Data migration has become a priority in many industries, spawned by a variety of business needs. Most of the existing tools for Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) process of data migration are piece-meal and do not present a complete solution. Moreover, while research has focused on the problem of Schema Mapping, a key step in the ETL process, most of the current algorithms do not perform well on real-world data. Researchers have suggested the use of Domain Knowledge to enhance schema mapping. In this paper, we use domain knowledge in an innovative manner to improve schema mapping in an 'actual' industrial setting. Further, we take a comprehensive view of the data migration problem and present an end-to-end system for the ETL process, utilizing existing tools for each step and building connectors, wherever required. We focus on Data Migration for Telecom Billing and utilize domain knowledge captured in an ontology, a thesaurus and a set of rules to improve schema mapping. Experiments conducted on a real-life data demonstrate the effectiveness of our system and validate the utility of domain knowledge in data migration projects.

Web services provide an instantiation of the loosely coupled service–oriented architecture and facilitate the process of enterprise application integration by encapsulating information, software, and other resources. However, to exploit the true potential of web services, it is critical to develop technologies and tools for composing new services from existing ones. While numerous composition approaches have been developed in the past, very little has been done towards tooling. What is clearly lacking is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to ease the process of composition, thereby reducing development time and integration efforts. In this paper, we build on our previous work on service composition, and present an IDE for end–to–end composition of web services. We elaborate on the design of the IDE, describe its integration with existing technologies, and discuss its usability based on the findings of a user survey.

Workflows often operate in volatile environments in which the component services' QoS changes frequently. Optimally adapting to these changes becomes an important problem that must be addressed by the Web service composition and execution (WSCE) system being utilized. We adopt the A-WSCE framework that utilizes a three-stage approach for composing and executing Web workflows. The A-WSCE framework offers a way to adapt by defining multiple workflows and switching among them in case of component failure or changes in the QoS parameters. However, the A-WSCE framework suffers from the limitations imposed by a simple strategy of periodically checking the QoS offerings of randomly picked providers in order to decide whether the current workflow is optimal. To address these limitations, we associate the value of changed information (VOC) with each workflow and utilize the VOC to update which workflow to execute. We empirically demonstrate the improved performance of the workflows selected using the new approach in comparison to the original framework.

Web services simplify enterprise application integration by facilitating reuse of existing components for creating new services. In a dynamic environment, it is imperative to design a Web Service Composition and Execution (WSCE) system that adapts to failure of component services or changes in their QoS offerings. In this paper, we motivate a staged approach for adaptive WSCE (A-WSCE) that cleanly separates the functional and non-functional requirements of a new service, and enables different environmental changes to be absorbed at different stages of composition and execution. We use Synthy, a prototype service creation environment, to implement our solution and demonstrate its effectiveness.

A composite service is typically specified using a language such as BPEL4WS and orchestrated by a single coordinator node in a centralized manner. The coordinator receives the client request, makes the required data transformations and invokes the component Web services as per the specification. However, in certain scenarios businesses might want to impose restrictions on access to the data they provide or the source from which they can accept data. Centralized orchestration can lead to violation of these data flow constraints as the central coordinator has access to the input and output data of all the component Web services. In many cases existing methods of data encryption and authentication are not sufficient to handle such constraints. These data flow constraints, thus, present obstacles for composite Web service orchestration. In this paper we propose a solution for orchestrating composite Web services under data flow constraints. The solution is based on decentralized orchestration, in which a composite Web service is broken into a set of partitions, one partition per component Web service. To overcome data flow constraints, each partition is executed within the same domain as the corresponding component Web service and hence, has the same access rights. However, there are, in general, many ways to decentralize a composite Web service. We apply a rule based filtering mechanism to choose a set of partitions that does not violate the specified dataflow constraints.