Most human centric business activities, like the handling of an insurance claim or the design of an IT solution, do not follow a formal process model word-by-word. While there are often underlying processes in place, the real business operation typically encompasses a wider scope of actions. It includes unstructured segments of human activities, additional documents and interactions, the integration of remote systems and services, and the reactions to exceptional situations. With the case management approach, the knowledge worker in the center takes control and acts as an orchestrator of available services rather than being a part of an assembly line. This paper presents how data-centric web services can be used to build a service-oriented case management application, and how advanced analytics can leverage historical information to improve the effectiveness of business processes execution.

WS-I's basic security profile (BSP) defines best practice guidelines for secure Web services communications, enabling interoperability between vendors. However it is difficult for developers to know if their SOA solutions are in fact compliant to these guidelines. In this paper, we discuss methods to assess compliance against BSP. We have implemented runtime validation of SOAP messages to check for compliance against BSP, a method implied by the BSP definition itself. Additionally, we have implemented a novel approach to statically validate WS security policies against BSP using Schematron. From our experiments dynamic validation for BSP compliance offers greater coverage but results in a significant overhead, while static validation is limited in its scope but extremely valuable since under reasonable assumptions it provides assurances about compliance prior to deployment. We conclude with a summation of our results and lessons for SOA practitioners.

The Web services platform is gaining popularity as the technology of choice for integrating applications in diverse and heterogeneous distributed environments, such as the Internet. It is widely recognized that one of the barriers preventing widespread adoption of this technology is a lack of products that support non-functional features of applications, such as security, transactionality and reliability. Supporting such features in a service-oriented environment is more complex than traditional distributed computing environments since such behaviors cannot be assumed by applications, but some persistent representation of the behavior has to be discovered dynamically. WS-Policy has been touted as a possible future standard way to specify these features and associate them with services, but the multitude of related proposals resemble a poorly manufactured jigsaw puzzle more than a coherent vision.

Architectural mismatch; the semantic and syntactic gap preventing component composition, can be partially alleviated through the ubiquity of the protocols for service composition (syntax). And yet, the semantics of service or component composition have remained elusive. The contribution of this paper builds on the notions introduced by grammar-oriented object design (GOOD) using the notion of manners to specify the semantics of services and drive their automated composition through dynamically reconfigure architectures enabled through GOOD. This leads to the use of manners for explicit service semantics representation in a re-configurable architectural style. We describe the base requirements for automated component and services composition and show how automated assembly of components and services can be accomplished through a dynamically reconfigurable (DyRec) architectural style. In addition, we show how this vision of dynamic reconfiguration is naturally supported by the Web services framework, because it derives from some of the core requirements of the service oriented architectures (SOA) style embodied by Web services. Further, we discuss how such a DyRec architectural style can be implemented using grammar-oriented object design (GOOD) and describe a project that led to a tool called the Business Compiler, to accomplish dynamic composition and collaboration.

Service metadata plays a central role in service oriented architecture (SOA)s. Explicit service metadata makes possible the decoupling of applications and supports dynamic selection and binding. Moreover it extends the basic interoperability model beyond the implicit agreement to use a set of common protocols, making possible advanced collaboration models based on the dynamic discovery of partner capabilities. Web services provide the beginning of an XML based instantiation of the SOA model, with major middleware vendors providing implementations on top of their current platforms. In this paper, we discuss how the use of middleware metadata in SOA environments leads to optimized interaction and increase application decoupling.

Describes an approach to building a distributed software component system for scientific and engineering applications that is based on representing Computational Grid services as application-level software components. These Grid services provide tools such as registry and directory services, event services and remote component creation. While a service-based architecture for grids and other distributed systems is not new, this framework provides several unique features. First, the public interfaces to each software component are described as XML documents. This allows many adaptors and user interfaces to be generated from the specification dynamically. Second, this system is designed to exploit the resources of existing Grid infrastructures like Globus and Legion, and commercial Internet frameworks like e-speak. Third, and most important, the component-based design extends throughout the system. Hence, tools such as application builders, which allow users to select components, start them on remote resources, and connect and execute them, are also interchangeable software components. Consequently, it is possible to build distributed applications using a graphical "drag-and-drop" interface, a Web-based interface, a scripting language like Python, or an existing tool such as Matlab.