A Method to Support Fault Tolerance Design in Service Oriented Computing Systems

Service Oriented Computing relies on the integration of heterogeneous software technologies and infrastructures that provide developers with a common ground for composing services and producing applications flexibly. However, this approach eases software development but makes dependability a big challenge. Integrating such diverse software items raise issues that traditional testing is not able to exhaustively cope with. In this context, tolerating faults, rather than attempt to detect them solely by testing, is a more suitable solution. This paper proposes a method to support a tailored design of fault tolerance actions for the system being developed. This paper describes system failure behavior through an extensive fault injection campaign to figure out its criticalities and adopt the most appropriate countermeasures to tolerate operational faults. The proposed method is applied to two distinct SOC-enabling technologies. Results show how the achieved findings allow designers to understand the system failure behavior and plan fault tolerance.

Two Heads Are Better Than One

This paper examines how Web 2.0 may be used in organizations to support business intelligence activities. Five leading professional services firms in the Energy, IT, software and health industries were used as the field research sites and action research performed on their Web 2.0 tools and environment. Business intelligence was the most significant driver of service value to their clients. From the data, five key findings were observed on the strategic use of Web 2.0 in the leading services firms. Firstly, the firm is aware that social networking tools can improve employees’ performance. Secondly, there are more tools for tacit-to-tacit and tacit-to-explicit knowledge transfer than explicit-to-explicit and explicit-to-tacit. Thirdly, the firm has a higher number of tools where knowledge flows within itself and almost none for external knowledge flows. Fourthly, social network is part of normal work responsibilities. Finally, among KM tools that were most recognized as assisting social network use were of the Web 2.0 genre such as wikis, RSS feeds and instant messaging and blogging. The authors show that using Web 2.0 improves social networking and may be linked to a service professional’s individual performance.

Modelling Self-Led Trust Value Management in Grid and Service Oriented Infrastructures

Current developments in grid and service oriented technologies involve fluid and dynamic, ad hoc based interactions between delegates, which in turn, serves to challenge conventional centralised structured trust and security assurance approaches. Delegates ranging from individuals to large-scale VO (Virtual Organisations) require the establishment of trust across all parties as a prerequisite for trusted and meaningful e-collaboration. In this paper, a notable obstacle, namely how such delegates (modelled as nodes) operating within complex collaborative environment spaces can best evaluate in context to optimally and dynamically select the most trustworthy ad hoc based resource/service for e-consumption. A number of aggregated service case scenarios are herein employed in order to consider the manner in which virtual consumers and provider ad hoc based communities converge. In this paper, the authors take the view that the use of graph-theoretic modelling naturally leads to a self-led trust management decision based approach in which delegates are continuously informed of relevant up-to-date trust levels. This will lead to an increased confidence level, which trustful service delegation can occur. The key notion is of a self-led trust model that is suited to an inherently low latency, decentralised trust security paradigm.

Secure Key Generation for Static Visual Watermarking by Machine Learning in Intelligent Systems and Services

The Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) demands supportive technologies and new requirements for mobile collaboration across multiple platforms. One of its representative solutions is intelligent information security of enterprise resources for collaboration systems and services. Digital watermarking became a key technology for protecting copyrights. In this article, the authors propose a method of key generation scheme for static visual digital watermarking by using machine learning technology, neural network as its exemplary approach for machine learning method. The proposed method is to provide intelligent mobile collaboration with secure data transactions using machine learning approaches, herein neural network approach as an exemplary technology. First, the proposed method of key generation is to extract certain type of bit patterns in the forms of visual features out of visual objects or data as training data set for machine learning of digital watermark. Second, the proposed method of watermark extraction is processed by presenting visual features of the target visual image into extraction key or herein is a classifier generated in advance by the training approach of machine learning technology. Third, the training approach is to generate the extraction key, which is conditioned to generate watermark signal patterns, only if proper visual features are presented to the classifier. In the proposed method, this classifier which is generated by the machine learning process is used as watermark extraction key. The proposed method is to contribute to secure visual information hiding without losing any detailed data of visual objects or any additional resources of hiding visual objects as molds to embed hidden visual objects. In the experiments, they have shown that our proposed method is robust to high pass filtering and JPEG compression. The proposed method is limited in its applications on the positions of the feature sub-blocks, especially on geometric attacks like shrinking or rotation of the image.

Execution Management for Mobile Service-Oriented Environments

This paper presents an Execution Management System (EMS) for Grid services that builds on the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) while achieving “mobile awareness” by establishing a WS-Notification mechanism with mobile network session middleware. It builds heavily on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), used for managing sessions with mobile terminals (such as laptops and PDAs) where the services are running. Although the management of mobile services is different to that of ubiquitous services, the enhanced EMS manages both of them in a seamless fashion and incorporates all resources into one Mobile Dynamic Virtual Organization (MDVO). The described EMS has been implemented within the framework of the Akogrimo EU IST project and has been used to support mission critical application scenarios in public demonstrations, including composite and distributed applications made of both ubiquitous and mobile services within multiple domains.

A Service Oriented SLA Management Framework for Grid Environments

Traditionally, network Service Providers specify Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to guarantee service availability and performance to their customers. However, these SLAs are rather static and span a single provider domain. Thus, they are not applicable to a multi–domain environment. In this paper, the authors present a framework for automatic creation and management of SLAs in a multi-domain environment. The framework is based on Service Oriented Computing (SOC) and contains a collection of web service calls and modules that allow for the automatic creation, configuration, and delivery of an end-to-end SLA, created from the merging of the per-domain SLAs. This paper also presents a monitoring procedure to monitor the QoS guarantees stipulated in the SLA. The SLA establishment and monitoring procedures are tested through a Grid application scenario targeted to perform remote control and monitoring of instrument elements distributed across the Grid.

A Survey of Web Services Provision

Web services technologies promise to create new business applications by composing existing services and to publish these applications as services for further composition. The business logic of applications is described by abstract processes consisting of tasks which specify the required functionality. Web services provision refers to assigning concrete Web services to perform the constituent tasks of abstract processes. It describes a promising scenario where Web services are dynamically chosen and invoked according to their up-to-date functional and non-functional capabilities. It introduces many challenging problems and has therefore received much attention. In this article, the authors provide a comprehensive overview of current research efforts. The authors divide the lifecycle of Web services provision into three steps: service discovery, service selection, and service contracting. They also distinguish three types of Web services provision according to the functional relationship between services and tasks: independent provision, cooperative provision and multiple provision. Following this taxonomy, we investigate existing works in Web services provision, discuss open problems, and shed some light on potential research directions.

Investigating the Role of Service Encounter in Enhancing Customer Satisfaction

Recently, it is found that several pure e-tailers set up a customer service center where on-line shoppers can access a real person over the phone to answer their questions. However, there has been little systematic research examining how service encounter help to enhance customer satisfaction when a pure e-retail company set up a call center to provide additional services. This study conducted a questionnaire survey and collected data from persons who shopped on-line and had experiences in requesting help from customer service centers. 116 responses were collected and the data were then analyzed to examine the four relationships posited in the research model. The proposed research model suggests that service encounter significantly influences service quality and information quality, which can jointly predict customer satisfaction. Findings of this study help to advance the understanding of the role that service encounters play in enhancing customer satisfaction.

Engineering Financial Enterprise Content Management Services

The demand is increasing to replace the current cost ineffective and bad time-to-market hardcopy publishing and delivery of content in the financial world. Financial Enterprise Content Management Services (FECMS) have been deployed in intra-enterprises and over the Internet to network with customers. This paper presents Web service technologies that enable a unified scalable FECMS framework for intra-enterprise content flow and inter-enterprise interactions, combining existing sub-systems and disparate business functions. Additionally, the authors demonstrate the key privacy and access control policies for internal content flow management (such as content editing, approval, and usage) as well as external access control for the Web portal and institutional programmatic users. Through the modular design of an integrated FECMS, this research illustrates how to systematically specify privacy and access control policies in each part of the system with Enterprise Privacy Authorization Language (EPAL). Finally, a case study in an international banking enterprise demonstrates how both integration and control can be achieved.

Knowledge Extraction from a Computational Consumer Model Based on Questionnaire Data Observed in Retail Service

In service industries, matching the level of demand of the consumer and the level of service of the provider is important because it requires the service provider to have knowledge of consumer-related factors. Therefore, an intelligent model of the consumer is needed to estimate such factors because they cannot be observed directly by the service provider. This paper describes a method for computational modeling of the consumer by understanding his or her behavior based on datasets observed in real services. The proposed method constructs a probabilistic structure model by integrating questionnaire data and a Bayesian network, which incorporates nonlinear and non-Gaussian variables as conditional probabilities. The proposed method is applied to an analysis of the requested function from customers regarding the continued use of an item of interest. The authors obtained useful knowledge for function design and marketing from the constructed model by a simulation and sensitivity analysis.