Web Services E-Contract and Reuse

The Internet and the Service-oriented Computing (SOC) paradigm (Papazoglou, Traverso & Dustdar, 2008) made the electronic interchange of services possible. Consequently, the scope of Business Process Management (BPM) (Khalaf, Keller & Leymann, 2006) has broadened from intra-organizational service interchange to interorganizational cooperation. In this new scenario, organizations are concentrating efforts on their main business and subcontracting electronic services (e-services) from partners. Business processes that cross organizational borders are more complex, thus a simple definition of the process is no longer enough to ensure trust. An electronic contract (e-contract) is necessary to define the rights and obligations of each involved party and monitoring of business process execution becomes mandatory.

Social Networks and Web Services-Based Systems

Web services are paving the way for a new type of business applications. This can be noticed from the large number of standards and initiatives related to Web services (Margaria, 2007; Papazoglou et al., 2007; Yu et al., 2008), which tackle a variety of issues such as security, fault tolerance, and substitution. These issues hinder the automatic composition of Web services. Composition handles the situation of a user’s request that cannot be satisfied by any single, available Web service, whereas a composite Web service obtained by combining available Web services may be used. Despite the tremendous capabilities that empower Web services, they still lack some capabilities that would propel them to a higher level of adoption by the IT community and make them compete with other integration middleware like CORBA and .Net. As a result, Web services adoption could be slowed down if some issues such as the complexity of their discovery are not properly addressed (Langdom, 2003). For this particular issue of discovery, we examine in this chapter the use of social networks (Ethier, visited in 2008; Wasserman and Glaskiewics, 1994). Such networks permit to establish between people relationships of different types like friendship, kinship, and conflict. These relationships are dynamic and, hence, adjusted over time depending on different factors like outcomes of previous interaction experiences, and natures of partners dealt with. Replacing people with Web services is doable since Web services constantly engage in different types of interaction sessions with users and peers as well

Web Service Discovery, Composition, and Interoperability

Web services have been employed in a wide range of applications and have become a key technology in developing business operations on the Web. In order to leverage on the use of Web services, Web service operations such as discovery, composition, and interoperability need to be fully supported. Several approaches have been proposed for each of these operations but these have advantages and disadvantages as well as varying levels of suitability for different applications. This leads to a motivation to explore and to compare current approaches as well as to highlight problems of the operations and their possible solutions. In this chapter, an introduction, a brief survey, problems and possible solutions to the three Web service operations mentioned above are discussed. The research opportunities and possible future directions on Web service are also presented.

Case Based Web Services

Web services are Internet-based application components published using standard interface description languages and universally available via uniform communication protocols (Singh & Huhns, 2005). Web services can be also considered the provision of services over electronic networks such as the Internet and wireless networks (Rust & Kannan, 2003). Web services is a new computing paradigm that has drawn increasing attention in information technology (Deitel, et al, 2004, p.13), information systems, and is playing a pivotal role in service computing and service intelligence (Singh & Huhns, 2005). Web services is a new business paradigm that is playing an important role in e-business, ecommerce and business intelligence (Wang, et al, 2006). The key motive for the rapid development of web services is the ability to discover services that fulfil users’ demands, negotiate service contracts and have the services delivered where and when the users request them (Tang, et al, 2007). The current research trend is to add intelligent techniques to web services to facilitate discovery, invocation, composition, and recommendation of web services (Wang, et al, 2006).

Socio-Economic Effects on Mobile Phone Adoption Behavior among Older Consumers

Aging is one of the major trends that is about to change the structure of consumer markets. As people age, they face changes in their health and functioning, that make them differ from their younger counterparts. Retiring is one of the changes that people face when they age, it clearly gives them more opportunities to make choices and more time for decision-making, and therefore their consuming power shouldn’t be overlooked. As electronic services are continuously developed, it is important to analyze aging people and identify the typical characteristics that affect their mobile phone usage.

Situational Enterprise Services

The ability to rapidly find potential business partners as well as rapidly set up a collaborative business process is desirable in the face of market turbulence. Collaborative business processes are increasingly dependent on the integration of business information systems. Traditional linking of business processes has a large ad hoc character. Implementing situational enterprise services in an appropriate way will deliver the business more flexibility, adaptability and agility.Service-oriented architectures (SOA) are rapidly becoming the dominant computing paradigm. SOA is now being embraced by organizations everywhere as the key to business agility. Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX on the other hand provide good user interactions for successful service discovery, selection, adaptation, invocation and service construction. They also balance automatic integration of services and human interactions, disconnecting content from presentation in the delivery of the service. Another Web technology, such as semantic Web, makes automatic service discovery, mediation and composition possible. Integrating SOA, Web 2.0 Technologies and Semantic Web into a service-oriented virtual enterprise connects business processes in a much more horizontal fashion. To be able run these services consistently across the enterprise, an enterprise infrastructure that provides enterprise architecture and security foundation is necessary.The world is constantly changing. So does the business environment. An agile enterprise needs to be able to quickly and cost-effectively change how it does business and who it does business with. Knowing, adapting to diffident situations is an important aspect of today’s business environment. The changes in an operating environment can happen implicitly and explicitly. The changes can be caused by different factors in the application domain. Changes can also happen for the purpose of organizing information in a better way. Changes can be further made according to the users’ needs such as incorporating additional functionalities. Handling and managing diffident situations of service-oriented enterprises are important aspects of business environment. In the chapter, we will investigate how to apply new Web technologies to develop, deploy and executing enterprise services.

Integrated Business Process Designs and Current Applications of Workflow Systems in E-Business

To enable effective cross-departmental automations and global transactions, business processes modeling offer external views on their infrastructure processes to all partners in the enterprise, such as product data, quality, costs and delivery requirements, quantity quotations, process plan efficiency, and interactions for meta-, macro-, and micro- distributed process planning (Livari & Livari, 2006; McKendrick, 2006; Siller, Estruch, Vila, Abellan, & Romero, 2008; Kuechler & Vaishnzvi, 2008). Business process modeling is significant as EBusiness and enterprise integration drive the need to deploy activities online (Tagg, 2001; Aissi, Malu, & Srinivasan, 2002; Weiss & Amyot, 2005; Sewing, Rosemann & Dumas, 2006; Chen, Zhang & Zhou, 2007). These management systems employ integrated productivity tools, specialized technical support systems, such as CAD systems, graphic packages, enterprise-wide integrated software applications, for example, ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), CRM (Customer Relationship Management), mail and other communication systems. When the applications become more modulated and service oriented, stand-alone software will no longer be sufficient (Cimatti, Clarke, Giunchiglia & Roveri, 2000; Adner & Helfat, 2003; Andreescu, 2006).

Interoperability Issues of Business Processes

At the beginning of the third millennium, we are facing one of the most important transition challenges: to build an electronic society. In that movement, EC (Electronic Commerce) represents one of the major driving forces that survived two big failures in the past, represented by EDI (1980s) and “dotcom era” (1990s). Despite different network technologies, EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) over OSI (Open Systems Interconnections) vs. dotcom over the Internet both left out of the e-business too many companies (e.g. most of SMEs, Small-to-Medium Enterprises). After disillusionment and failure analysis, new expansion of EC is taking place, especially in the form of B2B. In such circumstances there is a lot of heterogeneity between business processes, supported applications and associated data on one side and different hardware, operating systems, database systems, network infrastructure, etc. on the other side, that make huge difficulties and barriers in achieving the full potential of EC (Medjahed et al., 2003; Kajan & Stoimenov, 2005; Hepp, 2006). Similar situation is taking place inside companies where A2A (Application-to-Application) costs for data integration and access software were about $2.5 billion in 2007 and are going to grow further (Bernstein & Hass, 2008).

Mobile Telephony as a Universal Service

The opening quote nicely conceptualizes one of the most difficult challenges managers and regulators in the telecommunications sector face. While such individuals are not, for the most part, concerned with world-safety, they do need to address similar diversity issues in order to be profitable and to provide true universal services (i.e., reasonably priced, high quality telecommunication services to everyone who wishes to use them). Similarly to John F. Kennedy, managers and regulators understand that one-service or set of regulations that fits all may not be a wise strategy. Rather, their offerings and regulatory mechanisms are always flexible, and they cater to a heterogonous subscriber market. While wireless service providers do try to cater to different market segments by offering a variety of service packages, regulators often employ a single set of regulations that serve the entire market. On the one hand, organizations offering mobile services to individuals attempt to segment the market to maximize various performance factors, such as usage airtime, revenues, and customer base. On the other hand, policies should be in place to avoid the discrimination of specific less profitable customer categories. In fact, in the 21st century, mobile telephony has become so critical for the well-being of millions of people that it is vital to ensure the fairness of mobile services delivery.

Perspectives on the Viable Mobile Virtual Community for Telemedicine

A virtual community is an electronically supported social network: it can be seen as a group of people who have regular social interaction, independent of time and space, because of a common interest such as a problem, task, or feeling exchange (Eysenbach, Powell, Englesakis, Rizo, & Stern, 2004; Rheingold, 1993). When independence of time and space is achieved through the use of mobile devices and wireless communication technologies, such a virtual community is called a Mobile Virtual Community (MVC). Existing research interests in the MVC domain are grouped into technology-centered interest, user-centered interest and businesscentered interest (El Morr & Kawash, 2007). The technology-centered aspects include issues such as platform design, development framework, mobile network bandwidth limits and intelligent agents. The user-centered issues include user interface, behavior, personalization, privacy, data security and trust. Business-centered aspects include marketing, investment and business models.