A Service Component Model and Implementation for Institutional Repositories

With the boom of digital resources, there are urgent requirements to set up and manage Institutional Repositories (IRs) for companies and/or organizations. Cloud computing opens a new paradigm to build IRs by providing diverse services. We apply cloud services in the building of IRs and present a new model, which is based on digital object model and service component architecture, and consists of five service components, namely ID, metadata, content, log, and annotation service component. The five components are implemented by five corresponding clouds. These clouds provide two kinds of services: Web service and mashup service. We develop a framework and a code generation tool to generate an IR that can be used to manage the digital resources by invoking the five cloud services. Our approach is applied to the digital library on the history of water conservancy in China of Tsinghua University Library to demonstrate its feasibility.

Service Elicitation Method Using Applied Qualitative Research Procedures

This chapter introduces QSE, the Qualitative Service Elicitation method. It applies qualitative research procedures in service elicitation. Service engineering practice lacks lightweight methods to identify service candidates in projects with tight schedules. QSE provides a systematic method to analyze requirement material in service-oriented systems development with a feasible effort. QSE uses the procedures of the grounded theory research method to elicit service candidates from business process descriptions and business use case descriptions. The chapter describes the method with examples and a case study.

A Methodology for UICC-Based Security Services in Pervasive Fixed Mobile Convergence Systems

This chapter presents the fundamental and security characteristics of UICC and current practices of UICC-based security services (e.g. banking, stock, network authentication, etc.) in pervasive FMC systems. Moreover, we propose a novel UICC-based service security framework (USF), which implements the essential security functionalities used for FMC services, to provide the integrated security infrastructure and secure FMC services. The USF can be utilized to authenticate users, preserve privacy, and protect network infrastructures and business models of telephony companies.

A Software Engineering Framework for Context-Aware Service-Based Processes in Pervasive Environments

Context-awareness is considered to be the cornerstone technique for developing pervasive computing applications that are flexible, adaptable, and capable of acting autonomously on behalf of the user. However, context-awareness introduces various software engineering challenges. The separation of concerns is a promising approach in the design of the context-aware adaptive processes (CAAPs) where the core logic is designed and implemented separately from the context handling and adaptation logics. In this respect, this chapter presents a conceptual framework for developing CAAPs and software infrastructure for efficient context management that together address the known software engineering challenges and facilitate the design and implementation tasks associated with such context-aware applications.

The Design Principles and Practices of Interoperable Smart Spaces

Smart spaces provide information about physical environments, shared with inherently dynamic applications. This chapter introduces a novel development approach with its focus on two key properties of smart space applications: the ability to interoperate and behave in a situation-sensitive manner. Sixteen principles are defined in order to guide the development of an interoperability platform for smart spaces and on how to create applications on top of it. The interoperability platform deals with information and is agnostic with respect to ontologies, programming languages, service frameworks, and communication technologies. The interoperability platform also supports extensibility, evolvability and context based adaptation, which allows new applications to be added and to behave in a situation based manner. Agile application development is based on scenario specifications, implemented by the means of the ontology and model driven development. The approach has been applied to the development of smart personal spaces, smart indoor spaces, and smart city applications.

QoS-Oriented Service Computing

The idea of cloud computing aligns with new dimension emerging in service-oriented infrastructure where service provider does not own physical infrastructure but instead outsources to dedicated infrastructure providers. Cloud computing has now become a new computing paradigm as it can provide scalable IT infrastructure, QoS-assured services, and customizable computing environment. However, it still remains a challenging task to provide QoS assured services to serve customers with minimized cost, while also to guarantee the maximization of the business objectives (e.g. margin profit) to service provider and infrastructure provider within certain constraints. In order to address these issues, this chapter proposes a QoS-oriented service computing methodology, and discusses associated topics including service level agreement and associated reference architecture, green service, service metering and metrics, service monitoring, and on-demand resource provisioning. In the case study, we demonstrate how we employ QoS-oriented service computing in a multi-server, multi-user on-line game to facilitate the on-demand resource provisioning to maintain quality of service and quality of experience.

Community Computing

Many huge and complex pervasive services can be provided by employing cooperation among smart objects like agents. To offer such services efficiently, community computing was proposed as a new computing paradigm, in which pervasive services are provided through cooperation among agents (Jung, 2006). To design a community computing system, we proposed two abstraction models distinguished by intelligence level of community; the simple model (Jung, 2006) and the static community situation based model. In addition, we introduced a development process based upon the Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) approach for fast and convenient implementation of community computing systems. In this chapter, our contribution is to organize previous work related to cooperation and then clearly present the position of community computing in comparison. In addition, we refine the proposed two models including all their intermediate models in the development process, such as CCM (Community Computing Model), CIM-PI (Platform Independent Community Computing Implementation Model), and CIM-PS (Platform Specific Community Computing Implementation Model). To help automatic transformation from CCM to source codes, we improve a development toolkit called CDTK (Community Computing Development Toolkit). By using CDTK, a community computing system can be implemented semi-systematically. Finally, to verify the feasibility of community computing, we present implementation results of two scenarios by using proposed two models and CDTK. Through the simulated results, we examine the possibility of community computing.

High Level Definition of Event-Based Applications for Pervasive Systems

Within pervasive intelligent environments, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) will surround and serve us at any place and any time. A proper usability is considered essential for WSNs supporting real life applications. With this chapter, we aim at ease of use for specifying new applications that have to autonomously cope with expected and unexpected heterogeneity, sudden failures, and energy efficiency. Starting with general design criteria for applications in WSNs, we created a user-centric design flow for pervasive applications. The design flow provides very high abstraction and user guidance to refrain the user from implementation-, deployment- and hardware-details including heterogeneity of the available sensor nodes. Automatic event configuration is accomplished by using a flexible Event Specification Language (ESL) and Event Decision Trees (EDTs) for distributed detection and determination of real world phenomena. EDTs autonomously adapt to heterogeneous availability of sensing capabilities by pruning and subscription to other nodes for missing information. We present one of numerous simulated scenarios proving the robustness and energy efficiency with regard to the required network communications. From these, we learned how to deduce appropriate bounds for configuration of collaboration region and leasing time by asking for expected properties of the phenomena to be detected.

How to Choose the Right Cloud

Cloud computing is a recent trend in IT that moves computing and data away from desktop and portable PCs into large data centers, and outsources the “applications” (hardware and software) as services over the Internet. Cloud computing promises to increase the velocity with which applications are deployed, increase innovation, and lower costs, all while increasing business agility. But, is the migration to the Cloud the most profitable option for every business? This chapter presents a study of the basic parameters for estimating the potential infrastructure and software costs deriving from building and deploying applications on cloud and on-premise assets. Estimated user demand and desired quality attributes related to an application are also addressed in this chapter as they are aspects of the decision problem that also influence the choice between cloud and in-house solutions.

Service Discovery Architecture and Protocol Design for Pervasive Computing

Service discovery is an essential task in pervasive computing environments. Simple and efficient service discovery enables heterogeneous and pervasive computing devices and services to be easier to use. In this chapter, we discuss the key issues and solutions for service discovery architecture and protocol design for pervasive computing environments. Service design addresses the static and dynamic properties of services. Directory design focuses on scalability, topology, and infrastructure issues. Service integration uses services as building blocks to achieve complex services. Cross-layer design optimizes the performance of the protocols for ad hoc and sensor networks by integrating service discovery processes into lower layers of the network protocols. Security and privacy design protects the information, communication, devices, and services. We also point out the future research issues.