13784192
Analysis of business process integration in Web service context
The integration of Web services is a recent outgrowth of the Business Process integration field that will require powerful meta-schema matching mechanisms supported by higher level abstractions, such as UML meta-models. Currently, there are many XML-based workflow process specification languages (e.g. XPDL, BPEL) which can be used to define business processes in the Web services and Grid Computing world. However, with limited capability to describe the relationships (schemas or ontologies) between process objects, the dominant use of XML as a meta-data markup language makes the semantics of the processes ambiguous. OWL-S (Ontology Web Language for Services) exploits the semantic description power of OWL to build an ontology language for services. It therefore becomes a candidate for an inter lingua. In this paper, we propose an integration framework for business processes, which is applied to Web services defined in OWL-S.
14447070
Achieving convergence, causality preservation, and intention preservation in real-time cooperative editing systems
Real-time cooperative editing systems allow multiple users to view and edit the same text/graphic/image/multimedia document at the same time for multiple sites connected by communication networks. Consistency maintenance is one of the most significant challenges in designing and implementing real-time cooperative editing systems. In this article, a consistency model, with properties of convergence, causality preservation, and intention preservation, is proposed as a framework for consistency maintenance in real-time cooperative editing systems. Moreover, an integrated set of schemes and algorithms, which support the proposed consistency model, are devised and discussed in detail. In particular, we have contributed (1) a novel generic operation transformation control algorithm for achieving intention preservation in combination with schemes for achieving convergence and causality preservation and (2) a pair of reversible inclusion and exclusion transformation algorithms for stringwise operations for text editing. An Internet-based prototype system has been built to test the feasibility of the proposed schemes and algorithms
4928164
A service workflow management framework based on peer-to-peer and agent technologies
Service workflow management which consolidates multiple services to achieve business goals has become a critical issue in service-oriented computing. Due to the unique feature of service workflows such as full distribution and high dynamicity, the contemporary workflow technology has exhibited inefficiency, vulnerability, inflexibility and lack of adaptability. Based upon the authors' previous work on peer-to-peer based workflow management and seamless integration of agents and Web services, this paper innovatively presents SwinDeW-A which is a decentralised service workflow management framework based on peer-to-peer and agent technologies. Based on this framework, this paper also discusses how autonomous service level agreement negotiation, decentralised process enactment, and autonomous process adaptation can be achieved. The proposed approach takes advantages of the peer-to-peer computing technology and the agent technology to provide more efficient, reliable, flexible and adaptive service workflow management.
1701823
Dynamic checking of temporal constraints for concurrent workflows
At present, workflow management systems have not sufficiently dealt with the issues of time, involving time modelling at build-time and time management at run-time. They are lack of the ability to support the checking of temporal constraints at run-time. Although some approaches have been devised to tackle this problem, they are limited to a single workflow and use only static techniques to verify temporal constraints. In reality, there are multiple workflows executing concurrently in a workflow management system. There may well exist resource constraints between these concurrent workflows, which affect significantly the verification of temporal constraints at run-time. This paper proposes a novel approach for dynamic verification of temporal constraints for concurrent workflows. We first investigate resource constraints in workflow management systems, and then define concurrent workflow executions. Based on these definitions, we propose a verification method by analysing the temporal relationship and resource constraints between activities among concurrent workflows.
3428244
An Organisational Perspective on Collaborative Business Processes
Business collaboration is about coordinating the flow of information among organisations and linking their business processes. It brings great challenge to keep participating organisations as autonomous entities in integrating business processes of these organisations seamlessly. To address this issue, we develop a new perspective on business collaborations with a novel concept called relative workflow, which defines what a participating organisation can perceive in collaboration. By incorporating a visibility control mechanism, relative workflows allow each organisation to define its own collaboration structure and behaviours. In this paper, we present a formal definition of relative workflows and related algorithms for generating relative workflows, along with a discussion on how to perform tracking over relative workflows.
4924842
Assigning Local Fixed-time Constraints in Grid Workflow Systems
Many complex grid workflow processes often have only one global fixed-time constraint at the last activity. Since grid workflow execution normally lasts a long time, local control is very important to ensure the overall temporal correctness. With only one global fixed-time constraint, we cannot control grid workflow execution locally in terms of time. As a result, for any temporal violations, we must handle them globally with the consideration of all activities. This would impact the overall cost-effectiveness of grid workflow execution. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate how to assign local fixed-time constraints within the global one so that we can control grid workflow execution locally. Corresponding assigning and verification methods are developed. With local fixed-time constraints, we can achieve better cost-effectiveness
5091874
Integrating Web Services into Ontology-Based Web Portal
With the explosive emerged Web services, the Web becomes a world of information and applications. So portals whose goal is presenting a structured view onto the Web should provide users with a single point access to multiple types of not only information but also services. Recently, many systems have been developed using ontology-driven approaches to automatically generate and manage Web portals. However, all of them lack the integration of Web services. In this paper, we describe SPortS, an OWL-DL(Web Ontology Language-Description Logics) based portal generation system that integrates semantic Web services into generated portals at the presentation level, the data level and the function level. We present the portal generation process, the query decomposition and the service recommendation algorithms through which semantic Web services are integrated tightly into the generated portal.
2911118
A Theory of Network Localization
In this paper, we provide a theoretical foundation for the problem of network localization in which some nodes know their locations and other nodes determine their locations by measuring the distances to their neighbors. We construct grounded graphs to model network localization and apply graph rigidity theory to test the conditions for unique localizability and to construct uniquely localizable networks. We further study the computational complexity of network localization and investigate a subclass of grounded graphs where localization can be computed efficiently. We conclude with a discussion of localization in sensor networks where the sensors are placed randomly
181647
Geometric modeling with conical meshes and developable surfaces
In architectural freeform design, the relation between shape and fabrication poses new challenges and requires more sophistication from the underlying geometry. The new concept of conical meshes satisfies central requirements for this application: They are quadrilateral meshes with planar faces, and therefore particularly suitable for the design of freeform glass structures. Moreover, they possess a natural offsetting operation and provide a support structure orthogonal to the mesh. Being a discrete analogue of the network of principal curvature lines, they represent fundamental shape characteristics. We show how to optimize a quad mesh such that its faces become planar, or the mesh becomes even conical. Combining this perturbation with subdivision yields a powerful new modeling tool for all types of quad meshes with planar faces, making subdivision attractive for architecture design and providing an elegant way of modeling developable surfaces.
18665022
Towards scalable and reliable group key management
1. INTRODUCTION In secure group communications, members of a group share a symmetric group key. A key server provides access control to the group key as well as reliable rekeying for group members whenever the key changes. Figure 1 shows the functional components of an architecture for group key management. The registration component authenticates users and distributes to each user its individual key, which is shared only between the user and the key server. Authenticated users send their join and leave requests to the rekey encoding component. The encoding component validates the requests by checking whether they are encrypted by individual keys, and generates rekey messages, which are sent to the rekey transport component for delivery. Previous studies, however, have focused mainly on the encoding component, particularly the processing time required by the encoding component in a key server to process each request individually [1, 2]. The performance of batch rekeying and the problem of reliable transport of group rekey messages have not been addressed in the literature. In this paper, we investigate scalability issues of all three components, including a performance analysis of periodic batch rekeying based on the use of key trees [2], the design of a reliable rekey transport protocol, an analysis of server and client bandwidth requirements for the protocol, and an overall performance analysis of our system, called keygem. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. While individual rekeying introduces no extra delay to process user requests, it has two issues. First, it is hard for individual rekeying to control the synchronization between keys and data. Furthermore, the delay needed to reliably multicast a rekey message may he too large to implement individual rekeying. Second, individual rekey-ing can be inefficient. For authentication purpose, each rekey message needs to be digitally signed to prove that it originates from the key server. Furthermore, when a key server rekeys upon each request and when forward access control is required, we show that f2(log N) is a lower bound on the amortized number of encrypted keys. In keygem, we alleviate the synchronization problem and improve rekey …
150914
An enhanced model for searching in semantic portals
Semantic Portal is the next generation of web portals that are powered by Semantic Web technologies for improved information sharing and exchange for a community of users. Current methods of searching in Semantic Portals are limited to keyword-based search using information retrieval (IR) techniques, ontology-based formal query and reasoning, or a simple combination of the two. In this paper, we propose an enhanced model that tightly integrates IR with formal query and reasoning to fully utilize both textual and semantic information for searching in Semantic Portals. The model extends the search capabilities of existing methods and can answer more complex search requests. The ideas in a fuzzy description logic (DL) IR model and a formal DL query method are employed and combined in our model. Based on the model, a semantic search service is implemented and evaluated. The evaluation shows very large improvements over existing methods.