusable nature of a Web service emphasizes the need for a trust ensuring mechanism between the requester and the provider of the service. The focus of this paper is to suggest a fortified Web services architecture introducing the concept of contracts to increase the level of between the requester and the provider of the requested service. In order to achieve this goal a new language is introduced into the fortified Web services architecture: WS-Contract. WS-Contract is a machine-processable specification of the Web service semantics, formally supporting the different levels of contract information. It defines the pre-and post conditions of the Web services interface, the synchronization policy of the service and the QoS parameters that should be maintained between the requester agent and the provider agent. WS-Contract relies, wherever possible, on existing Web services standards to build the necessary trust ensuring mechanism for Web services

Summary form only given. The complexity of computing systems keeps growing even beyond human capabilities to handle management tasks for achieving the best benefits from such systems. Autonomic computing was introduced with the promise of self-management, where computing systems would be able to manage their behaviors. The concept of Web services emerged for the intension of enabling heterogeneous computing systems to seamlessly and dynamically interact with each other to empower intra-enterprise collaboration. This research is concerned with the issue of designing autonomic computing systems so that computing systems can evolve towards self-management paradigm. For this purpose, and by conducting the research, the relationship between the goals of autonomic computing and the promises of Web service has become enough persuasive to blend the two technologies in a composite one, which is autonomic Web services. In autonomic Web services, each entity is a Web service that is behaving autonomically. The research aims at proving that with autonomic Web services, computing systems will be able to manage themselves as well as their relationships with each other. To achieve this objective, the research proposes a system that implements the concept of autonomic Web services; a proof-of-concept prototype of this system is currently under development and testing.

This paper discusses the basic concepts of Web services, Web services architecture, Web services protocol stack, analyzes the current status of Web service composition research. In this paper, reusable Web service composition model is put forward. This model can be added to any Web service composition method (either dynamic or static), describes the process of Web service composition reuse. In this paper, the introduction of Web services composition classes and components thought to form the concept of Web services, component class, and the combination of Web services to achieve a certain degree of reuse.

Summary form only given. The emerging concept of semantic Web services aims at more sophisticated Web Service technologies: on basis of semantic description frameworks, intelligent mechanisms are envisioned for discovery, composition, and contracting of Web services. The tutorial explains the current state of the art in semantic Web services on basis of the Web service modeling ontology WSMO and related initiatives. Commencing from the vision and arising challenges for semantic Web services, the tutorial in detail explains the specifications of recent frameworks for semantic Web services and presents the Web service execution environment WSMX as the WSMO reference implementation. The tutorial consists of three main sections that subsequently provide a complete overview of semantic Web services and the latest status of WSMO. The tutorial addresses academic as well as industrial researches and developers that are working with Web services and are interested in semantic Web services.

Since CAD data is used as master data throughout the lifecycle of a product, it is important to provide a means for efficiently sharing CAD data among systems used for collaborative product development. Web Services, a type of distributed object technology, is adequate for this purpose; in a previous study [7], the authors proposed the architecture of Web Services for CAD (WSC) for the retrieval of CAD data. CAD data are classified into CAD assembly and part data. Since product design is typically modeled in the form of CAD assembly data, it is worth to consider this application when implementing a service for CAD data retrieval. In this study, the authors first propose a concept of parallel Web Service, which is an extension of WSC and whose goal is the rapid retrieval of CAD assembly data. They then discuss the technical details that can lead to its realization. Finally, experimental results regarding the performance of assembly data retrieval by the parallel Web Service are presented and compared with analogous performance by a single Web Service.

Growing numbers of pervasive devices are gaining access to the Internet. However, much of the existing rich multimedia content cannot be handled by mobile client devices with limited communication, processing, storage and display capabilities. In this paper, we propose new ways to enhance the universal access to multimedia content through Web Services and Semantic Web concepts. A semantic-based personalized delivery concept is drafted that makes use of these emerging technologies together with rather classical multimedia transcoding ideas. Instead of large, monolithic portal applications designed for multi-purpose adaptation and a single-source delivery, we propose to shift multimedia adaptation functionality to a portfolio of adequately selected Web Services. Web Services accessible through standard interfaces that allow for multimedia format conversion and composition can allow for a more flexible, application-independent adaptation and thus ease multimedia service provisioning essentially.

A major propelling technology for electronic government (e-Government) is the powerful concept of Semantic Web Service. Semantically enriched Web services promise to increase the level of automation and to reduce integration efforts significantly. On the other hand, and due to the heterogeneous structure of the public sector, the achievement of interoperability and integration is a key challenge for a comprehensive e-Government. Therefore, the combination of e-Government and Semantic Web Services is very much natural. In this paper, we present a dynamic approach for semantically composing e-Government Web services based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques. The overall objective of our approach is to improve the citizen centric e-Government vision by providing a platform for automatically discovering, composing and optimizing e-Government services.

The 3GPP proposed the specifications of “Open Service Access (OSA),” which included eight suites of open application programming interface (API) for developing telecommunication services in 1999. Instead of traditional telecommunication operators, the third-party companies can easily create a variety of new services across operators’ networks via the API without wasting time and energy on the details of telecommunication networking. There have been a few international organizations, such as 3GPP, Parlay Group, and ETSI, working on the standards. The Parlay Group proposed a suite of specifications, which was almost the same as the OSA after several revisions. Therefore, the suite can also be named OSA/Parlay. These standard organizations hope that their activities can bring great advances to mobile services and communication industry. In recent years, the web service has prevailed all over the world because its outstanding software architecture can run on any computing platform. In order to make the OSA more popular, the Parlay Group included the concept and technique of the web service and proposed the other suite of OSA specifications, Parlay X, in 2003. The APIs in the former OSA/Parlay specifications were designed base on the protocols of telecommunication networking. Instead, the APIs in the Parlay X were devised from the viewpoint of applications’ requirements. In this article, we will introduce the architecture and capabilities of the Parlay X, and compare it with the original OSA/Parlay. We also take two examples, “Stock Risk Notification System,” and “Weather Forecasting SMS System,” to explain the mechanism of the Parlay X in detail.

The Web, as we know it, is a collection of human readable pages that are virtually unintelligible to computer programs. For that reason, it has been called the “eyeball” Web. While the Web emerged as a World Wide repository of digitized information, by and large, the very same information is not available for automatic computation. In recent years two parallel efforts emerged that have the potential of overcoming this paradox: the first effort is the Semantic Web which provides the tools for the explicit markup of the content of Web pages; the second effort is the development of Web Services which results in a Web where programs act as independent agents to become the producers and consumers of information and enable automation of business transactions.In this talk I will focus on research that attempts to bridge the gap between the Web as we know it, the Semantic Web and Web services. Under this approach, I propose the vision of Web services as autonomous goal-directed agents which select other agents to interact with, and flexibly negotiate their interaction model, acting at times in client server mode, or at other times in peer to peer mode. The resulting Web services, that I call Autonomous Semantic Web services, utilize ontologies and semantically annotated Web pages to automate the fulfillment of tasks and transactions with other Web agents. In particular, Autonomous Semantic Web services use the Semantic Web to support capability based discovery and interoperation at run time. A first step towards this vision is the development of formal languages and inference mechanisms for representing and reasoning with core concepts of Web services. DAML-S (the Darpa Agent Markup Language for Services) is the first attempt to define such a language. I will give a brief overview of DAML-S and its relations with the Semantic Web and Web services. In addition, I will provide concrete examples of computational models of how DAML-S can be viewed as the first step in bridging the gap between the Semantic Web and current proposed industry standards for Web services. I will provide concrete examples of DAML-S in action, discuss challenges still open in the bridging between the Semantic Web and Web services and provide a roadmap to get us from today’s Web to the Web of autonomous Semantic Web services.KeywordsFormal LanguageCore ConceptDigitize InformationAutomatic ComputationBusiness TransactionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

10 - Web Services—An Introduction to the Future

WWW (World Wide Web) has become the richest resource pool of services and information. But most of services (e.g. real time stock quote information and Web mail service) are independent and distributed. If we need a new Web service that sends us an email when some stock quote reaches a specific price, a Web service integration tool is needed to compose the Web stock quote information with the Web mail service. This paper proposes a convenient and powerful integration tool to seamlessly integrate the existing Web services into new services. Our tool, called Web service integration tool (WSIT), provides the functionalities to record and modulize existing Web services, to design, modify and compose recorded Web services, and to play and test the new composed Web services.

Marine environmental information is the main decision-making basis on ocean development, marine environmental protection and marine management. With the rapid development of ocean science technology and requirement of ocean application, human beings are more relay on the marine environmental information, and the requirement for the management and service on marine environmental information becomes higher and higher. SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) encapsulate information in the shape of service, now is the one of the most concernful themes in the IT field, and is the trend for marine data information construction. This article recommends the concept and technology of data warehouse, SOA and Web Service, does deep research on the traditional data warehouse architecture and the features of current marine heterogeneous data informatization, does analysis on the status and existing problems of marine data warehouse, and proposed a information integration architecture strategy based on SOA and marine environmental data warehouse.

Service oriented architecture and especially web services play the main role in nowadays internet enabled business. By the appearance of semantic web, the new concept of semantic web services becomes the base of the next generation of WWW. The developers of semantic web services (SWS) promise that the process of discovery will become more automated and more intelligent. So, we propose a new discovery mechanism that based on clustered SWS repository. The clustered SWS repository will seed up the process of service discovery. In addition, the proposed mechanism has the ability to find composite solutions consist of more that one service to achieve the service requester goals.

Reusability is a central concept of Web services as it allows for the construction of composite Web services at a lower cost/effort. Web services offer diverse functional capabilities (e.g., ticket purchase, hotel booking) and inherent transactional properties. However, due to the lack of an explicit and formal description of these functional and transactional perspectives, the correctness of the transactional reliability and functional properties cannot be verified. The composite Web service reliability is computed using a set of transactional requirements defined by designers throughout the Accepted Termination States (ATS) concept. The main objective of this article is to introduce a formal model of the Web service configuration and its correctness requirements that permit to ensure the correct Web service execution from functional and transactional points of view. For that purpose, we developed a Correct Configuration Model for Transactional Composite Services (CCM4TCS) using the <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Event-B</small> method. This model is used to formally validate the consistency of composite Web service configuration’s properties and requirements. It allows also to check the correctness of ATS constraints that we use as reliability parameters. The correctness and the validation of our model are ensured by discharging proof obligations and by animating the specification using the ProB model-checker.

Over the past several years, many legacy applications have become Web-enabled. A current trend is to Web service-enable legacy applications to allow for XML-based data exchange between a legacy application and a software client that could be hosted in a different framework. This approach enables interoperability between legacy systems and those developed in frameworks of the Web-centric multi-tier architecture that is now prevalent.For building agile, loosely coupled systems, a proposed architecture is that offered by software agent frameworks. If systems are developed in agent frameworks, there will be architectural interoperability issues with Web-centric systems. One approach to facilitate agent system / Web-centric system interoperability is to utilize Web services as a bridge, with software agents offering Webs services to clients of other frameworks. This approach was investigated via a prototyping effort, which is reported herein. Attention is restricted to software agent frameworks that are compliant with the specifications of the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA). The focus is on the principled design and performance of agent-based Web services. Recommendations for modifications to FIPA specifications in order to increase support for agent-based Web services are also given.