Spreadsheets are used by millions of users as a routine all-purpose data management tool. It is now increasingly necessary for external applications and services to consume spreadsheet data. In this paper, we investigate the problem of transforming spreadsheet data to structured formats required by these applications and services. Unlike prior methods, we propose a novel approach in which transformation logic is embedded into a familiar and expressive spreadsheet-like formula mapping language. Popular transformation patterns provided by transformation languages and mapping tools, that are relevant to spreadsheet-based data transformation, are supported in the language via formulas. Consequently, the language avoids cluttering the source spreadsheets with transformations and turns out to be helpful when multiple schemas are targeted. We implemented a prototype and evaluated the benefits of our approach via experiments in a real application. The experimental results confirmed the benefits of our approach.

The technology world is experiencing the emergence of a generation of massive-scale networked digital systems, performing complex operations that are partially out of the control of the systems' designers. This is the case, e.g., of pervasive computing environments, characterized by the proliferation of embedded electronic devices with communication and computing capabilities, able to network themselves forming a “digital halo” surrounding the user in its daily activities. In this paper, we advocate the use of bottom-up design patterns, able to build on results in complex systems science and systems biology, for devising new solutions for designing and managing such environments. We also present a possible application to a novel cyberphysical ecosystem, that we call the Energy Web, arising from the combination of innovative information and communication technologies with distributed renewable energy sources.

In this paper, we present the concept of Time Sequence Summarization to support chronology-dependent applications on massive data sources. Time sequence summarization takes as input a time sequence of events that are chronologically ordered. Each event is described by a set of descriptors. Time sequence summarization produces a concise time sequence that can be substituted for the original time sequence in chronology-dependent applications. We propose an algorithm that achieves time sequence summarization based on a generalization, grouping and concept formation process. Generalization expresses event descriptors at higher levels of abstraction using taxonomies while grouping gathers similar events. Concept formation is responsible for reducing the size of the input time sequence of events by representing each group created by one concept. The process is performed in a way such that the overall chronology of events is preserved. The algorithm computes the summary incrementally and has reduced algorithmic complexity. The resulting output is a concise representation, yet, informative enough to directly support chronology-dependent applications. We validate our approach by summarizing one year of financial news provided by Reuters.

The rapid growth of social networking sites and web communities have motivated web sites to expose their APIs to external developers who create mashups by assembling existing functionalities. Current APIs, however, aim toward developers with programming expertise; they are not directly usable by wider class of users who do not have programming background, but would nevertheless like to build their own mashups. To address this need, we propose a spreadsheet-based Web mashups development framework, which enables users to develop mashups in the popular spreadsheet environment. First, we provide a mechanism that makes structured data first class values of spreadsheet cells. Second, we propose a new component model that can be used to develop fairly sophisticated mashups, involving joining data sources and keeping spreadsheet data up to date. Third, to simplify mashup development, we provide a collection of spreadsheet-based mashup patterns that captures common Web data access and spreadsheet presentation functionalities. Users can reuse and customize these patterns to build spreadsheet-based Web mashups instead of developing them from scratch. Fourth, we enable users to manipulate structured data presented on spreadsheet in a drag-and-drop fashion. Finally, we have developed and tested a proof-of-concept prototype to demonstrate the utility of the proposed framework.

Standardization in Web services simplifies integration. However, it does not remove the need for adapters due to possible heterogeneity among service interfaces and protocols. In this paper, we characterize the problem of Web services adaptation focusing on business interfaces and protocols adapters. Our study shows that many of the differences between business interfaces and protocols are recurring. We introduce mismatch patterns to capture these recurring differences and to provide solutions to resolve them. We leverage mismatch patterns for service adaptation with two approaches: by developing stand-alone adapters and via service modification. We then dig into the notion of adaptation aspects that, following aspect-oriented programming paradigm and service modification approach, allow for rapid development of adapters. We present a study showing that it is a preferable approach in many cases. The proposed approach is implemented in a proof-of-concept prototype tool, and evaluated using both qualitative and quantitative methods.

Major media companies such as The Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal or Reuters generate huge amounts of textual news data on a daily basis. Mining frequent patterns in this mass of information is critical for knowledge workers such as financial analysts, stock traders or economists. Using existing frequent pattern mining (FPM) algorithms for the analysis of news data is difficult because of the size and lack of structuring of the free text news content. In this article, we demonstrate a comprehensive Streaming TEmporAl Data (STEAD) analysis framework for mining frequent patterns in financial news. In this demonstration, we show how the mining task is supported by the use of a Time-Aware Content Summarization algorithm (TACS). This summary generates a concise representation of large volume of data by taking into account the expert's peculiar interest while preserving the news arrival temporal information which is essential for FPM algorithms. We experimented the whole framework on a set of news data from Reuters.

End-user programmers---the 45 million of them, as estimated for 2001 in US alone [7]---routinely use spreadsheet to visualize, manipulate, and analyze data. Thanks to this environment, they can build applications that solve their daily problems. Even building a report can be seen as programming an application that takes corporate data as input and outputs a presentation. To build this application, spreadsheet users have to import data and place them in spreadsheet cells, highlight the important pieces, compute maybe some aggregates, add a chart or two. If well done, this application will be used each time data are updated to effortlessly produce a fresh report.

Business processes (BPs) are central to the operation of both public and private organizations. A business process is a set of coordinated tasks and activities to achieve a business objective or goal. Given the importance of BPs to overall efficiency and effectiveness, the competitiveness of organizations hinges on continuous BP improvement. In the nineties, the focus of BP improvement was on automation: workflow management systems (WfMSs) and other middleware technologies were used to reduce cost and improve efficiency by providing better system integration and automated enactment of operational business processes. Recently, the focus of business process has expanded to monitoring, analysis and understanding of business processes, and such techniques are incorporated in business process management systems (BPMSs).

Understanding the business (interaction) protocol supported by a service is very important for both clients and service providers: it allows developers to know how to write clients that interact with a service, and it allows development tools and runtime middleware to deliver functionality that simplifies the service development lifecycle. It also greatly facilitates the monitoring, visualization, and aggregation of interaction data. This paper presents an approach for discovering protocol definitions from real-world service interaction logs. It first describes the challenges in protocol discovery in such a context. Then, it presents a novel discovery algorithm, which is widely applicable, robust to different kinds of imperfections often present in realworld service logs, and able to derive protocols of small sizes, also thanks to heuristics. As finding the most precise and the smallest model is algorithmically not feasible from imperfect service logs, finally, the paper presents an approach to refine the discovered protocol via user interaction, to compensate for possible imprecision introduced in the discovered model. The approach has been implemented and experimental results show its viability on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

In service-oriented architectures, everything is a service and everyone is a service provider. Web services (or simply services) are loosely coupled software components that are published, discovered, and invoked across the Web. As the use of Web service grows, in order to correctly interact with them, it is important to understand the business protocols that provide clients with the information on how to interact with services. In dynamic Web service environments, service providers need to constantly adapt their business protocols for reflecting the restrictions and requirements proposed by new applications, new business strategies, and new laws, or for fixing problems found in the protocol definition. However, the effective management of such a protocol evolution raises critical problems: one of the most critical issues is how to handle instances running under the old protocol when it has been changed. Simple solutions, such as aborting them or allowing them to continue to run according to the old protocol, can be considered, but they are inapplicable for many reasons (for example, the loss of work already done and the critical nature of work). In this article, we present a framework that supports service managers in managing the business protocol evolution by providing several features, such as a variety of protocol change impact analyses automatically determining which ongoing instances can be migrated to the new version of protocol, and data mining techniques inferring interaction patterns used for classifying ongoing instances migrateable to the new protocol. To support the protocol evolution process, we have also developed database-backed GUI tools on top of our existing system. The proposed approach and tools can help service managers in managing the evolution of ongoing instances when the business protocols of services with which they are interacting have changed.

This paper deals with the problem of discovering protocol models by analyzing real-world interaction logs. There are several scenarios where protocol discovery is useful and needed: (i) In practice, the protocol definition may not be available. This can happen for many reasons, e.g., the service has been developed using a bottom-up approach, by simply SOAP-ifying an existing application; (ii) even when the protocol model is available, protocol discovery is important as we may want to verify if the designed protocol model is what is actually being supported by the implementation and, if not, what are the differences. An instance of this problem involves discovering if the service is compliant with the protocol specification required by some domain-specific standardization body or industry consortium.

In service-oriented computing, a conversation is a sequence of message exchanges between two or more services to achieve a certain goal, for example to order and pay for goods. A business protocol of a service is a specification of the possible conversations that a service can have with its partners. Motivated by the goal of facilitating the scalable development and maintenance of service oriented applications, especially in light of the many benefits of protocols, we have developed ServiceMosaic (servicemosaic.isima.fr), a platform for Web services life-cycle management. ServiceMosaic is an interactive and model-driven CASE tool for managing Web service interactions, which consists of two broad modules: protocol discovery and protocol management.

SaintEtiQ (Saint-Paul et al., 2005) is an on-line linguistic summarization system of tables and/or views. Our approach considers a first normal form relation R(A1,...,An) in the relational database model, and constructs a new relation R*( A1,...,An), in which tuples z are summaries and attribute values are linguistic labels describing a set of tuples Rz, sub-table of R. Thus, the SaintEtiQ system identifies statements of the form "Most tuples of R are (a11or a12...or a1m1) and (a21...or a a2m1)".

The development of user interfaces (UIs) is one of the most time-consuming aspects in software development. In this context, the lack of proper reuse mechanisms for UIs is increasingly becoming manifest, especially as software development is more and more moving toward composite applications. In this paper we propose a framework for the integration of stand-alone modules or applications, where integration occurs at the presentation layer. Hence, the final goal is to reduce the effort required for UI development by maximizing reus.

There is an increasing demand in making web user interfaces richer and more interactive. Currently, there are two approaches aiming at improving web user interfaces. First, downloaded code in form of Java Applet or ActiveX can be executed in browsers. And more recently, AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript + XML) leverages browsers' JavaScript engine to render user interfaces without reloading pages. Both approaches have some weaknesses.In this paper, we present an alternative approach to creating highly interactive web user interfaces. Our approach is based on the Extensible User Interface Protocol (XUP), a SOAP-based protocol for communicating events and incremental user interface updates on the web. On top of XUP, we have built a web user interface development framework, OpenXUP, consisting of a thin client and a server toolkit which offers a set of event-driven APIs. The framework allows for the rapid development of highly interactive web applications and services.

The increasing number of satellite and cable television channels is resulting in a soaring number of broadcast programs available to viewers. To alleviate this problem, Personal Video Recorders (multimedia platforms which record TV programs on a hard disk) should integrate a recommender system, which purpose is to filter programs according to their relevance. These systems are based on a user profile, acting as a representative for the user's interests. An important research issue resides in going beyond explicitly user-defined profiles. This paper presents a TV recommender system using fuzzy linguistic summarization technique, which enables automatic learning of the user profile. The logical architecture of the recommender system based on the SAINTETIQ model, as well as the main ideas of the filtering task are introduced in this communication.

A new approach for the summarization of image databases is described. A linguistic description of images is first generated from its low level features such as color. An original incremental summary process, called SAINTETIQ is then applied to the images, leading to a comprehensive hierarchically organized set of summaries of parts of the database. The summary process is driven by data and relies on the background knowledge represented by a fuzzy relational thesaurus. It provides both a proximity measure between terms of color domain, and a way to produce generalized descriptions of summaries. Finally, this article points out usages of the summaries. A new method to browse image databases is then presented as well as a way to produce relevant prototypes from groups of images. Those tasks take advantage of the linguistic descriptions of summaries provided by SAINTETIQ.