Web services selection for distributed composition of multimedia content

There is a critical need to design and develop tools that abstract away the fundamental complexity of XML-based Web services specifications and toolkits, and provide an elegant, intuitive, simple, and powerful query-based invocation system to end users. Web services based tools and standards have been designed to facilitate seamless integration and development for application developers. As a result, current implementations require the end user to have intimate knowledge of Web services and related toolkits, and users often play an informed role in the overall Web services execution process. We employ a self-learning mechanism and a set of algorithms and optimizations to match user queries with corresponding operations in Web services. Our system uses Semantic Web concepts and Ontologies in the process of automating Web services matchmaking. We present performance analysis of our system and quantify the exact gains in precision and recall due to the knowledge acquisition algorithms.

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

Web services are a new technology that enables to integrate applications running on different platforms by using primarily XML to enable communication among different computers over the Internet. Large number of applications was designed as stand alone systems before the concept of Web services was introduced and it is a challenge to integrate them into larger computational networks. A generally applicable method of wrapping stand alone applications into Web services was developed and is described. To test the technology, it was applied to the QikProp for DOS (Windows). Although performance of the application did not change when it was delivered as a Web service, this form of deployment had offered several advantages like simplified and centralized maintenance, smaller number of licenses, and practically no training for the end user. Because by using the described approach almost any legacy application can be wrapped as a Web service, this form of delivery may be recommended as a global alternative to traditional deployment solutions.

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.

PurposeThis paper aims to supply an introduction to the bioinformatics discipline for information professionals, outlining how current information management issues are hampering the effective integration and interoperability of resources.Design/methodology/approachThe approach taken is to outline some of the more challenging issues to illustrate their consequences, such as syntactic and semantic heterogeneity, data storage formats and media, and the existence of inconsistencies in information content in bioinformatics resources. A discussion of these topics indicates how semantic web concepts and technologies, together with e‐science initiatives, can be used to address these problems.FindingsThe paper reveals that, if one considers the use of semantic web technologies such as XML and ontologies for the development of information standards that allows integration of different information systems, these systems could then be placed into applications such as web services and GRIDS tailored for biological studies. Such applications would provide automated functionality for database integration, workflow management, inclusion of provenance data, and notification of services.Originality/valueThe value of this paper is that it exemplifies how information professionals can make an impact on the discipline of bioinformatics, which historically has not been addressed by experts with information skills.

A web service is an interface of the software component that can be accessed by standard Internet protocols. The web service technology enables an application to application communication and interoperability. The increasing number of web service providers throughout the globe have produced numerous web services providing the same or similar functionality. This necessitates the use of tools and techniques to search the suitable services available over the Web. UDDI (universal description, discovery and integration) is the first initiative to find the suitable web services based on the requester's functional demands. However, the requester's requirements may also include non-functional aspects like quality of service (QoS). In this paper, the authors define a QoS model for QoS aware and business driven web service publishing and selection. The authors propose a QoS requirement format for the requesters, to specify their complex demands on QoS for the web service selection. The authors define a tree structure called quality constraint tree (QCT) to represent the requester's variety of requirements on QoS properties having varied preferences. The paper proposes a QoS broker based architecture for web service selection, which facilitates the requesters to specify their QoS requirements to select qualitatively optimal web service. A web service selection algorithm is presented, which ranks the functionally similar web services based on the degree of satisfaction of the requester's QoS requirements and preferences. The paper defines web service provider qualities to distinguish qualitatively competitive web services. The paper also presents the modelling and selection mechanism for the requester's alternative constraints defined on the QoS. The authors implement the QoS broker based system to prove the correctness of the proposed web service selection mechanism.

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.

Web services provide a promising solution to an age old need of fast and flexible information sharing among people and businesses. One of the key research issues in web services is selection of most pertinent web services. Selection of web service has become a tedious job because of the increasing number of service providers providing services with similar functionality. Therefore, a framework for selection and discovery of web service that can meet the non-functional requirements is needed. In this work, we have developed a selection tool (WSS-NFP) for web services which can rank services based on their non functional properties such as performance, delay etc. We have used soft computing techniques for selection and discovery of web services based on non functional properties. These properties are fuzzy in nature. A tool is developed and implemented that is generic in nature and can be customized for any application domain. As a core of this tool, it consists of Fuzzy System for ranking web services and Neural Network for fine tuning the membership functions for linguistic terms. Appropriate and fine tuned membership functions help in minimizing the output error measure and maximizing the performance index of the proposed tool. This tool is basically a Neuro-Fuzzy system for ranking web services of any domain.

10 - Web Services—An Introduction to the Future

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.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) introduced the web services as distributed computing components that can be independently deployed and invoked by other services or software to execute composite services that represent an end-to-end business process. An important problem in the SOA is the web service selection and composition problem which involves selecting the right web services mix to construct the best service composition that achieves the consumers Service Level Agreement (SLA) requirements. In this chapter we propose different methods to solve the problem of the business processes execution engine web service selection and services composition construction in the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).  The chapter provides different mechanisms to improve the web services selection and composition using dynamic techniques. The main goal is to satisfy the services' requirements expressed as the SLA and to enhance the services selection and composition by increasing the availability and decreasing the response time of the service compositions.