38911992
Effective integration of multiple tools in a loosely-coupled tool interfacing paradigm for CASE
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.
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
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
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.
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.
6243197
An application of least squares fit mapping to text information retrieval
This paper describes a unique example-based mapping method for document retrieval. We discovered that the knowledge about relevance among queries and documents can be used to obtain empirical connections between query terms and the canonical concepts which are used for indexing the content of documents. These connections do not depend on whether there are shared terms among the queries and documents; therefore, they are especially effective for a mapping from queries to the documents where the concepts are relevant but the terms used by article authors happen to be different from the terms of database users. We employ a Linear Least Squares Fit (LLSF) technique to compute such connections from a collection of queries and documents where the relevance is assigned by humans, and then use these connections in the retrieval of documents where the relevance is unknown. We tested this method on both retrieval and indexing with a set of MEDLINE documents which has been used by other information retrieval systems for evaluations. The effectiveness of the LLSF mapping and the significant improvement over alternative approaches was evident in the tests.
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.
11534248
Mining in Anticipation for Concept Change: Proactive-Reactive Prediction in Data Streams
Prediction in streaming data is an important activity in the modern society. Two major challenges posed by data streams are (1) the data may grow without limit so that it is difficult to retain a long history of raw data; and (2) the underlying concept of the data may change over time. The novelties of this paper are in four folds. First, it uses a measure of conceptual equivalence to organize the data history into a history of concepts. This contrasts to the common practice that only keeps recent raw data. The concept history is compact while still retains essential information for learning. Second, it learns concept-transition patterns from the concept history and anticipates what the concept will be in the case of a concept change. It then proactively prepares a prediction model for the future change. This contrasts to the conventional methodology that passively waits until the change happens. Third, it incorporates proactive and reactive predictions. If the anticipation turns out to be correct, a proper prediction model can be launched instantly upon the concept change. If not, it promptly resorts to a reactive mode: adapting a prediction model to the new data. Finally, an efficient and effective system RePro is proposed to implement these new ideas. It carries out prediction at two levels, a general level of predicting each oncoming concept and a specific level of predicting each instance's class. Experiments are conducted to compare RePro with representative existing prediction methods on various benchmark data sets that represent diversified scenarios of concept change. Empirical evidence offers inspiring insights and demonstrates the proposed methodology is an advisable solution to prediction in data streams.
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.
1344510
COPE: traffic engineering in dynamic networks
Traffic engineering plays a critical role in determining the performance and reliability of a network. A major challenge in traffic engineering is how to cope with dynamic and unpredictable changes in traffic demand. In this paper, we propose COPE, a class of traffic engineering algorithms that optimize for the expected scenarios while providing a worst-case guarantee for unexpected scenarios. Using extensive evaluations based on real topologies and traffic traces, we show that COPE can achieve efficient resource utilization and avoid network congestion in a wide variety of scenarios.