Web services is a fast moving research field with a profound impact to many critical research areas, ranging from software to communication, from server platforms to mobile endpoints. It emerges as a disruptive technology to various enterprises to deliver services, computing, communication and information to their customers and partners. This talk intends to capture some recent advances of Web services and new Web services applications in software-as-a-services, cloud computing, communication, message centric SOAP engine design, and mobile services computing endpoints.

 

In addition to present the technical perspectives and extension potentials in these new developments, I would like to fill the gap between academic research and industry applications through real examples and use cases, with a goal to demonstrate how these technical advances of Web services are applied to industry products and applications, Standards, servers, clients, and new paradigms in software design and testing.

Boeing is an aerospace company, and both airplanes and aviation services are our core businesses. Founded in 1916, Boeing has had a long relationship with China. In fact, the first engineer hired by the company, Wong Tsoo, was a Chinese national. Boeing is projected to sell more airplanes to China than other countries outside of United States in the next 20 years.  Boeing’s central research organization supports the enterprise by developing technology in support of the company’s current and future products, streamlining operations, and improving tools and processes. In the past few years, we have been collaborating with Chinese universities in Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, and Hong Kong to develop technologies for net-enabled applications for commercial aviation. We expect this effort will continue in the years to come.

 

Boeing provides a long list of services to airlines in streamlining their operations.  Recent models of Boeing aircraft such as the Next-Generation 737 and 787 Dreamliner will be net-enabled in the air and on the ground. We are just beginning to explore the opportunities net-enabling the fleet can bring to the end customers in terms of safety, cost, and passenger experience.  Airplanes are mobile nodes in an IP world, offering tremendous opportunities and challenges for researchers.  In this speech, we will explore how net-enabling and Web services can help us to exploit the opportunities and overcome the challenges.

Thanks to the advent of smart devices and the emergence of 3G/4G wireless technologies, services over mobile phones are becoming in many respects similar to those available over the PC based internet. Indeed mobile web-based services, such as search, maps, presence, messaging, emails, productivity, social networking, and entertainment are becoming available in high-end phones from several device manufacturers. Mobile computing, however, promises richer applications and services based on location and context. Web technologies are being adapted and extended to support emerging mobile internet services. However, location based mobile services present new significant challenges in terms of implementation and management complexity. In this presentation we will discuss the business trends of mobile services. Through a discussion of current projects at IBM Research, we will also present examples of the technology trends supporting scalable location based services.

Services Computing has become a foundational discipline of modernizing services and software industry. Services Computing Curriculum Initiative (SCCI) is a community-driven professional activity which is sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Services Computing (TC-SVC). This session will present the latest advancements of SCCI in terms of newly formalized knowledge areas, case studies, and best practices of creating and delivering Services Computing courses. Several adoption approaches will be introduced based on co-design and reuse principles for various degree programs.

This panel will also share with you some long-term visions and latest lessons learnt from experienced professors and practitioners in the community.

This panel brings together technology experts and business leaders and provide first hand insight to the evolution of cloud computing and IT as a Service (ITaaS), from both technology and business model perspectives. The panel will discuss the disruptive nature of Cloud computing and its business model, including the impact to the current enterprise IT industry, to the service provider industry, to the enterprise software industry, to the networking industry, and to the service industry. The panel will also discuss the confluence of SOA paradigm and SaaS paradigm and examine its implication to the enterprise IT architecture. The panel will also help audience understand the limitation and challenges for cloud computing and ITaaS. The audience of this panel is targeted at the technology leaders and business decision makers in enterprise IT, software industry, and networking industry.

The purpose of this panel is to present a broad range of best practices of SOA strategization and operationalization in the use of web services in real-world SOA implementations. The focus will be on the common challenges and issues encountered in SOA projects. Topics include, but are not limited to, tenets, methodology, architecture, service management, standards, tools, process, organization, governance, security, and quality of services. Practitioner's guides and anti-patterns as well as trends will be discussed in the context. Real-life pragmatic solutions to business problems will be exemplified and illustrated in case studies.

The civil aviation system is a global enterprise that includes airframe, engine and component manufacturers, airlines, maintenance organizations, regulatory agencies, airports, air traffic control authorities and millions of service providers that must work together effectively to ensure cargo and passengers get to their destinations as scheduled, while traveling safely and efficiently. The system includes a bewildering array of commercial and custom developed systems for monitoring and controlling the operations of the participant.

 

The news has recently been filled with examples of operations not working as smoothly as we all hope: Passengers have been stranded on taxi-ways, flights cancelled for weather and maintenance inspections and crowds of passengers complaining of lost baggage have become common as civil aviation grows. The growth has been rapid and shows no signs of abating. The available seat-kilometers in China are predicted to grow at over 8% per year for the next decade. The rest of the world will grow between 4 and 6%. We need to find ways to:

 

- Improve communications between manufacturers, airlines and regulatory agencies to defend our unmatched safety record in the face of increasing traffic.

- Orchestrate and streamline workflow among the hundreds of collaborating organizations that keep civil aviation functioning.

- Improve the services we provide a diverse flying public to increase their enjoyment of the travel experience

Web services, network technologies and service oriented architectures provide a means of improving communications between heterogeneous systems that make up our civil aviation transportation system. A web service is a software component that supports interoperable component- to-component interaction over a network. Each service makes its functionality available through well-defined or standardized XML interfaces. Web services do not work together by coincidence. Smoothly interacting systems in a network of the scale described here will require initial investment in building an enabling platform. Crafting a service-oriented architecture is the first step towards this infrastructure. Openness and standardization are key ways to accumulate resources and spread the risk of capitalization. This panel will focus on finding a vision and roadmap for initiating an open civil aviation web service platform that is sustainable and self actuating in the long run.

In many decades, many organizations, especially large consulting companies, have been designing, implementing and managing business solutions for every industry around the globe.. But due to numerous limitations in process, tooling and skills, most of those solutions were made very specific to individual industry and client needs at its early design stage. Therefore, reuse and more importantly, managing the ever changing business requirements, become almost impossible.

 

Service-orientation and architecture, model-driven business development provides us a new and powerful approach to facilitate asset based industry solution design and development. To further accelerate this, this tutorial will discuss an innovative approach that take advantage of many proven best software engineering practices, from object/component based technology, meta-data driven architecture types (archetypes) that are used to model the common structural and in some cases non-structural business entities such as Customer, Product, Payment, etc. In order to address the consequences introduced by abstracting those common elements out of the specific industry model and be able to enable easy and meta-data based transformation, we properly decompose business components/services into a multi-layered business architecture.

 

Therefore, process/components/services can be decomposed accordingly to facilitate the decomposition and abstraction, while maintaining certain level of necessary traceability across various artifacts. In the realization phase, existing assets/operational systems will be mapped and transformed to the required business components and services to best leverage those existing valuable industry/client investments.

 

To support such a SOA based, model and business driven development process, existing tooling, especially the necessary transformation and integration capability, needs to be significantly enhanced. This tutorial will also present some recommendation based on some recent design and implementation, and they could be used to guide future tooling alignment and integration effort across software modeling, implementation and solution products.

 

In addition, we will present how to leverage existing internal or external assets or product offerings and the open industry reference models and standards (such as ACCORD, ebXML, ARTS/IxRetail).

 

This work is based on authors' collective experience in leading the large end-to-end client engagements across many industries, while promoting various industry leading software engineering best practices.

Facility is the most important but costly channel for many enterprises to win in the customer-centric marketplace. How to optimize facility site network is part of the critical strategic nuts for executives. Many enterprises have adopted Geographic Information System (GIS) basedsolutions to support facility related business analysis, which, however, are usually based on desktop applications and are costly and need specialists’ management. Thus in this paper, a light-weighted and easy-to-use web-based spatial decision support system on facility transformation analysis, iFAO (intelligent facility network analytics & optimization), is introduced. Employing web services technology, it could host facility related business analysis services for different enterprises in different industries. How to enable the information sharing and analysis collaboration, which we call data management, is one of the key issues in this servicehosting environment. After analyzing the characteristics of three types of data used in this kind of system, we introduce a common data management framework and three technologies to realize it. Besides, we present its detail implementations, a series of web services, which is also an extension to the OGC Service Architecture. The framework has been validated by the applications of iFAO in real banking and retail projects and it is also applicable to other web GIS based decision support solutions.

Service-oriented architectures (SOA), based on Web services as the underlying architecture, have the potential to facilitate dynamic evolution of business processes. However, to fully realize the benefit of the SOA vision, it is critical to shield application developers from the complexity of Web services and related XML-based formats. In the currently available toolkits, users often play an informed role in the mapping of XML based specifications, operation names, message structures, and parameter types. The focus of our work is to design and develop an elegant, intuitive, simple, and powerful free-form query based system that allows interaction with Web services, without requiring the end-user to understand the operation names, parameters types, and other XMLbased information in a WSDL document. Our system uses Semantic Web concepts, ontologies, and WordNet in the process of automating Web services matchmaking. In this paper we focus on presenting techniques for matching free-form queries with appropriate Web service operations and extracting parameter values from user queries. We quantify the accuracy of our methodologies in terms of precision and recall.

The raison dêtre for web-services is that they could be used to compose new services. As in process centric systems, wherein blocks of software implement a functional domain through a set of linked activities, a SOA based system modeled through web-services, requires business services (of low granularity) which implement various business functions. Such business services could not only ensure a high degree of re-use but could also help in realizing service oriented architecture in its true sense. Although today quite a few approaches for the problem exist, but most of them are bottom up solutions, or mainly focus on domain decomposition and composite service formation. Not many of them have yet utilized the full potential of business processes, which form the backbone of any enterprise. In this work we define what a business service would be like, vis-a-vis its corresponding business function, and how it could be realized through data, utility, information and other services. We present our service identification approach which utilizes process maps and service hierarchies and towards the end we discuss some of our current work in building an automation tool (named SQUID) for service identification.

Service discovery, matching and selection are terms related to find proper services for user requests. User starts communication for getting a desired service, and then service framework finds proper service(s) through syntactic or semantic search based on user’s requests. It is a tedious work to choose proper services among vast number of services, and sometimes non-available services are chosen. If available services to users are decided before service request, the cost for finding service can be lower and the service is provided promptly. In this paper, therefore we propose a novel approach for fast service selection based on user context in dynamic environment in order to reduce the time to find services for users. For supporting fast service selection, we use the rete network composed of preconditions of services.

Enterprise content management systems deal with the management of business documents and related human workflow between organizations. Many of these systems are built as monolithic, stand-alone applications that lack the dynamicity support and are difficult to scale and interoperate with other enterprise systems. In order to tackle these issues, a service-oriented approach is introduced for the implementation of a distributed enterprise content management system that is composed from a number of common service components. The basic common service components are implemented according to the Service Component Architecture (SCA), and consist of a content repository service, a document workflow service, a document search service, a notification service, a security service, an execution log service, and an integration service. In content repository service, a document meta-model is defined for managing, tracking and storage of business documents. In this paper, we first present the overall system architecture and detailed design of each service. We then illustrate how to assemble these services into higher-level composite services in order to provide document management functions for the enterprise application. Our implementation shows that our design is able to support on-demand document management services and scale-up in a large enterprise, without much development efforts.

A Framework Web services are gaining momentum as key elements in cross-domain enterprises integration because more and more functions within intra- and inter- enterprises have been encapsulated as Web services. However, these services are typically provided and invoked by different service providers in different enterprises distributed in multi-domains, so it is inevitable to face the problem of semantic inconsistency during enterprise integrating and cooperating. In this paper, ontology is brought out to solve this problem by building reference ontologies corresponding to each domain, and then collaboration ontologies are constructed semi-automatically, whereafter OWL-S files generated from collaboration ontologies are mapped to BPEL and WSDL files respectively. By this way, the semantic information will be kept in processes and Web services, so that there is a common understanding among cross-domain cooperating enterprises. The OCDEII system architecture is proposed to support such integration and interoperability and further a prototype system is implemented in Project ImportNET.

In this paper we present a framework for automation of distributed market place that is based on intelligent software agents and semantic web services A multi-agent environment designed for automation of e-commerce activities such as negotiation between buyer and seller, recommendation, and customer decision making. Furthermore we use a semantic web service middleware called StraBM, advising managers of e-shops for making appropriate strategic decisions and managing business models. StraBM uses a customized WSMX middleware to generate appropriate strategy and business models.

In order to provide guaranteed services in P2P networks, applications have to be supported by sufficient computing resources, especially bandwidths and storage spaces, which are acquired from the heterogeneous peers. As soliciting peers’ resources contribution by giving remunerations imposes an additional cost, the guaranteed services should be provided cost-effectively. In this paper, after defining the framework to analyze the cost implication, we propose a resource reservation algorithm called P2P User Requirement Acquisition scheme, PURE-A, which is distributed and cost-aware. In a network of the heterogeneous peers with limited local information, PURE-A is cost efficient in providing resource acquisition service to satisfy the QoS requirement.

Services Computing is now recognized as a foundational discipline for the modern software and services industries. The Technical Committee on Services Computing (TC-SVC) within IEEE Computer Society is leading an initiative to establish and promote a Services Computing curriculum. This paper identifies fourteen key knowledge areas in the field of Services Computing, three of which have been discussed in a previous paper; here, we provide details for the other eleven. We then discuss how to compose reusable elements from these knowledge areas to design courses. Finally, we report on the 2008 Summer School on Services Computing, which utilized the concepts we have described.

In this paper, we present a case study based Services Computing course delivery practice, which includes course preparation, course structure, course enablement, course evaluation and analysis, and audience-specific discussions. The case study is created based on a course offering to students from Internet Business System Master’s program. Specifically, this paper touches the major course offering challenges, course logistic setting and format, and course coverage. The emphasis is placed on the selection of pedagogically sound materials and methods among the many available Services Computing related content. In the case study, final open-ended student projects show the feasibility, usefulness and success of this course delivery practice. Lessons learned from the course offering and potential impacts on other degree programs are also discussed in this paper.

The need to create, store, maintain, and share data as being part of Web2.0 labelled solutions requires the application of different skills and tools sets. The growing complexity of these new kinds of applications leads to cost and time-intensive development life-cycle because many data design and management decisions are directly influenced by distribution and semantic aspects. In this paper we propose the WebComposition Data Grid Service (WebComposition/DGS) as a supporting service to address these problems. The service acts as a highly integrative core component for data-centric applications, taking traditional SOAbased business scenarios as well as RESTarchitectural style applications in the Web2.0 context into account.

In service delivery business, the service practitioners create solutions for the customer requests by integrating proper service components available from the service provider company. This process is called solution design. The solution design process requires the translation of the service requests from the customers, which come in various forms, into the terminology that is internally used by the service provider company. This is a crucial task as all of the internal processes of the service provider, such as financial processes, service delivery etc., need to be in coordination with the solution design process. In today’s business environment, performing this translation in a very efficient way is critical. In this paper, we present the business process and the problem with regards to solution design process. Subsequently, we formalize the business problem as an optimization problem and present a formal algorithm to solve the optimization problem.