Interoperable Semantic and Syntactic Service Discovery for Ambient Computing Environments

2010 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 13-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonia Ben Mokhtar ◽  
Pierre-Guillaume Raverdy ◽  
Aitor Urbieta ◽  
Roberto Speicys Cardoso

The inherent heterogeneity of ambient computing environments and their constant evolution requires middleware platforms to manage networked components designed, developed, and deployed independently. Such management must also be efficient to cater for resource-constrained devices and highly dynamic situations due to the spontaneous appearance and disappearance of networked resources. For service discovery protocols (SDP), one of the main functions of service-oriented architectures (SOA), the efficiency of the matching of syntactic service descriptions is most often opposed to the fullness of the semantic approach. As part of the PLASTIC middleware, the authors present an interoperable discovery platform that features an efficient matching and ranking algorithm able to process service descriptions and discovery requests from both semantic and syntactic SDPs. To that end, the paper defines a generic, modular description language able to record service functional properties, potentially extended with semantic annotations. The proposed discovery platform leverages the advanced communication capabilities provided by the PLASTIC middleware to discover services in multi-network environments. An evaluation of the prototype implementation demonstrates that multi-protocols service matching supporting various levels of expressiveness can be achieved in ambient computing environments.

Author(s):  
Sonia Ben Mokhtar ◽  
Pierre-Guillaume Raverdy ◽  
Aitor Urbieta ◽  
Roberto Speicys Cardoso

The inherent heterogeneity of ambient computing environments and their constant evolution requires middleware platforms to manage networked components designed, developed, and deployed independently. Such management must also be efficient to cater for resource-constrained devices and highly dynamic situations due to the spontaneous appearance and disappearance of networked resources. For service discovery protocols (SDP), one of the main functions of service-oriented architectures (SOA), the efficiency of the matching of syntactic service descriptions is most often opposed to the fullness of the semantic approach. As part of the PLASTIC middleware, the authors present an interoperable discovery platform that features an efficient matching and ranking algorithm able to process service descriptions and discovery requests from both semantic and syntactic SDPs. To that end, the paper defines a generic, modular description language able to record service functional properties, potentially extended with semantic annotations. The proposed discovery platform leverages the advanced communication capabilities provided by the PLASTIC middleware to discover services in multi-network environments. An evaluation of the prototype implementation demonstrates that multi-protocols service matching supporting various levels of expressiveness can be achieved in ambient computing environments.


Author(s):  
Giuseppe Di Modica ◽  
Orazio Tomarchio ◽  
Lorenzo Vita

Resource and service discovery in SOAs: A P2P oriented semantic approachAn intense standardization process is favouring the convergence of grids and Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs). One of the benefits of such technological convergence is that grid resources and applications can be virtualized by services and offered through the SOA paradigm. In the broad and interoperable scenarios enabled by the SOA, involving the participation of several grid infrastructures across many administrative domains, service discovery can be a serious issue. In this paper we present a P2P-based infrastructure that leverages semantic technologies to support a scalable and accurate service discovery process. The key concept of the presented idea is the creation of an overlay network organized in several semantic groups of peers, each specialized in answering queries pertaining to specific applicative domains. Groups are formed by clustering together peers offering services that are semantically related. The architecture details of the proposed solution are presented. A system prototype has also been implemented and validated through a case study deployed on the PlanetLab testbed.


Author(s):  
Anton Michlmayr ◽  
Philipp Leitner ◽  
Florian Rosenberg ◽  
Schahram Dustdar

Service-oriented Architectures (SOA) and Web services have received a lot of attention from both industry and academia. Services as the core entities of every SOA are changing regularly based on various reasons. This poses a clear problem in distributed environments since service providers and consumers are generally loosely coupled. Using the publish/subscribe style of communication service consumers can be notified when such changes occur. In this chapter, we present an approach that leverages event processing mechanisms for Web service runtime environments based on a rich event model and different event visibilities. Our approach covers the full service lifecycle, including runtime information concerning service discovery and service invocation, as well as Quality of Service attributes. Furthermore, besides subscribing to events of interest, users can also search in historical event data. We show how this event notification support was integrated into our service runtime environment VRESCo and give some usage examples in an application context.


Author(s):  
Gerhard Austaller

The chapter “Ubiquitous Services and Business Processes” discussed the benefits for real time enterprises of service oriented architectures (SOA) in terms of reusability and flexibility. Web services are one incarnation of SOA. This chapter gives a brief introduction to SOA. It discusses the attributes that define SOA, the roles of the participants in a service oriented environment. The essence of SOA is that clients use services offered by a service provider to get a task done. For the moment we simplify service to “a software component with network connection”. Services are offered with a description at wellknown “places” (also called registries, repositories), where clients choose services according to their needs. The chapter discusses several approaches to describe services and to look for them. Moreover, some well-known systems, and also current research, are discussed.


Author(s):  
Ivano De Furio ◽  
Giovanni Frattini ◽  
Luigi Romano

Organizations in all sectors of business and government are pursuing service-oriented architecture (SOA) initiatives in response to their need for increased business agility. This is particularly true for mobile telecommunications companies. That is why mobile telecom operators need to research new and innovative sources of revenue. Innovation is not an easy task. It requires embracing a new way of doing business, where new technologies are fundamental. SOA architecture and Web services technology are proposed by IT industry as the best solution to create a network of partnership and new services, but despite software producer claims, interoperability issues arise with service composition. Such a problem can be significantly reduced by adopting a semantic approach in service description and service discovery. Our research is focused on new methods and tools for building high personalized, virtual e-business services. A new service provisioning architecture based on Web services has been conceived, taking into account issues related to end-user mobility. The following pages deal with a proposal for creating real localized, personalized virtual environments using Web services and domain ontologies. In particular, to overcome interoperability issues that could arise from a lack of uniformity in service descriptions, we propose a way for controlling and enforcing annotation policies based on a Service Registration Authority. It allows services to be advertised according to guidelines and domain rules. Furthermore, this solution enables enhanced service/component discovery and validation, helping software engineers to build services by composing building blocks and provision/deliver a set of personalized services.


Author(s):  
Dana Petcu ◽  
Georgiana Macariu ◽  
Alexandru Cârstea ◽  
Marc Frîncu

Service-oriented computing is an interesting paradigm not only for building business applications but also for scientific applications requiring a loosely-coupled communication system between its components. In particular, scientific applications involving symbolic computations that are both computational and data intensive have proved in the last years to be adequate for implementation in service-oriented architectures, mainly due to the standards promoted for communications or service discovery. This chapter discusses the main issues and problems encountered in the transition from the classical symbolic computations based on stand-alone computer algebra systems towards service-oriented symbolic computations, such as building services from legacy codes, discover, compose and orchestrate services, standardize the exchange data formats. Moreover, several new approaches to solve at least partially these transition problems have been recently implemented, tested and are revealed in this chapter.


Author(s):  
Ivano De Furio ◽  
Giovanni Frattini ◽  
Luigi Romano

Organizations in all sectors of business and government are pursuing service-oriented architecture (SOA) initiatives in response to their need for increased business agility. This is particularly true for mobile telecommunications companies. That is why mobile telecom operators need to research new and innovative sources of revenue. Innovation is not an easy task. It requires embracing a new way of doing business, where new technologies are fundamental. SOA architecture and Web services technology are proposed by IT industry as the best solution to create a network of partnership and new services, but despite software producer claims, interoperability issues arise with service composition. Such a problem can be significantly reduced by adopting a semantic approach in service description and service discovery. Our research is focused on new methods and tools for building high personalized, virtual e-business services. A new service provisioning architecture based on Web services has been conceived, taking into account issues related to end-user mobility. The following pages deal with a proposal for creating real localized, personalized virtual environments using Web services and domain ontologies. In particular, to overcome interoperability issues that could arise from a lack of uniformity in service descriptions, we propose a way for controlling and enforcing annotation policies based on a Service Registration Authority. It allows services to be advertised according to guidelines and domain rules. Furthermore, this solution enables enhanced service/component discovery and validation, helping software engineers to build services by composing building blocks and provision/deliver a set of personalized services.


2011 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Crasso ◽  
Alejandro Zunino ◽  
Marcelo Campo

Discovering services acquires importance as Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) becomes an adopted paradigm. SOC’s most popular materializations, namely Web Services technologies, have different challenges related to service discovery and, in turn, many approaches have been proposed. As these approaches are different, one solution may be better than another according to certain requirements. In consequence, choosing a service discovery system is a hard task. To alleviate this task, this paper proposes eight criteria, based on the requirements for discovering services within common service-oriented environments, allowing the characterization of discovery systems. These criteria cover functional and non-functional aspects of approaches to service discovery. The results of the characterization of 22 contemporary approaches and potential research directions for the area are also shown.


Author(s):  
Marco Crasso ◽  
Alejandro Zunino ◽  
Marcelo Campo

Discovering services acquires importance as Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) becomes an adopted paradigm. SOC’s most popular materializations, namely Web Services technologies, have different challenges related to service discovery and, in turn, many approaches have been proposed. As these approaches are different, one solution may be better than another according to certain requirements. In consequence, choosing a service discovery system is a hard task. To alleviate this task, this paper proposes eight criteria, based on the requirements for discovering services within common service-oriented environments, allowing the characterization of discovery systems. These criteria cover functional and non-functional aspects of approaches to service discovery. The results of the characterization of 22 contemporary approaches and potential research directions for the area are also shown.


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