The value of integrated data relies upon common data points having an accessible, consistent interpretation; to achieve this at scale requires appropriate informatics support. This paper explains how a model-driven approach to software engineering and data management, in which software artefacts are generated automatically from data models, and models are used as metadata, can achieve this. It introduces a simple data modelling language, consistent with standard object modelling notations, together with a set of tools for model creation,maintenance, and deployment. It reports upon the application of this approach in the provision of informatics support for two large-scale clinical research initiatives.

Data integration for the purposes of tracking, tracing and transparency are important challenges in the agri-food supply chain. The Electronic Product Code Information Services (EPCIS) is an event-oriented GS1 standard that aims to enable tracking and tracing of products through the sharing of event-based datasets that encapsulate the Electronic Product Code (EPC). In this paper, the authors propose a framework that utilises events and EPCs in the generation of “linked pedigrees” - linked datasets that enable the sharing of traceability information about products as they move along the supply chain. The authors exploit two ontology based information models, EEM and CBVVocab within a distributed and decentralised framework that consumes real time EPCIS events as linked data to generate the linked pedigrees. The authors exemplify the usage of linked pedigrees within the fresh fruit and vegetables supply chain in the agri-food sector.

We investigate the problem of locally monitoring contract regulated behaviours in agent-based web services. We encode contract clauses in service specifications by using extended timed automata. We propose a non intrusive local monitoring framework along with an API to monitor the fulfillment (or violation) of contractual obligations. A key feature of the framework is that it is fully symbolic thereby providing a scalable solution to monitoring. At runtime execution steps generated by the service are passed as input to the runtime monitor. Conformance of the execution against the service specification is checked using a symbolically represented extended timed automaton. This allows us to monitor service behaviours over large state spaces generated by multiple, long running contracts. We illustrate our methodology by monitoring a service composition scenario from the vehicle repair domain, and report on the experimental results.

We report on a novel approach to (semi-)automatically compile and verify contract-regulated service compositions. We specify Web services and the contracts governing them as WSBPEL behaviours. We compile WSBPEL behaviours into the specialised system description language ISPL, to be used with the model checker MCMAS to verify behaviours automatically. We use the formalism of temporal-epistemic logic suitably extended to deal with compliance/violations of contracts. We illustrate these concepts using a motivating example whose state space is approximately 106and discuss experimental results.

A Service oriented system emerges from composition of services. Dynamically composed reactive Web services form a special class of service oriented system, where the delays associated with communication, unreliability and unavailability of services, and competition for resources from multiple service requesters are dominant concerns. As complexity of services increase, an abstract design language for the specification of services and interaction between them is desired. In this paper, we present ASDL (Abstract Service Design Language), a wide spectrum language for modelling Web services. We initially provide an informal description of our computational model for service oriented systems. We then present ASDL along with its specification oriented semantics defined in Interval Temporal Logic (ITL): a sound formalism for specifying and reasoning about temporal properties of systems. The objective of ASDL is to provide a notation for the design of service composition and interaction protocols at an abstract level.

Current ontological specifications for semantically describing properties of Web services are limited to their static interface description. Normally for proving properties of service compositions, mapping input/output parameters and specifying the pre/post conditions are found to be sufficient. However these properties are assertions only on the initial and final states of the service respectively. They do not help in specifying/verifying ongoing behaviour of an individual service or a composed system. We propose a framework for enriching semantic service descriptions with two compositional assertions: assumption and commitment that facilitate reasoning about service composition and verification of their integration. The technique is based on Interval Temporal Logic(ITL): a sound formalism for specifying and proving temporal properties of systems. Our approach utilizes the recently proposed Semantic Web Rule Language.