7174562
Implementation of Agent-based Ontology Mapping and Integration
The achievement of some business goals requires more than individual capabilities and knowledge. Hence, it is necessary for different organisations to work together in order to achieve the goals. In this paper, an innovative agent-based architecture is developed to model ontology mapping and integration in a distributed and dynamic business environment where interactions among organisations may take place at unpredictable times, for unpredictable reasons, and between unpredictable organisations. Functionalities and implementation of involved agents are discussed. In addition, a three-layer user ontologies are introduced. Finally, demonstrations of ontology mapping and integration are presented
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.
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.
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
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
6583750
Building Trust in Online Rating Systems Through Signal Modeling
Online feedback-based rating systems are gaining popularity. Dealing with unfair ratings in such systems has been recognized as an important but difficult problem. This problem is challenging especially when the number of regular ratings is relatively small and the unfair ratings contribute to a significant portion of the overall ratings. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm to detect the unfair ratings that cannot be effectively prevented by existing state-of-the-art techniques. Our algorithm is particularly effective to detect malicious raters that collaboratively manipulate ratings of one or several products. The main idea of our algorithm is to use an autoregressive signal modeling technique combined with trust-enhanced rating aggregation. We are able to detect and filter out unfair ratings very accurately. Extensive experiments through simulations and real-world data have been performed to validate the proposed algorithm. The experimental results show significant improvements on detecting collaborative unfair raters over existing techniques.
17059698
Towards composing information providing services
Composing Web services is an active field of research and development. Recently, many efforts are devoted to process integration on world changing services, e.g. business process composition. We present a solution to compose information providing services to achieve more powerful capabilities and free the user from trivial work. Our work serves as an important complement to the existing research on process integration.
30442545
On Kotzig's conjecture concerning graphs with a unique regular path-connectivity
Abstract Kotzig (see Bondy and Murty, Graph Theory with Applications, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1976) conjectured that there exists no graph with the property that every pair of vertices is connected by a unique path of length k, k>2 . Kotzig (Graph Theory and Related Topics, Academic Press, New York, 1979, pp. 358–367) has proved this conjecture for 2 . Xing and Hu (Discrete Math. 135 (1994) 387–393) have proved it for k>11 . Here we prove this conjecture for the remaining cases k=9,10,11 .
16965968
Performance of Full Text Search in Structured and Unstructured Peer-to-Peer Systems
While structured P2P systems (such as DHTs) are often regarded as an improvement over unstructured P2P systems (such as super-peer networks) in terms of routing efficiency, it is not clear which architecture is better for full text search. This paper provides a quantitative comparison of full text keyword search in structured and unstructured P2P systems. We examine three techniques (and optimizations to those techniques) proposed in the literature: using a DHT along with inverted lists and Bloom filters; using a super-peer network; and using a random walk over an unstructured network. We use real Web documents and user queries to measure the cost for both document publishing and query processing, in terms of bandwidth and response time. Our results show that all three techniques use roughly the same bandwidth to process queries (with the super-peer technique having a slight edge). The structured network provides the best response time (30 percent better than a super-peer network), but has a high cost of document publishing, using six times as much bandwidth as the super-peer system. The random walk technique requires no publishing, but has a very long response time unless multiple random walks operate in parallel.
34587947
Guaranteed Mutually Consistent Checkpointing in Distributed Computations
In this paper, we emplore the isomorphism between vector time and causality to characterize consistency of a set of checkpoints in a distributed computing. A necessary and sufficient condition, to determine if a set of checkpoints can form a consistent global checkpoint, is presented and proved using the isomorphic power of vector time and causality. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to use the isomorphism for this purpose. This condition leads to a simple and straightforward algorithm for a guaranteed mutually consistent global checkpointing. In our approach, a process can take a checkpoint whenever and wherever it wants while other related process may be asked to take an additional checkpoint for ensuring the mutual consistency. We also show how this condition and the resulting algorithm can be used to obtain a maximum and minimum global checkpoints, another important paradigm for distributed applications.