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The proposed functional data service framework provides a way of making heterogeneous data sources more accessible to applications and manageable to developers by integrating a service-oriented architecture, a functional data model, the semantic Web, and other related technologies. With the supports of the proposed mechanism, different data sources with their supporting programming technologies are annotated with semantics to facilitate data advertisement and discovery. The data and their relationships in the proposed framework are modelled as a number of functions to form functional data models and these models are realised as web services, so the interfaces for accessing these data can be published. Semantic Web services and ontologies are used to describe the characteristics and facets of data sources. This paper describes the structure of the proposed framework and its advantages in integrating heterogeneous data sources. The paper includes an example to illustrate the main characteristics of the proposed framework.

E-Business and E-Commerce applications have evolved and been revolutionized through emerging Web-based service-oriented technologies. These advanced technologies include Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) and Web services that stimulate evolution of the business world into a new e-business platform. This web based platform (requires a flexible IT infrastructure) provides improved customer experiences and can streamline business process to create new business values in a fast changing business environment. Recently, we have seen an explosion in the number and the diversity of digital communities. Enabled by emerging technologies such as social networking and 3D internet, these digital communities are providing new forms of interactions and collaborations. In addition, Service Science, Management and Engineering are emerging as a new multi-disciplinary research and academic effort to make the service sector more productive and innovative. SOA/SOC not only provides a new concept in the design and management of software systems but also provides IT people with more agility than before in terms of software interoperability, reusability and visibility. In this talk, we will present the industry trends and directions on service oriented computing and applying SOA/SOC in building next generation web based collaborative applications, software as a service, and IT-enabled services.

Due to the dynamic nature, such as runtime composition and evaluation, it is critical for an SOA system to consider its data provenance, which concerns security, reliability, and integrity of data as it is routed in the system. In a traditional software system, one can focus on the software itself to determine the security, reliability, and integrity; however, in an SOA system, one also needs to consider the origins and routes of data and their impact, i.e., data provenance. This paper first analyzes the unique natures and characteristics of data provenance in an SOA system. Then it proposes a new framework to classify data provenance and collect data in SOA systems. Finally, this paper uses an example to illustrate these concepts and techniques

Web service technology enables seamless integration of different software to fulfill dynamic business demands in a platform-neutral fashion. However, the adoption of loosely-coupled and distributed services will cause trustworthiness problems. In this article, we present an experience-based evaluation of service’s trustworthiness based on trust experience (understanding) and trust requirements (policy). We utilize ontology to specify past experiences of services and trustworthy requirements of the requester. Before invoking found services, the addressed method can help the requester evaluate the trustworthiness of the services based on his or her trustworthy requirements and past experiences of the services. Furthermore, we also present an evaluation method for composite services by taking the structure of the composite services into account. The main contribution of the paper is providing evaluation methods for Web services such that the service requester can make better decisions in selecting found services in terms of service’s trustworthiness.

The architecture of SOA-based applications is different from traditional software architecture where the architecture is mainly static. The architecture of an SOA-based application is dynamic, i.e., the application may be composed at runtime using existing services. Thus SOA has provided a new direction for software architecture study, where the architecture is determined at runtime and architecture can be dynamically changed at runtime to meet the new software requirements. This paper proposes an architecture classification scheme for SOA-based applications. Using this classification, several well-known SOA-based applications are reviewed including the architectures proposed and adopted by major computer companies and standard organizations. The architecture classification provides a unified way to evaluate a variety of architectures for SOA-based applications.

The emerging paradigm of Web services opens a new way of Web application design and development to quickly develop and deploy Web applications by integrating independently published Web services components to conduct new business transactions. As research aiming at facilitating Web services integration and verification, WS-Net is an executable architectural description language incorporating the semantics of colored Petri-net with the style and understandability of object-oriented concepts. WS-Net describes each Web services component in three layers: interface net declares the services that the component provides to other components; interconnection net specifies the services that the component acquires to accomplish its mission; and interoperation net describes the internal operational behaviors of the component. As an architectural model that formalizes the architectural topology and behaviors of each Web services component as well as the entire system, WS-Net facilitates the verification and monitoring of Web services integration.

Electronic meeting control has been the focus of many research efforts; however, extensively adopted standards are still unavailable. In this paper, we present a generic model for electronic meeting control. Our model is based on the formal meeting protocol commonly known as the parliamentary procedure or Robert's Rules of Order (RRO). Capturing the essential features of traditional RRO, we suggest extension mechanisms in order to exploit the capabilities of electronic media. Centered on the concept of a discussion thread, our extended RRO model can handle concurrent meeting activities, multiple floors, amendment nesting, and discussion hierarchies. M-Net, an electronic meeting system, is introduced as an example supported by our model.

Web application development differs from the development of traditional software in several significant ways; therefore requirements engineering for Web applications entails new demands accordingly. This paper proposes an extreme Web requirements engineering - mockup-driven fast-prototyping methodology to help elicit and finalize system requirements, as well as facilitate adjustment to quickly changing user requirements typical to Web applications. Supporting the inclusion of customer feedback early in the development process, this strategy minimizes the risk of wasting valuable development efforts because of ambiguous or incomplete specifications. Real-life experiences of the use of the methodology in industry are reported as examples.

A Web service is a software application published on the Web and accessible through standard Internet protocols. Multimedia Web services generally integrates multimedia contents over Web services. Core techniques of web services need to be enhanced accordingly in order to facilitate multimedia transportation and handling. Seamlessly integrated with simple object access protocol (SOAP), this paper presents a model for network router supporting dynamic selection and binding of most efficient protocol serving for quality of service (QoS) based multimedia Web services.

Abstract Web application development can be very complicated without an appropriate framework, architecture and application model. A good implementation model can help application developers communicate with clients, consolidate the design before starting the development, speed up the development, and make the code highly reusable. This paper proposes a mockup‐driven fast prototyping methodology (MODFM) for the development of Web applications. It is built on the most recent Web technologies: EJB, JSP, Servlet, XML, Struts, and Web application server. A two‐tier Model‐View‐Controller (MVC) architecture is proposed as the underlying backbone and a supporting environment is tailored specifically in order to enable development. Two basic supporting tools are provided: the dynamic menu generator and the generic code generator, which produce code for front‐end, back‐end and database schemas. MODFM helps to generate fully functional mockup systems for the client to review at an early analysis stage, and continues to provide guidance throughout follow‐on development phases. Real‐life experiences on the use of this methodology in industry are presented as examples. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In this paper, a manageable Web services hub framework and enabling technologies for e-sourcing are proposed for buyers, suppliers, service providers and trading partners to register business, user and service information as well as to provision and subscribe to services. The proposed framework enables a business to dynamically configure its business processes to integrate with existing Web services provided by other enterprises based on service requirements. Next, a multi-level security mechanism ensuring secure communications in a hub or among hubs is presented. An advanced Web services discovery mechanism is introduced after that for looking up multiple UDDI registries and aggregating results in an efficient manner. A working system of this framework, Managed e-Hub, which provides an infrastructure for enabling next generation e-utilities in a secure and controlled environment, is also presented in this paper. Some further research ideas are given at the end of the paper.

XML is emerging as an important format for describing the schema of documents and data to facilitate integration of applications in a variety of industry domains. An important issue that naturally arises is the requirement to generate, store and access XML documents. It is important to reuse existing data management systems and repositories for this purpose. We describe the XML Access Server (XAS), a general purpose XML based storage and retrieval system which provides the appearance of a large set of XML documents while retaining the data in underlying federated data sources that could be relational, object-oriented, or semi-structured. XAS automatically maps the underlying data into virtual XML components when mappings between DTDs and underlying schemas are established. The components can be presented as XML documents or assembled into larger components. XAS manages the relationship between XML components and the mapping in the form of document composition logic. The versatility in its ways to generate XML documents enables XAS to serve a large number of XML components and documents efficiently and expediently.

Recently it has been witnessed that intelligent software agents are used in various e-commerce applications where dynamic and heterogeneous interactions between organizations and individuals are involved. The involvement of agents in e-commerce shows promises of re-shaping the ways business is conducted in areas such as shopping, pricing, negotiation, auction, and brokerages, to name a few. Automation brought by e-commerce agents is expected to reduce certain types of frictional costs and time incurred in trading. However, many theoretical, technological, sociological and legal aspects still need to be addressed before such opportunities become a significant reality.

Reversible execution has not been fully exploited in symbolic debuggers. Debuggers that can undo instructions usually incur a significant performance penalty during a debugging session. We describe an efficient reversible debugging mechanism based on program instrumentation. The approach enables repetitive debugging sessions with selectable reversible routines and recording modes. Experimental results indicate that the execution penalty can be significantly reduced with moderate code growth.

Hard-real-time schedulability analysis is carried out based on the assumption that the worst-case execution time (WCET) of each task is known. Cycle-stealing Direct Memory Access (DMA) I/O steals bus cycles from an executing program and prolongs the execution time of the program. Because of the difficulty in bounding the interference on the executing program, cycle-stealing DMA I/O is often disabled in hard-real-time systems. This paper presents an analytical method for bounding the WCET of a program executing concurrently with cycle-stealing DMA I/O. This is an extension of our previous work which bounded the WCET of a straight-line sequence of instructions when cycle-stealing operations are allowed. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with experiments on several programs.

Decision-support applications require the ability to query against large amounts of detailed historical data. We are exploiting parallel technology to improve query response time through query decomposition, CPU and I/O parallelism, and client/server approach. IBM System/390 Parallel Query Server is built on advanced and low-cost CMOS microprocessors for decision-support applications. We discuss our design, implementation and performance of a scalable parallel query server.>

The imprecise computation technique has been proposed as a way to handle transient overload and to enhance fault tolerance of real-time systems. In a system based on this technique, each time-critical task is designed in such a way that it can produce a usable, approximate result in time whenever a failure or overload prevents it from producing the desired, precise result. This paper describes ways to implement imprecise computations, models to characterize them and algorithms for scheduling them. An imprecise mechanism for the generation and use of approximate results can be integrated in a natural way with a traditional fault-tolerance mechanism. An architectural framework for this integration is described.>

Presents a database access characterization method that first distinguishes three types of access pattern from a trace-locality within a transaction, random accesses by transactions, and sequential accesses by long queries. The authors describe a concise way to characterize the access skew across the randomly accessed pages by assuming that the large number of data pages may be logically grouped into a small number of partitions, such that the frequency of accessing each page within a partition can be treated as equal. They present an extensive validation of the buffer hit predictions, both for single-node as well as multiple-node systems, based on access characterization using production database traces. This approach can be applied to predict the buffer hit probability of a composite workload from those of its component files.>

The authors study dynamic load balancing algorithms in loosely coupled hard-real-time systems. The gradient model, focused addressing and the bidding methods are used. The gradient model entails transferring backlogged tasks to nearby idle processors according to pressure gradient indirectly established by request from idle processors. The focused addressing node uses network-wide surplus information in determining the target node to send excessive tasks to. Busy nodes in the bidding method send out requests for bids to migrate tasks that are not to be completed. In the model, each job is divided into a hard task and a soft task. All hard tasks must be finished by their deadlines and will not be migrated to other nodes. If a soft task cannot be completed by its deadline, it can be migrated to a neighboring node with less load or more surplus CPU time. Three load-balancing algorithms were evaluated.>

Although decision-tree classification algorithms have been widely used for machine learning in artificial intelligence, there has been little research toward evaluating the performance or quality of the current classification algorithms and investigating the time and computational complexity of constructing the smallest size decision tree which best distinguishes characteristics of multiple distinct groups. A known NP-complete problem, 3-exact cover, is used to prove that this problem is NP-complete. One prevalent classification algorithm in machine learning, ID3, is evaluated. The greedy search procedure used by ID3 is found to create anomalous behavior with inferior decision trees on a lot of occasions. A decision-tree classification algorithm, the intelligent decision-tree algorithm (IDA), that overcomes these anomalies with better classification performance is presented. A time analysis shows that IDA is more computationally efficient than ID3, and a simulation study indicates that IDA outperforms ID3.>

The knowledge of access skew (non-uniform access) in each database relation is useful for both workload management (buffer pool allocation, transaction routing, etc.), as well as capacity planning for changing workload mix. However, it is a challenging problem to characterize the access skew of a real database workload in a simple manner that can easily be used to compute the buffer hit probability under the LRU replacement policy. A concise way to characterize the access skew is proposed by assuming that the large number of data pages may be logically grouped into a small number of partitions such that the frequency of accessing each page within a partition can be treated as equal. Based on this approach, a recursive binary partitioning algorithm is presented that can infer the access skew from the buffer hit probabilities for a subset of the buffer sizes. This avoids explicit estimation of individual access frequencies for the large number of database pages. The method is validated of its ability to predict buffer hit from the skew characterization using production database traces.

Here the problem of scheduling tasks, each of which is logically decomposed into a mandatory subtask and an optional subtask, is considered. The mandatory subtask must be executed to completion in order to produce an acceptable result. The optional subtask begins after the mandatory subtask is completed and refines the result in order to reduce the error in the result. The optional subtask can be left incomplete. The error in the result of a task is equal to the processing time of the unfinished portion of the optional subtask. Two preemptive algorithms for scheduling, on a uniprocessor system, n dependent tasks with rational ready times, deadlines, and processing times are described. An algorithm is optimal in the following sense: whenever feasible schedules that meet the ready time and deadline constraints of all tasks exist, it finds one that has the minimum total error of all tasks. One of the algorithms is optimal when the tasks have identical weights, and its time complexity is $O(n\log n)$. The other algorithm has time complexity $O(n^2 )$, but is optimal when tasks have different weights. A schedule is said to satisfy the $0/1$ constraint when every optional subtask is either completed or discarded. The problem of finding an optimal feasible schedule that satisfies the $0/1$ constraints and minimizes the total processing time of the discarded optional subtasks is NP-complete. Two algorithms for finding optimal schedules of dependent tasks on a uniprocessor system for the special case when all optional subtasks have identical processing times are presented.

The problem of scheduling periodic jobs in hard real-time systems that support imprecise computations is discussed. Timing faults are avoided in such systems by making available intermediate, imprecise results of acceptable quality when results of the desired quality cannot be produced on time. Two workload models of imprecise computations are presented. These models differ from traditional models in that a task may be terminated any time after it has produced an acceptable result. Each task is logically decomposed into a mandatory part followed by an optional part. In a feasible schedule, the mandatory part of every task is completed before the deadline of the task. The optional part refines the result produced by the mandatory part to reduce the error in the result.>

In real-time systems, jobs must be finished before their deadlines. When several jobs have similar requests, handling related operations together may improve both the response times of individual jobs and the total execution time of the system. This is because many jobs have common operations which can be performed only once if jobs are coalesced as a single job. Scheduling algorithms which use the technique of job coalescing to meet more job deadlines are studied. Optimal scheduling algorithms for different system models are investigated. Due to the high complexities of these optimal algorithms, several online heuristic algorithms and their performances are investigated.>

Consideration is given to the problem of scheduling tasks each of which is logically decomposed into a mandatory subtask and an optional subtask. The mandatory subtask must be executed to completion. If the available processor time is insufficient, the optional subtask can be left incomplete. The error in the result of a task is equal to the processing time of the unfinished portion of the optional subtask. A description is given of a preemptive algorithm for scheduling n dependent tasks with rational ready times, deadlines, and processing times on a uniprocessor system. This algorithm determines whether feasible schedules that meet the timing constraints of all tasks exist; when feasible schedules exist, it finds one that has the minimum total error. The complexity of this algorithm is O(n log n). A schedule is said to satisfy the 0/1 constraint when every optional subtask is either completed or discarded. The problem of finding an optimal feasible schedule that satisfies the 0/1 constraint and minimizes the number of discarded optional subtasks is NP-complete. Two algorithms are presented for finding optimal schedules of dependent tasks on a uniprocessor system for the special case when all optional subtasks have identical processing times.>

Several preemptive, priority-driven algorithms for scheduling periodic jobs on systems that support imprecise computations are described and evaluated. The algorithms are designed to keep the average error in the results produced over consecutive periods small. The approach taken here is to consider each task as consisting of two parts: a mandatory part that must be completed in order for the task to produce an acceptable result, and an optional part that refines the result produced by the mandatory part to reduce the error in the result. The mandatory parts of all tasks have hard deadlines; the rate-monotone algorithm is used to schedule them to meet all deadlines. The optional parts have soft deadlines; different algorithms are used to schedule the optional parts to minimize the average error. The performance of these algorithms is evaluated in terms of the average error over all jobs as a function of their total utilization factor.>