Search results

This paper aims to show that information and evidence found in the XML‐based environment of web services can allow web services providers to gain a sense of the trustworthiness of web services requestors over time.

A literature review on trust in web services environment is provided. Trust management models, and an existing trust specification for web services are discussed. Next, a conceptual framework for web services trust formation is presented.

The paper makes explicit types of information that can be used for trust formation. Web services providers are given the ability to trust requestors autonomously by making use of information that is published through web services standards, defined over and above a web services interface. The approach incorporates elements of social trust as it is concerned with more than cryptographic controls. It has mechanisms that allow a web services provider to manage trust autonomously, enabling different types of trust for different situations.

A conceptual framework for trust formation has been defined that identifies a proposal for trust calculation. The paper does not address the implementation of the framework, and calculation of trust over information categories.

The paper identifies a practical approach to autonomous web services trust by making use of web services standards such as WS‐Policy and WSMetadataExchange.

This paper identifies a taxonomy of trust information that can be used to make explicit the requirements for web services trust.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of the balanced scorecard methodology in web services quality. A balanced scorecard framework is developed for web services quality by identifying critical success factors that make up the business objectives, measures, targets, and initiatives.

The framework of web services quality applying the balanced scorecard methodology is developed by integrating the theory of balanced scorecard and web services. Then, case studies with two organizations in the agricultural industry are deployed to test the framework of the balanced scorecard.

The findings of the exploratory case studies suggest a cyclic process that was created with the use of the balanced scorecard approach to evaluate the quality of web services applications and in order to integrate quality and to provide a strategic map and indicate how information will be disseminated so that the potential use of web services can be attained.

The study contributes to practitioners as they will have a system which will provide them with timely, cost‐effective, scalable, manageable, and reliable feedback on their strategic performance. Further, the balanced scorecard gives a holistic view of the firms by simultaneously examining its performance from four perspectives; namely learning and growth, internal business processes, customer, and financial perspectives.

Unlike previous research that uses the balanced scorecard to measure the economic impact on the firm. This paper discusses the role of the balanced scorecard methodology in improving the service quality of firms using web services. Further, it provides lessons learned, as in measures that firms can be aware of in the quality of the services they provide.

The Internet has accelerated the adoption of collaborative commerce among businesses to form Web services. Web services refer to modular Internet‐based business functions that perform specific business tasks to facilitate business interactions within and beyond the organization. Firms are embedded in networks of collaborative relationships that influence the flow of resources among the stakeholders (requesters, providers, users and employees). Collaboration with Web services creates trust in the technological dimensions of Web services. Technology trust refers to the subjective probability by which organizations believe that the underlying technology infrastructure is capable of facilitating transactions according to their confident expectations. In this paper we examine the role of facilitating conditions in technology trust and its relationship with Web services. We provide a set of guidelines for early adopters and discuss the theoretical and practical implications of Web services and directions for future research.

Distributed computing architecture has been around for a while, but not all of its benefits could be leveraged due to issues such as inter‐operability, industry standards and cost efficiency that could provide agility and transparency to the business process integration. Web services offer a cross platform solution that provides a wrapper around any business object and exposes it over the Internet as service. Web services typically work outside of private networks, offering developers a non‐proprietary route to their solutions. The growth of this technology is imminent; however, there are various factors that could impact its adoption rate. This paper provides an in‐depth analysis of various factors that could affect adoption rate of this new technology by the industry. Various advantages, pitfalls and future implications of this technology are considered with reference to a practitioner survey conducted to establish the main concerns effecting adoption rate of Web services.

In any critical system, high‐availability of software components like web services has so far been achieved through replication. Three replication strategies known as active, passive, and hybrid, describe for example how many replicas are needed, where to locate replicas, and how replicas interact with the original web service and among themselves if needed. The purpose of this paper is to show how replicates could be substituted with components that are similarly functional to the component that needs back‐up in case of failure.

After examination of the different existing replication strategies, it was decided to test the suitability of the proposed web services high‐availability approach based on communities for each strategy. To this end, the specification of web services using two behaviors, namely control and operational, was deemed appropriate.

The active replication strategy is the only strategy that could support the development of a web services high‐availability approach based on communities of web services.

The proposed approach has been validated in practice by deploying a JXTA‐based testbed. The experimental work has implemented the active replication strategy.

Software component high‐availability could be achieved by components that are similarly functional to this component, which permits the common limitations of existing replication strategies to be addressed.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the problems associated with the development of e‐government in Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) countries and propose a novel framework for adopting service orientation. This framework includes a new approach and architecture for implementing service orientation called SBA‐eGOV (Service Based Architecture for E‐Government).

A comprehensive literature review was carried out to study various service oriented architecture (SOA) adoption strategies and implementation methods. The most appropriate adoption strategy and implementation method were selected. Web service adoption and implementation/development methodologies were designed separately, and then integrated to form one single framework. Web services best practices were studied to identify the specificities of web services for e‐government projects in SADC countries. A service orientation framework, which includes a service orientation development/implementation method, was developed for e‐government projects. Data from the UN report on e‐government readiness for year 2004‐2010 were analysed.

The trend showed that the e‐government index of SADC countries has been stagnating (even degrading) since 2005. One of the main reasons is the lack of software application integration. The main area of weakness is the lack of a complete framework for adopting and implementing web services. A framework for adopting service orientation, developing web services and deploying e‐services is required to enable application software integration.

By applying the proposed framework, e‐services can be deployed more rapidly to citizens, businesses and government departments.

SBA‐eGOV can be adopted by countries where e‐government projects have completed the “Internalisation” and “Interaction” stages and use to deliver e‐services to citizens.

This work comprises development of a new framework, SBA‐eGOV, which consists of a service‐orientation adoption methodology, a service‐orientation implementation methodology and a service‐based architecture for government. SBA‐eGOV is a novel and complete framework which addresses service‐orientation adoption, development and implementation. To date, no such research work has been undertaken to analyse and solve the problems surrounding e‐government projects in SADC.

Web services play vital role in the development of emerging technologies such as Cloud computing and Internet of Things. Although, there is a close relationship among the discovery, selection and composition tasks of Web services, research community has treated these challenges at individual level rather to focus on them collectively for developing efficient solution, which is the purpose of this work. This paper aims to propose an approach to integrate the service discovery, selection and composition of Semantic Web services on runtime basis.

The proposed approach defined as a quality of service (QoS)-aware approach is based on QoS model to perform discovery, selection and composition tasks at runtime to enhance the user satisfaction and quality guarantee by incorporating non-functional parameters such as response time and throughput with the Web services and user request. In this paper, the proposed approach is based on ontology for semantic description of Web services, which provides interoperability and automation in the Web services tasks.

This work proposed an integrated framework of Web service discovery, selection and composition which supports end user to search, select and compose the Web services at runtime using semantic description and non-functional requirements. The proposed approach is evaluated by various data sets from the Web Service Challenge 2009 (WSC-2009) to show the efficiency of this work. A use case scenario of Healthcare Information System is implemented using proposed work to demonstrate the usability and requirement the proposed approach.

The main contribution of this paper is to develop an integrated approach of Semantic Web services discovery, selection and composition by using the non-functional requirements.

The purpose of the research is to speed up the process of semantic web services by transformation of current Web services into semantic web services. This can be achieved by applying ontology learning techniques to automatically extract domain ontologies.

The work here presents a Service Ontology Learning Framework (SOLF), the core aspect of which extracts Structured Interpretation Patterns (SIP). These patterns are used to automate the acquisition (from production domain specific Web Services) of ontological concepts and the relations between those concepts.

A Semantic Web of accessible and re‐usable software services is able to support the increasingly dynamic and time‐limited development process. This is premised on the efficient and effective creation of supporting domain ontology.

Though WSDL documents provide important application level service description, they alone are not sufficient for OL however, as: they typically provide technical descriptions only; and in many cases, Web services use XSD files to provide data type definitions. The need to include (and combine) other Web service resources in the OL process is therefore an important one.

Web service domain ontologies are the general means by which semantics are added to Web services; typically used as a common domain model and referenced by annotated or externally described Web artefacts (e.g. Web services). The development and deployment of Semantic Web services by enterprises and the wider business community has the potential to radically improve planned and ad‐hoc service re‐use. The reality is slower however, in good part because the development of an appropriate ontology is an expensive, error prone and labor intensive task. The proposed SOLF framework is aimed to overcome this problem by contributing a framework and a tool that can be used to build web service domain ontologies automatically.

The output of the SOLF process is an automatically generated OWL domain ontology, a basis from which a future Semantic Web Services can be delivered using existing Web services. It can be seen that the ontology created moves beyond basic taxonomy – extracting and relating concepts at a number of levels. More importantly, the approach provides integrated knowledge (represented by the individual WSDL documents) from a number of domain experts across a group of banks.

The Internet is changing the way businesses operate today. Firms are using the Web for procurement, to find trading partners, and to link existing applications to other applications. Web services are rapidly becoming the enabling technology of today’s e‐business, and e‐commerce systems. We are having a massive impact on the way businesses think about designing, developing, and deploying Web‐based applications. Web services may be an evolutionary step in designing distributed applications, however, they are not without problems. There are issues relating to security, transactions and scalability that need to be addressed. This paper addresses security concerns in Web services and the role of technology trust.

A web service is a software system designed to support interoperable machine‐to‐machine or application‐to‐application interactions over networks. Descriptions enable web services to be discovered, used by other web services, and composed into new web services. Web service composition is a mechanism for creating new web services by reusing existing ones. In order to compose a web service, the right primitive services have to be discovered. A matchmaking technique enables discovering these services. Web services have functional, non‐functional, behavioral, and semantic characteristics. These four aspects of web services provide different key information about the service; therefore they have to be considered for description, matching, and composition. The purpose of this paper is to propose a formal description framework and a formal matchmaking technique that allows describing and discovering web services by considering their four characteristics.

In this paper, the description framework combines two existing languages for functional, semantic, and behavioral description, along with a simple and new language for non‐functional description.

A case study is used to illustrate the description framework and the matchmaking technique. The implementation and performance evaluation of the matchmaking technique is presented. The framework formalizes and integrates the languages in a common semantic domain in order to match and manipulate the different aspects together and formally. Isabelle is used by the matchmaking technique for discovering the partially and fully matched services.

The contribution of this paper lies in the new description framework and the new matchmaking technique.