基于散列值的广域网服务发现

服务发现是网络自配置的重要内容.局域网服务发现方案已日臻完善并且应用到实际系统之中.对于广域网,由于客户和服务的分布性、动态性及数目众多的特点,必须解决包括可伸缩性在内的诸多问题.良好的可伸缩性是指在客户和服务的数目不断增长的情况下,服务发现系统仍然能够保持正确的功能和稳定的性能.提出了一种基于散列值的广域网服务发现方案.其方法是在服务表示模型和匹配条件的基础上,根据类型名和属性名集合为服务信息生成散列值,为服务请求生成散列值域.散列值指示负责存储服务信息的服务目录,散列值域指示有可能满足服务请求的服务目录.为服务目录指定值域,并使得所有的服务目录能够按照值域间的关系组织成一棵内容编址树.根据散列值将服务信息转发并存储到特定值域的服务目录上,根据散列值域将服务请求转发到有可能使其得到满足的服务目录上,从而实现广域网范围内的服务发现.模拟系统以及分析和对比表明,这一方案可以有效克服已有方案的局限,达到良好的可伸缩性.     

A text mining approach on automatic generation of web directories and hierarchies

The World Wide Web (WWW) has been recognized as the ultimate and unique source of information for information retrieval and knowledge discovery communities. Tremendous amount of knowledge are recorded using various types of media, producing enormous amount of web pages in the WWW. Retrieval of required information from the WWW is thus an arduous task. Different schemes for retrieving web pages have been used by the WWW community. One of the most widely used scheme is to traverse predefined web directories to reach a user's goal. These web directories are compiled or classified folders of web pages and are usually organized into hierarchical structures. The classification of web pages into proper directories and the organization of directory hierarchies are generally performed by human experts. In this work, we provide a corpus-based method that applies a kind of text mining techniques on a corpus of web pages to automatically create web directories and organize them into hierarchies. The method is based on the self-organizing map learning algorithm and requires no human intervention during the construction of web directories and hierarchies. The experiments show that our method can produce comprehensible and reasonable web directories and hierarchies.     

Context-based caching and routing for P2P web service discovery

In modern heterogeneous environments, such as mobile, pervasive and ad-hoc networks, architectures based on web services offer an attractive solution for effective communication and inter-operation. In such dynamic and rapidly evolving environments, efficient web service discovery is an important task. Usually this task is based on the input/output parameters or other functional attributes, however this does not guarantee the validity or successful utilization of retrieved web services. Instead, non-functional attributes, such as device power features, computational resources and connectivity status, that characterize the context of both service providers and consumers play an important role to the quality and usability of discovery results. In this paper we introduce context-awareness in web service discovery, enabling the provision of the most appropriate services at the right location and time. We focus on context-based caching and routing for improving web service discovery in a mobile peer-to-peer environment. We conducted a thorough experimental study, using our prototype implementation based on the JXTA framework, while simulations are employed for testing the scalability of the approach. We illustrate the advantages that this approach offers, both by evaluating the context-based cache performance and by comparing the efficiency of location-based routing to broadcast-based approaches. Recommended by: Zakaria Maamar     

Mobile service oriented architectures for NN-queries

The ever-increasing number of mobile device users has also raised the users’ expectation of mobile services accordingly. This phenomenon has given pressures to the mobile service providers to improve their services in order to stay competitive in the market. The service oriented approach is seen to be a promising scheme for mobile services. This paper presents mobile service oriented architectures for Nearest-Neighbor (NN) queries that are classified into five categories, namely (i) intermittent query mobile services, (ii) continuous query mobile services, (iii) context-aware mobile services, (iv) continuous moving object query mobile services, and (v) data broadcast mobile services. These services incorporate query, location and context-aware services, ontological context model, and broadcast. The proposed architectures are concerned with mobile services for clients on the move requesting services based on their current location, which is arguably the most important feature in a wireless environment. Furthermore, we also discuss the Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirement for mobile services in which request latency time is one of the most important parameters to consider. Some analytical models for query latency measurement are presented and the results are compared with the simulation experiments.     

A JESS-enabled context elicitation system for providing context-aware Web services

Providing context-aware Web services is an adaptive process of delivering contextually matched Web services to meet service requesters’ needs. We define the term “context” from two perspectives: one from service requesters; and the other from Web services. From the former perspective, context is defined as the surrounding environment affecting requesters’ services discovery and access, such as requesters’ preferences, locations, activities, and accessible network and devices. From the latter perspective, context is defined as the surrounding environment affecting Web services delivery and execution, such as networks and protocols for service binding, devices and platforms for service execution, and so on. This paper presents a Java Expert System Shell (JESS)-enabled context elicitation system featuring an ontology-based context model that formally describes and acquires contextual information pertaining to service requesters and Web services. Based on the context elicitation system, we present a context-aware services-oriented architecture for providing context-aware Web service request, publication, and discovery. Implementation details of the context elicitation system and the evaluation results of context-aware service provision are also reported.     

MobiEureka: an approach for enhancing the discovery of mobile web services

While several service discovery protocols and standards have been proposed for supporting service discovery from mobile devices, this remains a challenging problem. In many cases, mobile clients may discover services which they consider relevant but soon realize that such services are not completely usable on their mobile devices due to compatibility and interoperability issues. Without integrating device capabilities into the discovery process, or a device-aware mobile service discovery, it becomes extremely difficult to determine whether discovered services may or may not function properly within the device’s constraints. This paper introduces a solution known as MobiEureka, a mobile device-aware system for enhancing the discovery of mobile web services from mobile devices. Experimental validation, results, and analysis of the introduced ideas are discussed.     

Pervaho: A specialized middleware for mobile context-aware applications

The concept of context-awareness offers a great potential for the future of mobile applications. In order to be developed in an optimal way, mobile context-aware applications need appropriate middleware services. This paper introduces Pervaho, an integrated middleware aimed specifically at supporting the development and testing of mobile context-aware applications. To illustrate the use of Pervaho, we walk through the development of a concrete mobile application and show how it can be built on top of Pervaho’s location-based publish/subscribe service. We also illustrate how a specialized mobility testing tool significantly simplifies the process of testing proximity-based semantics. We then present the implementation of Pervaho, which is based on a set of communication protocols geared at mesh networks. Finally, we provide a performance analysis of our implementation.     

基于策略的可控服务发现与动态路由模型

如何改进现有服务发现模型使之适应动态可变的服务运行环境并选择最符合用户需求的Web服务正在引起研究领域关注.提出了一种基于策略的可控服务发现与动态路由模型(P-WSDRM).该模型支持抽象服务、服务实例和服务发现者的属性定义,支持携带属性描述信息的服务发布与发现,引入了策略判定机制,支持服务发现者基于已定义的策略进行服务发现和实例路由.目前已经于Linux平台和目录服务实现了该模型的一个原型系统.     

Accessibility and Usability of User-centric Web Interaction with a Unified-Ubiquitous Name-based Directory Service

Web-based information services should be evaluated for accessibility and usability with various types of Internet Web-browsing devices, interacting with web information servers including directory server. A ubiquitous name-based directory server, accessible and usable with a variety of Web-browsing devices (e.g. Internet-capable mobile phones), could be a unified center for human-centric Web interaction services as well as for business models based on personalized services. We studied the accessibility and usability in user-centric Web interaction with a unified-ubiquitous name-based directory service, as metric metadata for real-time estimation. We studied the real-time metrics in synthetic approach for comparison among different services. We show empirical results based on implementation and experiments in Korea, Japan and China.     

A System Architecture for Context-Aware Service Discovery

Recent technological advances have enabled both the consumption and provision of mobile services (m-services) by small, portable, handheld devices. However, mobile devices still have restricted capabilities with respect to processing, storage space, energy consumption, stable connectivity, bandwidth availability. In order to address these shortcomings, a potential solution is context-awareness (by context we refer to the implicit information related both to the requesting user and service provider that can affect the usefulness of the returned results). Context plays the role of a filtering mechanism, allowing only transmission of relevant data and services back to the device, thus saving bandwidth and reducing processing costs. In this paper, we present an architecture for context-aware service discovery. We describe in detail the system implementation and we present the system evaluation as a tradeoff between a) the increase of the quality of service discovery when context-awareness is taken into account and b) the extra cost/burden imposed by context management.     

Personal service areas for mobile Web applications

Location-based mobile services let wireless mobile users access Web-based information about resources in their immediate vicinities. The authors describe an algorithm that draws on context mobility elements, such as the user's travel direction and speed, to form personal service areas. Their experimental context-aware tourist information system (CATIS) leverages XML technologies and Web services to provide tourist information to mobile users based on these personal service areas and the users' preferences. Because Web service performance depends on the underlying databases, the authors also developed a layered caching scheme for storing environmental data to improve response time.     

Service discovery 101

A key aspect of the service-oriented architecture approach for middleware is that services advertise themselves using directory or lookup services so that prospective clients can find them. The service location and discovery abstractions required to support this are not much different from those we use to conduct business with other people. As a result, we can gain insights into how distributed service discovery systems work by comparing them to everyday human-oriented service discovery approaches. Given that service discovery depends on discovery services, how does an application actually find a discovery service?.     

Organizing domain-specific information on the Web: An experiment on the Spanish business Web directory

Web directories organize voluminous information into hierarchical structures, helping users to quickly locate relevant information and to support decision-making. The development of existing ontologies and Web directories either relies on expert participation that may not be available or uses automatic approaches that lack precision. As more users access the Web in their native languages, better approaches to organizing and developing non-English Web directories are needed. In this paper, we have proposed a semi-automatic framework, which consists of anchor directory boosting, meta-searching, and heuristic filtering, to construct domain-specific Web directories. Using the framework, we have built a Web directory in the Spanish business (SBiz) domain. Experimental results show that the SBiz Web directory achieved significantly better recall, F-value, efficiency, and satisfaction rating than the benchmark directory. Subjects provided favorable comments on the SBiz Web directory. This research thus contributes to developing a useful framework for organizing domain-specific information on the Web and to providing empirical findings and useful insights for end-users, system developers, and researchers of Web information seeking and knowledge management.     

Clustering of LDAP directory schemas to facilitate information resources interoperability across organizations

Directories provide a well-defined general mechanism for describing organizational resources such as the resources of the Internet2 higher education research community and the Grid community. Lightweight directory access protocol directory services enable data sharing by defining the information's metadata (schema) and access protocol. Interoperability of directory information between organizations is increasingly important. Improved discovery of directory schemas across organizations, better presentation of their semantic meaning, and fast definition and adoption (reuse) of existing schemas promote interoperability of information resources in directories. This paper focuses on the discovery of related directory object class schemas and in particular on clustering schemas to facilitate discovering relationships and so enable reuse. The results of experiments exploring the use of self-organizing maps (SOMs) to cluster directory object classes at a level comparable to a set of human experts are presented. The results show that it is possible to discover the values of the parameters of the SOM algorithm so as to cluster directory metadata at a level comparable to human experts.     

Online role mining for context-aware mobile service recommendation

Finding and recommending suitable services for mobile devices are increasingly important due to the popularity of mobile Internet. While recent research has attempted to use role-based approaches to recommend services, role discovery is still an ongoing research topic. Using role-based approaches, popular mobile services can be recommended to other members in the same role group in a context- dependent manner. This paper proposes several role mining algorithms, to suit different application requirements, that automatically group users according to their interests and habits dynamically. Most importantly, we propose an online role mining algorithm that can discover role patterns efficiently and incrementally. Finally, we present a complete, question-based framework that can efficiently perform role mining for context-aware service recommendation in a mobile environment—where a device may not be always connected to the server and/or scalability of the role mining algorithm running on the server is critical.     

Semantic Web service discovery: state-of-the-art and research challenges

Ubiquitous computing paradigms involving social agents require principled selection of services, context-aware analysis, and satisfaction of requests, as well as dynamic interaction and negotiation with other agents. Synergies between semantic technologies and service discovery facilitate rich and formal representations of services and agent interactions as well as specialization and generalization of service needs. In this paper, we provide an extensive review of semantic Web service discovery, highlighting the state-of-the-art approaches, the key semantic formalisms employed, as well as benchmarks and testbeds for performance evaluation. Defining a generic framework for semantic service discovery, we describe the key tasks and criteria involved in agent-based computing. A detailed comparison of the popular discovery systems is performed with a discussion on trade-offs between existing approaches. We conclude by pointing out important research challenges to be addressed for next-generation service discovery by dynamic multi-agent systems in complex environments.     

A meta-control architecture for orchestrating policy enforcement across heterogeneous information sources

There is increasing demand from both organizations and individuals for technology capable of enforcing sophisticated, context-sensitive policies, whether security and privacy policies, corporate policies or policies reflecting various regulatory requirements. In open environments, enforcing such policies requires the ability to reason about the policies themselves as well as the ability to dynamically identify and access heterogeneous sources of information. This article introduces a semantic web framework and a meta-control model to orchestrate policy reasoning with the identification and access of relevant sources of information. Specifically, sources of information are modeled as web services with rich semantic profiles. Policy Enforcing Agents rely on meta-control strategies to dynamically interleave semantic web reasoning and service discovery and access. Meta-control rules can be customized to best capture the requirements associated with different domains and different sets of policies. This architecture has been validated in the context of different environments, including a collaborative enterprise domain as well as several mobile and pervasive computing applications deployed on Carnegie Mellon's campus. We show that, in the particular instance of access control policies, the proposed framework can be viewed as an extension of the XACML architecture, in which Policy Enforcing Agents offer a particularly powerful way of implementing XACML's Policy Information Point (PIP) and Context Handler functionality. At the same time, our proposed architecture extends to a much wider range of policies and regulations. Empirical results suggest that the semantic framework introduced in this article scales favorably on problems with up to hundreds of services and tens of service directories.