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The integration of information systems must consider various aspects, including the individuals of an organization, cooperating with other vendors, and the connections within this organization. The advantages of integration include shortening the negotiation process among the organization and the cooperating vendors, saving time for the users, and identifying the interface management. However, the greatest difficulties are how to integrate different system platforms and implement technical aspects into a suitable Web‐interface for users to operate. Information technology companies have developed Web Services which rely on the flexibility of the Extended Mark‐up Language. The services not only apply to integrated information systems, but also provide open services in Web environments. This article evaluates the feasibility of Web Services for application in integrated library information systems.

Web services refer to a specific set of technologies used to implement a Service Oriented Architecture. Thanks to maturing Web‐services standards, and to new mobile devices and application solutions, progress is being made in presenting similar Web‐services offerings in both mobile and fixed networks. To bring that architecture and the solutions it will support to the world of mobility is indeed a significant issue in m‐business applications, because mobile Web services present various advantages: Reduction of the overall cost of development (by reusing existing system components), faster time to market introduction of products (provided by applications’ rapid development and deployment) and remarkable possibilities to emerge new applications with increased functionalities. In addition, the new and forthcoming mobile networks, with native IP connection and high speed transmission capability, allow the development of a variety of modern multimedia services. Multimedia Messaging Services (capable to mix the media types in order to enable more intuitive messaging operation), and Instant Messaging and Presence Services (dedicated for presence, instant messaging, and distribution and sharing of multimedia content in groups of users), provide suitable underlying capabilities to support location‐based and context‐sensitive multimedia services. In this paper we will present the current approaches regarding architectural, functional and security features that allow enterprises to enjoy the benefits of traditional Web services in the mobile multimedia domain.

The capabilities of embedded devices such as smartphones are steadily increasing and provide the great flexibility of data access and collaboration while being mobile. From the distributed computing point of view, fundamental issues in mobile computing include heterogeneity in terms of varying device capabilities (i.e., operating systems and various hardware platforms), performance characteristics and real‐time behavior, and the ability to discover and interact with peers seamlessly. Web services are a family of XML based protocols to achieve interoperability among loosely coupled networked applications. We propose the use of Web services on embedded devices in order to solve interoperability issues in distributed mobile systems. We discuss various toolkits available for embedded devices and investigate performance characteristics of embedded Web services on smartphones. Our goal is to guide the design of Web services based applications on mobile devices, and provide estimates of performance that can be expected.

To define a framework for access control for virtual applications, enabled through web services technologies. The framework supports the loosely coupled manner in which web services are shared between partners.

A background discussion on relevant literature, with an example is used to illustrate the problem that exists. To enable access control composition, an extension is proposed to authorisation specification language, together with publication of access control requirements of a web service provider.

The framework shows that loosely coupled access control can be made possible by making use of the standard manner in which messages are communicated in XML, and by composing assertions with the access control policy of the provider in a consistent manner. Access to web service methods is only granted if permission can be derived for it, where the derivation step forms a formal proof.

A basic framework has been defined. An architecture to support it must be defined. Only a very basic level of access control composition has been illustrated.

The publication of access control requirements in standards such as WS‐Policy can be considered.

This paper offers a practical approach to address access control for web services.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the implementation of a web services application to deliver a calendar of events from the Agriculture Network Information Center (AgNIC) portal to County Extension web pages.

To provide a context for this work, the paper begins with background on AgNIC, an initiative of the USDA National Agricultural Library, land‐grant universities, and others, to build a portal to deliver agriculture‐related information and resources. Featured is the University of Arizona's (UA) contribution to AgNIC, Rangelands West, which has become a model of collaboration between land‐grant libraries and Cooperative Extension units. The UA first implemented web services to allow harvesting of Rangelands West metadata by the central AgNIC database. This experience provided the framework for further exploring this technology as a means for delivering customized content.

By instituting a service oriented architecture (SOA) using web services technologies (XML, WSDL, UDDI, and SOAP), developing a Master Service Bus to coordinate the application, and creating Flash plug‐ins and a Profile Manager for delivery, a calendar web service based on customer specifications was developed.

The paper discusses the implications for web services technology to offer new ways to share information and build stronger collaborations for delivering customized services

eScience workflows use orchestration for integrating and coordinating distributed and heterogeneous scientific resources, which are increasingly exposed as web services. The rate of growth of scientific data makes eScience workflows data‐intensive, challenging existing workflow solutions. Efficient methods of handling large data in scientific workflows based on web services are needed. The purpse of this paper is to address this issue.

In a previous paper the authors proposed Data‐Flow Delegation (DFD) as a means to optimize orchestrated workflow performance, focusing on SOAP web services. To improve the performance further, they propose pipelined data‐flow delegation (PDFD) for web service‐based eScience workflows in this paper, by leveraging from the domain of parallel programming. Briefly, PDFD allows partitioning of large datasets into independent subsets that can be communicated in a pipelined manner.

The results show that the PDFD improves the execution time of the workflow considerably and is capable of handling much larger data than the non‐pipelined approach.

Execution of a web service‐based workflow hampered by the size of data can be facilitated or improved by using services supporting Pipelined Data‐Flow Delegation.

Contributions of this work include the proposed concept of combining pipelining and Data‐Flow Delegation, an XML Schema supporting the PDFD communication between services, and the practical evaluation of the PDFD approach.

Aims to give an overview of web services, related protocols, and examples of use.

This column simply provides a technical overview of technology directly related to the work of digital libraries and digital library services.

It is increasingly important for digital libraries to consider how internet‐based applications can share data and provide standardized means for exposing content and allow more sophisticated querying to occur. Web services, which is a model for this purpose, has been in development for several years and yet has not been widely adopted by libraries maintaining digital repositories and applications containing other digital content. The basic technology for web services is examined, along with several examples of web service protocols in use as well as several instances of how various organizations are taking advantage of those technologies.

Web services and related protocols hold much promise for digital libraries and digital repositories.

This column will be most useful for libraries and institutions that are beginning to think about incorporating web services into their current technical infrastructure. It is particularly important for digital libraries that maintain archival, rare materials and research archives to be aware of and use web services to share and syndicate their important and valuable content.

This paper discusses an ongoing research programme, which explores the development of the software‐as‐a‐service business model by different service providers (xSPs). With the demise of the first phase of the ASP market, due to the failure of vendors to provide business value to potential and existing customers, Web services promise to resolve some of these problems by integrating software applications across heterogeneous technology platforms and business environments. Whether this will be achieved is the subject of continuing debate. This paper presents the preliminary findings from a study, which uses the Microsoft .NET technology platform to develop Web services. Two Web‐enabled prototype databases are discussed. The paper concludes that Web services is still relatively new, but if key technical and business challenges are resolved, it may provide value for the customer where ASPs failed.

This paper aims to develop a service‐oriented distributed multi‐robot system based on manufacturing message specification (MMS) and new‐generation distributed object technology – web services for realizing remotely monitoring and controlling multiple heterogeneous robots in the internet environment.

The study presents robot communication model and distributed multi‐robot monitoring and control software structure based on MMS and web services. In particular, monitoring and control software design of MMS concepts in web services environment using Unified Modeling Language model is discussed in detail. In addition, to verify the validity of the proposed design method, a multi‐robot prototype system for robot flexible assemble cell has been achieved. Its Server software is implemented in C++ with Visual Studio.NET being the development environment and Client software is programmed in Java with Borland JBuilder 9 being the development tool.

Finds that the communication structure following MMS can make the multi‐robot monitoring and control system have perfect robustness, interoperability and reconfigurability. Besides, web services technology can conveniently realize MMS services, also can successfully resolve the remote multi‐robot monitoring and control problem among cross‐network, cross‐platform and heterogeneous systems.

Provides an easy and low‐cost method for realizing heterogeneous multi‐robot remote driving. The web‐based distribution of the presented system is critical in enabling capabilities such as e‐manufacturing, e‐diagnostics and e‐maintenance.

The proposed system can be seamlessly integrated into other automated manufacturing systems or management systems in plug‐and‐play fashion. The combination of MMS and web services is in favor of real manufacturing equipments being embedded in the network, so the presented systematic methodology can be a useful reference for constructing web‐based reconfigurable manufacturing systems.

Provides robot communication model based on MMS and web services and presents service‐oriented distributed remote multi‐robot monitoring and control software architecture.

Web services are going mobile. A mobile enterprise can be established in a cellular network by participating mobile hosts, which act as web service providers, and their clients. Mobile hosts enable seamless integration of user‐specific services to the enterprise, by following web service standards, also on the radio link and via resource constrained smart phones. However, establishing such a mobile enterprise poses several technical challenges, such as the quality of service (QoS), discovery aspects and proper integration solutions, for the network as well as for the mobile phone users. The purpose of this paper is to summarize the challenges and research associated with this domain and with establishing the mobile enterprise.

The paper summarizes the challenges and research in the mobile web services domain, along with a detailed discussion of the developed mobile web service mediation framework (MWSMF). MWSMF is realized based on the enterprise service bus (ESB) technology, as an intermediary between mobile hosts and web service clients. Moreover, to scale the mobile enterprise to the loads possible in cellular networks, some of the components of MWSMF are shifted to the new utility computing paradigm, cloud computing.

From the study it was found that ESB provides a good integration solution for the mobile enterprise research challenges. The detailed analysis of the MWSMF concludes that the mediation framework and its components are horizontally scalable, thus allowing to utilize elasticity of cloud platform to meet load requirements of mobile enterprise in an easy and quick manner.

The study addresses the research with providing services from smart phones and establishing mobile enterprise. The QoS challenges are addressed and the study introduces an integration framework using ESB technology. The porting of MWSMF onto the cloud is also addressed. As an added value, the research serves as a case study for porting enterprise applications to the cloud.