bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Challenges of Multi Device Support with Portals
Authors: Fitzgerald Jaye , Landrum Van
Published: February 2011

Although Portals can aggregate and integrate applications “at the glass” on desktop PCs and laptop browsers, more users expect to access Portals on their mobile devices. The challenges to support multiple devices are difficult. Standard HTML web pages cannot be delivered to most mobile devices, which have different capabilities like screen sizes, image formats, and input methods. With thousands of devices and the frequent introduction of new devices, how can a Portal support the many types of mobile devices connecting to the Portal’s many applications? In this paper, the authors discuss the issues and solutions to this many-to-many relationship. IBM Mobile Portal Accelerator provides multiple device support from a Portal by using a version of XHTML called XDIME as the content markup and a multi-channel component coupled with a device repository to provide the proper device specific view. As a result, the page that is sent to the device is appropriate for that specific device and its capabilities, where no horizontal scrolling is required, all information fits on the screen, forms work, and all images are rendered properly, creating a positive user experience.
An Integration Ontology for Components Composition
Authors: Khemakhem Sofien , Drira Khalil , Jmaiel Mohamed
Published: February 2011

Software components composition can improve the efficiency of knowledge management by composing individual components together for complex distributed application. There are two main areas of research in knowledge representation for component composition: the syntactic based approach and the semantic-based approach. In this paper, the authors propose an integrated ontology-supported software component composition. The authors’ approach provides dual modes to perform component composition. Ontologies are employed to enrich semantics at both components description and composition. The authors demonstrate that their search engine SEC++ fulfills automated component composition, in particular, and knowledge management in general.
Portals, Technology and E-Learning
Authors: Adamson Greg
Published: February 2011

E-learning promises to improve the learning process through the application of technology, including portal technology. Portals can provide the personalisation and interactivity functionality that e-learning requires. However, the long-held promise that technology will improve learning has often failed to deliver. This paper examines the promise of this technology and compares the specific demands of e-learning to the actual capability of portals and the underpinning Internet and World Wide Web. It then identifies four “costs” of using technology for e-learning, and points to existing project management tools that may minimise the effect of these “costs”.
Using Ajax to Track Student Attention
Authors: Newmarch Jan
Published: February 2011

Tracking the behaviour of users of online learning systems is an important issue, but current techniques have not been able to give deep views on what users do with Web-based learning systems. This paper shows how the use of Ajax can provide a richer model of how users interact with Web systems. In this paper, the authors will discuss a case study used to better track behaviours of online learning systems and how Ajax improves this understanding of user interactions.
Use of Web Analytics in Portals
Authors: Polgar Jana
Published: February 2011

Web analytics are typically branded as a tool for measuring website traffic. They can be equally used as a tool for business research, results of advertising campaigns, and market research. Web analytics provide data on the number of visitors, page views, measure a visitor’s navigation through a website, etc. This collection of data is typically compared against some metrics to indicate whether the web site is delivering expected values, what improvements should be considered, and so on. These metrics are also used to improve a web site or marketing campaign’s audience response. Tracking portal visits are important in order to obtain a better understanding of which parts of the portal are delivering value. However, portals have unique attributes associated with the page composition techniques, page, and portlet refresh. Portal always presents multiple topics on the same page, which pose specific challenges to explore exciting opportunities allowing the web designer to gain insights about portal usage and user behaviour. Furthermore, portals are inherently multidimensional, and effective tools to monitor and analyse portal data usage must be able to support multidimensional analysis.
Integration of Business Event and Rule Management With the Web Services Model
Authors: Nagarajan Karthik , Lam Herman , Su Stanley Y.W.
Published: February 2011

Web services technology is emerging as a promising infrastructure to support loosely coupled, Internet-based applications that are distributed, heterogeneous and dynamic. It provides a standards-based, process-centric framework for achieving the sharing of distributed heterogeneous applications. While Web services technology provides a promising foundation for developing distributed applications for e-business, additional features are required to make this paradigm truly useful in the real world. In particular, interactions among business organizations need to follow the policies, regulations, security and other business rules of the organizations. An effective way to control, restrict and enforce business rules in the use of Web services is to integrate business event and rule management concepts and techniques into the Web services model. In this paper, we focus on incorporating the business event and rule-management concepts into the Web services model at the service provider side. Based on a code-generation approach, we have developed techniques and implemented tools to generate Web service “wrappers” and other objects required to integrate an Event-Trigger-Rule (ETR) technology with the Web services technology.
Implementation and Performance of WS-Security
Authors: Makino Satoshi , Tamura Kent , Imamura Takeshi , Nakamura Yuichi
Published: February 2011

This article describes performance improvements for the Web Services Security (WS-Security) specification. In the course of its development and performance measurement, we identified bottlenecks in the XML parsing and public key operations such as RSA signature and encryption. We are working on minimizing the impact of both of these bottlenecks. We implemented a stream-based WS-Security processor and showed its efficiency in XML parsing, in terms of both the processing time and the memory usage. In addition, we introduced the Web Services Secure Conversation (WS-SecureConversation) to avoid expensive public key operations.
Merkle Tree Authentication in UDDI Registries
Authors: Bertino Elisa , Carminati Barbara , Ferrari Elena
Published: February 2011

UDDI registries are today the standard way of publishing information on Web services. They can be thought of as a structured repository of information that can be queried by clients to find the Web services that better fit their needs. Even if, at the beginning, UDDI has been mainly conceived as a public registry without specific facilities for security, today security issues are becoming more and more crucial, due to the fact that data published in UDDI registries may be highly strategic and sensitive. In this paper, we focus on authenticity issues by proposing a method based on Merkle Hash Trees, which does not require the party managing the UDDI to be trusted with authenticity. In the paper, besides giving all the details of the proposed solution, we show its benefit with standard digital signature techniques.
Towards a Framework for Agent-Enabled Semantic Web Service Composition
Authors: Ermolayev Vadim , Keberle Natalya , Plaksin Sergey , Kononenko Oleksandr , Terziyan Vagan
Published: February 2011

The article presents the framework for agent-enabled dynamic Web service composition. The core of the methodology is the new understanding of a Web service as an agent capability having proper ontological description. It is demonstrated how diverse Web services may be composed and mediated by dynamic coalitions of software agents collaboratively performing tasks for service requestors. Middle Agent Layer is introduced to conduct service request to task transformation, agent-enabled cooperative task decomposition and performance. Discussed are the formal means to arrange agents’ negotiation, to represent the semantic structure of the task-activity-service hierarchy and to assess fellow-agents’ capabilities and credibility factors. Finally, it is argued that the presented formal technique is applicable to various application domains. Presented is the ongoing work on designing and implementing agent-based layered architecture for intelligent rational information and document retrieval. Finally, the discussion of the OntoServ.Net framework for the development of P2P mobile service infrastructures for industrial asset management provides the extension of the Web service composition approach.
Matchmaking for Business Processes Based on Choreographics
Authors: Wombacher Andreas , Fankhauser Peter , Mahleko Bendick , Neuhold Erich
Published: February 2011

Web services have a potential to enhance B2B e-commerce over the Internet by allowing companies and organizations to publish their business processes on service directories where potential trading partners can find them. This can give rise to new business paradigms based on ad-hoc trading relations as companies, particularly small to medium scale, can cheaply and flexibly enter into fruitful contracts, for example through subcontracting from big companies by simply publishing their business processes and the services they offer. More business process support by the Web service infrastructure is however needed before such a paradigm change can materialize. A service for searching and matchmaking of business processes does not yet exist in the current infrastructure. We believe that such a service is needed and will enable companies and organizations to be able to establish ad-hoc business relations without relying on manually negotiated interorganizational workflows. This article gives a formal semantics to business process matchmaking based on finite state automata extended by logical expressions associated to states.
A Semi-Automatic Approach to Composite Web Services Discovery, Description and Invocation
Authors: Liang Qianhui , Chakarapani Lakshmi N. , Su Stanley Y.W. , Chikkamagalur Raman N. , Lam Herman
Published: February 2011

With the popularity of the Web services technology, more and more software systems’ functionalities become available by being published and registered as Web services. Registered Web services need to be dynamically combined to form “composite services” when individual “simple services” fail to meet service requestors’ complex service needs. In this article, we propose a semi-automatic approach to composite Web services discovery, description and invocation. We present an intelligent registry with constraint matching capabilities to support composite service discovery and description. It provides a user interface to interactively compose a service request. It then uses a semi-automatic mechanism and a search algorithm to construct a composite service template that satisfies the request. The operations of the template are bound to registered service operations by constraint matching subsequently. The resulting composite service is specified in the Web Services Flow Language. A composite service processor is designed to execute composite services by invoking the component service operations of various service providers.
RAW Architecture
Authors: Parra-Fuente Javier , Sanchez-Alonzo Salvador , Sanjuan-Martinez Oscar , Joyanes-Agular Luis
Published: February 2011

Web services are static components, which implies that before a change in their structure or behavior can be made, the source code — or a decoder of compiled code — is needed. The full process consists of three steps: editing and modifying the source code, compiling it again, and redeploying it in the server. Reflection, a powerful tool for the adaptation of applications at runtime, may help in creating more flexible and dynamic Web services. In this paper, we introduce RAWS (Reflective and Adaptable Web Service) Architecture, a Web service design model based on a reflective architecture multilevel. RAWS allows both the dynamic modification of the definition and implementation structure of the Web service, and the dynamic modification of the Web service behavior in order to change the existing code or to add new functionalities. All these dynamic modifications are performed directly on the code during execution, with no need to have the Web service source code. We also introduce an automatic generator of the reflective infrastructure that is needed for the implementation of the RAWS architecture. This infrastructure will make possible that any Web service can automatically behave like a Reflective and Adaptable Web Service.
Toward the Right Communication Protocol for Web Services
Authors: Tari Zahir , Malhotra Manish , Tari Abdelkamel , McKinlay Mark
Published: February 2011

Web Services require a common understanding of messages and message content in order to interact with each other. Several protocols have been proposed, which are coded into agent interfaces or implemented using framework-specific methods such as shared repositories. However, an agent wishing to interact with a large number of other disparate agents cannot be expected to have knowledge of how to initiate or maintain a conversation with all other agents it may encounter. In this paper, we propose a dynamic communication protocol for Web services—DynWES. This involves the publication of protocol specifications representing a finite state machine (FSM). A client agent downloads this specification, validates it for correctness, and then implements the protocol dynamically as a state machine. Mechanisms for building FSMs and checking their correctness are presented. An implementation of DynWES also is described and tested (using applications in the wine selling business domain).
Integrating Intelligent Mobile Agents with Web Services
Authors: Mateos Cristian , Zunino Alejandro , Campo Marcelo
Published: February 2011

Research on Web services aims at extending the Web with computer-understandable descriptions enabling programs to interact and exploit Web-accessible programs without human intervention. Advances in this line of research will strongly benefit the fields of intelligent and mobile agents due to their potentials for building Web-enabled applications. In this paper, we describe a novel programming language called MoviLog for developing intelligent mobile agents that interact with Web services. The most interesting aspect of the language is its Reactive Mobility by Failure mechanism that allows programmers to develop mobile agents without explicitly providing code for handling mobility.
Information Management for Computational Grids
Authors: Jie Wei , Zang Tianyi , Hung Terence , Turner Stephen J. , Cai Wentong
Published: February 2011

Information Service is a key component of a Grid environment and crucial to the operation of a computational Grid. This paper presents an Information Service for a computational Grid Virtual Organization (VO). The main functionality of this Information Service is the provision of information essential for applications running on a computational Grid. This Information Service is a hierarchical structure that consists of VO layer, site layer, and resource layer. We propose different models of information data organization for Information Service, and experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of these models. Based on the experimental results, we further introduce the data organization model for our Information Service. The implementation of the Information Service is based on the Globus Toolkit and complies with the OGSI (Open Grid Services Infrastructure) specifications. In this paper, some application experiences of using the Information Service are also presented.
Architectural Foundations of WSRF.NET
Authors: Humphrey Marty , Wasson Glenn
Published: February 2011

State management has always been an underlying issue for large-scale distributed systems, but only recently has it been brought to the forefront of Grid computing with the introduction of the Web Services Resource Framework (WSRF) and its companion, WS-Notification. WSRF advocates standardized approaches for client exposure to and potential manipulation of stateful services for Grid computing; however, these arguments and their long-term implications have been difficult to assess without a concrete implementation of the WSRF specifications. This paper describes the architectural foundations of WSRF.NET, which is an implementation of the full set of specifications for WSRF and WS-Notification on the Microsoft .NET Framework. To our knowledge, the observations and lessons learned from the design and implementation of WSRF.NET provide the first evaluation of the WSRF approach. A concrete example of the design, implementation, and deployment of a WSRF-compliant service and its accompanying WSRF-compliant client are used to guide the discussion. While the potential of WSRF and WS-Notification remains strong, initial observations are that there are many challenges that remain to be solved, most notably the implied programming model derived from the specifications, particularly the complexity of service side and client code and the complexity of WS-Notification.
On Feature Interactions Among Web Services
Authors: Weiss Michael , Esfandiari Babak
Published: February 2011

Web Services promise to allow businesses to adapt rapidly to changes in the business environment and to the needs of customers. However, the rapid introduction of new services paired with the dynamicity of the business environment also leads to undesirable interactions that negatively impact service quality and user satisfaction. In this paper, we propose an approach for modeling such undesirable interactions as feature interactions. As each functional feature ultimately is motivated by non-functional requirements, we make an explicit distinction between functional and non-functional features. We then describe our approach for detecting and resolving feature interactions among Web Services. The approach is based on goal-oriented analysis and scenario modeling. It allows us to reason about feature interactions in terms of goal conflicts and feature deployment. Three case studies illustrate the approach. The paper concludes with a discussion of our findings and an outlook on future research.
Authorization Service for Web Services and its Application in a Health Care Domain
Authors: Indrakanti Sarath , Varadharajan Vijay , Hitchens Michael
Published: February 2011

In this paper, we discuss the design issues for an authorization framework for Web Services. In particular, we describe the features required for an authorization policy language for Web Services. We briefly introduce the authorization service provided by Microsoft .NET MyServices and describe our extended authorization model that proposes extensions to the .NET MyServices authorization service to support a range of authorization policies required in commercial systems. We discuss the application of the extended authorization model to a health care system built using Web Services. We use the XML Access Control Language (XACL) in our implementation to demonstrate our extended authorization model. This also enables us to evaluate the range of authorization policies that XACL supports.
A Dynamic Label Checking Approach for Information Flow Control in Web Services
Authors: Tari Zahir , Bertok Peter , Simic Dusan
Published: February 2011

Information Flow Control (IFC) is a method of enforcing confidentiality by using labels, data structures for specifying security classifications. IFC is used in programming languages to monitor procedures in an attempt to detect and prevent information leakage. While it ensures greater security, IFC excessively restricts flow of information. This paper presents a model of information flow control using semi-discretionary label structures. We propose a set of rules that not only increases the flexibility of IFC but also defines labels as a practical component of a security system. We propose a dynamic approach using a centralized model for dynamic label checking and verify the proposed model using theoretical proofs.
Facilitating Dynamic Service Compositions by Adaptable Service Connectors
Authors: Li Gang , Han Yanbo , Zhao Zhuofeng , Wang Jing , Wagner Roland M.
Published: February 2011

Dynamic changes of services and requirements require service connection relationships adaptable in service compositions. This paper presents an adaptable service connector model and related language and tools. The model presents service connection relationships as an explicit component with which service connections can be reconfigured and changes of services involved in the interaction can be handled; this makes the service connection relationships more adaptive. With the language and tools supporting the model, services can be dynamically chained, which make service-oriented applications adapt to volatile business requirements and dynamic changeable services. The related case study and evaluation are also presented in this paper.
Supporting Predictable Service Provision in MANETs Via Context-Aware Session Management
Authors: Handorean Radu , Sen Rohan , Hackmann Gregory , Roman Gruia-Catalin
Published: February 2011

The increasing ubiquity of wireless mobile devices is promoting unprecedented levels of electronic collaboration among devices interoperating to achieve a common goal. Issues related to host interoperability are addressed partially by the principles of the service-oriented computing paradigm. However, certain technical concerns relating to predictable interactions among hosts in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) have not yet received much attention. We introduce “follow-me sessions,” where interactions occur between a client and a service, rather than a specific service provider. A client, thus, may exploit several service providers during the course of its interaction with a given service. This redundancy mitigates the effects of mobility-induced disconnections, thereby facilitating reliable communication. The switching of service providers is done using a combination of strong process migration, context-sensitive binding and locationagnostic communication protocols. This paper covers the architecture and implementation of a middleware that supports follow-me sessions and shows how this middleware mitigates issues related to proxy-based service-oriented architectures in mobile ad hoc networks. We support our claims via technical evaluation of our approach.
Facilitating the Specification of Semantic Web Services Using Model-Driven Development
Authors: Gannod Gerald C. , Timm John T.E. , Brodie Raynette J
Published: February 2011

The Semantic Web promises automated invocation, discovery, and composition of Web services by enhancing services with semantic descriptions. An upper ontology for Web services called OWL-S has been created to provide a mechanism for describing service semantics in a standard, well-defined manner. Unfortunately, the learning curve for semantic-rich description languages such as OWL-S can be steep, especially given the current state of tool support for the language. This paper describes a suite of automated software tools that we have developed to facilitate the construction of OWL-S specifications. The tools operate in two stages. In the first stage, a model-driven architecture technique is used to generate an OWL-S description of a Web service from a Unified Modeling Language (UML) model. This allows the developer to focus on creating a model of the Web service in a standard UML tool, leveraging existing knowledge. In the second stage, an interactive approach for generating groundings is used. This paper describes both tools and demonstrates how the use of lightweight interactive tools facilitates creation of OWL-S specifications.
Organizing Thematic, Geographic, and Temporal Knowledge in a Well-Founded Navigation Space
Authors: Brunner Levin , Schulz Klaus U. , Weigel Felix
Published: February 2011

We introduce a family of symbolic logical formalisms for reasoning with named entities, associated topics or thematic fields, geographic areas, and temporal periods. We argue that this kind of knowledge is useful for various applications in a Semantic Web context, in other words, for the content-oriented description of Web services and yellow pages. In our approach, entities and their relationships are positioned in a well-founded (i.e., acyclic) navigation space, called an EFGT Net. Large (small) entries regarding the navigation order represent general (specific) topics and large (small) geographic or temporal areas. This acyclic organization of knowledge aims to support indexing, search, and classification tasks directly. Each entry comes with a unique identifier that describes the role of the corresponding concept, using techniques from description logics. A formal semantics for the language of identifiers is given. For the resulting logic, role hierarchies and role-value maps are characteristic and crucial. Based on the semantics of identifiers, a set of intensionally typed links is defined that induces the aforementioned navigation structure on the set of all entries. We then introduce a set of deduction rules and a saturation procedure for computing all links between concepts, as well as intensional types for links. We prove soundness, completeness, and termination of the link derivation calculus.
Metadata, Ontologies, and Information Models for Grid PSE Toolkits Based on Web Services
Authors: Comito Carmela , Mastoroianni Carlo , Talia Domenico
Published: February 2011

A PSE toolkit is a group of technologies within a software architecture through which multiple PSEs can be built for different application domains. The effective use of a PSE toolkit requires the management of the heterogeneity of the involved resources that can include computers, data, network facilities, sensors, and software tools provided by different organizations. A distributed implementations of a PSE toolkit can be envisioned through the exploitation of features and functionalities offered by a service-oriented Grid framework, so obtaining a Grid PSE toolkit based on Web services. This paper presents a metadata model for Grid PSE toolkits based on Web services and the architecture of an information system that exploits the proposed metadata model. These two components contribute to define a general model of metadata management for supporting the design and implementation of problem solving environments on Grids.
Managing Semantic Metadata for Web/Grid Services
Authors: Chen L. , Shadbolt N. R. , Goble C. , Tao F.
Published: February 2011

Web/Grid services’ metadata and semantics are becoming increasing important for service sharing and effective reuse. In this paper we present a generic framework for engineering and managing services’ Semantic Metadata (SMD) with the ultimate purpose of facilitating interoperability, automation, and knowledgeable reuse of services for problem solving. The framework addresses fundamental issues, approaches, and tools for the whole lifecycle of SMD management, in other words, those of acquiring, modeling, representing, publishing, and reusing services’ SMD. It adopts ontologies and the Semantic Web technologies as the enabling technologies by which services’ metadata are semantically enriched and made interoperable, understandable, and accessible on the Web/Grid for both humans and machines. In particular, mechanisms are proposed to make use of service SMD for service discovery and composition. The paper also describes a service SMD management system in the context of the UK e-Science project GEODISE. A suite of tools are developed, which forms the core of the SMD management infrastructure. We demonstrate the added value of the use of SMD through the integration of SMD management with GEODISE application systems.
A Flexible Directory Query Language for the Efficient Processing of Service Composition Queries
Authors: Binder Walter , Constantinescu Ion , Faltings Boi
Published: February 2011

Service composition is a major challenge in an open environment populated by large numbers of heterogeneous services. In such a setting, the efficient interaction of directory-based service discovery with service composition engines is crucial. In this article we present a Java-based directory that offers special functionality enabling effective service composition. In order to optimize the interaction of the directory with different service composition algorithms exploiting application-specific heuristics, the directory supports user-defined selection and ranking functions written in a declarative query language. Inside the directory queries are transformed and compiled to JVM bytecode which is dynamically linked into the directory. The compiled query enables a best-first search of matching directory entries, efficiently pruning the search space.
Behaviour-Aware Discovery of Web Service Compositions
Authors: Brogi Antonio , Corfini Sara
Published: February 2011

A major challenge for service-oriented computing is how to discover and compose (Web) services to build complex applications. We present a matchmaking system that exploits both semantics and behavioural information to discover service compositions capable of satisfying a client request.
Extensible Architecture for High-Performance, Scalable, Reliable Publish-Subscribe Eventing and Notification
Authors: Ostrowski Krzysztof , Birman Ken , Dolev Danny
Published: February 2011

Existing Web service notification and eventing standards are useful in many applications, but they have serious limitations that make them ill-suited for large-scale deployments, or as a middleware or a component- integration technology in today’s data centers. For example, it is not possible to use IP multicast, or for recipients to forward messages to others, scalable notification trees must be setup manually, and no end-to-end security, reliability, or QoS guarantees can be provided. We propose an architecture that is free of such limitations and that may serve as a basis for extending or complementing the existing standards. The approach emerges from our work on QuickSilver, a new, extremely modular and extensible platform for high-performance, scalable, reliable eventing.
Karma2
Authors: Simmhan Yogesh L. , Plale Beth , Gannon Dennis
Published: February 2011

The increasing ability for the sciences to sense the world around us is resulting in a growing need for datadriven e-Science applications that are under the control of workflows composed of services on the Grid. The focus of our work is on provenance collection for these workflows that are necessary to validate the workflow and to determine quality of generated data products. The challenge we address is to record uniform and usable provenance metadata that meets the domain needs while minimizing the modification burden on the service authors and the performance overhead on the workflow engine and the services. The framework is based on generating discrete provenance activities during the lifecycle of a workflow execution that can be aggregated to form complex data and process provenance graphs that can span across workflows. The implementation uses a loosely coupled publish-subscribe architecture for propagating these activities, and the capabilities of the system satisfy the needs of detailed provenance collection. A performance evaluation of a prototype finds a minimal performance overhead (in the range of 1% for an eight-service workflow using 271 data products).
Result Refinement in Web Services Retrieval Based on Multiple Instances Learning
Authors: Zou Yanzhen , Zhang Lu , Li Yan , Xie Bing , Mei Han
Published: February 2011

Web services retrieval is a critical step for reusing existing services in the SOA paradigm. In the UDDI registry, traditional category-based approaches have been used to locate candidate services. However, these approaches usually achieve relatively low precision because some candidate Web Services in the result set cannot provide actually suitable operations for users. In this article, we present a new approach to improve this kind of category-based Web Services retrieval process that can refine the coarse matching results step by step. The refinement is based on the idea that operation specification is very important to service reuse. Therefore, a Web Service is investigated via multiple instances view in our approach, which indicates that a service is labeled as positive if and only if at least one operation provided by this service is usable to the user. Otherwise, it is labeled as negative. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can increase the retrieval precision to a certain extent after one or two rounds of refinement.
XML Security with Binary XML for Mobile Web Services
Authors: Kangasharju Jaakko , Lindholm Tancred , Tarkoma Sasu
Published: February 2011

In the wireless world, there has recently been much interest in alternate serialization formats for XML data, mostly driven by the weak capabilities of both devices and networks. However, it is difficult to make an alternate serialization format compatible with XML security features such as encryption and signing. We consider here ways to integrate an alternate format with security, and present a solution that we see as a viable alternative. In addition to this, we present extensive performance measurements, including ones on a mobile phone on the effect of an alternate format when using XML-based security. These measurements indicate that, in the wireless world, reducing message sizes is the most pressing concern, and that processing efficiency gains of an alternate format are a much smaller concern. We also make specific recommendations on security usage based on our measurements.
A Reservation-based Extended Transaction Protocol for Coordination of Web Services
Authors: Zhao Wenbing , Kart Firat , Moser L.E. , Melliar-Smith P.M.
Published: February 2011

Web services can be used to automate business activities that span multiple enterprises over the Internet. Such business activities require a coordination protocol to reach consistent results among the participants in the business activity. In the current state of the art, either classical distributed transactions or extended transactions with compensating transactions are used. However, classical distributed transactions lock data in the databases of different enterprises for unacceptable durations or involve repeated retries, and compensating transactions can lead to inconsistencies in the databases of the different enterprises. In this article, we describe a novel reservation protocol that can be used to coordinate the tasks of a business activity. Instead of resorting to compensating transactions, the reservation protocol employs an explicit reservation phase and an explicit confirmation and cancellation phase. We show how our reservation protocol maps to the Web services coordination specification, and describe our implementation of the reservation protocol. We compare the performance of the reservation protocol with that of the two-phase commit protocol and optimistic two-phase commit protocol. We also compare the probability of inconsistency for the reservation protocol with that for compensating transactions.
An Approach to Checking Compatibility of Service Contracts in Service-Oriented Applications
Authors: Nepal Surya , Zic John , Chau Thi
Published: February 2011

In the service-oriented architecture model, a service may be characterized by its exchange of asynchronous messages, and a service contract is a desirable composition of a variety of messages. Though this model is simple, implementing large-scale, cross-organizational distributed applications may be difficult to achieve in general, as there is no guarantee that service composition will be possible because of incompatibilities between the service contracts. This article examines and addresses this problem, first by identifying and specifying contract compatibility conditions based on standards such as WS-Business Activity, and second, through the use of a compatibility checking tool that enables application developers to perform checks at design time.
XML Data Binding for C++ Using Metadata
Authors: Payrits Szabolcs , Dornbach Péter
Published: February 2011

Mapping XML document schemas and Web Service interfaces to programming languages has an important role in effective creation of quality Web Service implementations. The authors present a novel way to map XML data to the C++ programming language. The proposed solution offers more flexibility and more compact code that makes it ideal for embedded environments. The article describes the concept and the architecture of the solution and compares it with existing solutions. This article is an extended version of the paper from ICWS 2006. The authors include a broader comparison with existing tools on Symbian and Linux platforms and evaluate the code size and performance.
Protocol-Level Service Composition Mismatches
Authors: Xiong PengCheng , Pu Calton , Zhou Mengchu
Published: February 2011

Protocol-level mismatch is one of the most important problems in service composition. The state-of-the-art method to deal with protocol mismatch is to generate adaptors to check deadlock-freeness based on a reachability graph. When this property is violated, the generation process will repeat itself until no deadlock state is found; however, the main drawback of this method is that it does not take into account the future deadlock state and requires many interactions with a developer. In this regard, it suffers from low efficiency. In this paper, the authors model multiple web service interaction with a Petri net called Composition net (C-net). The protocol-level mismatch problem is transformed into the empty siphon problem of a C-net. The authors take future deadlock states into consideration through this model, while finding the optimal solution that involves fewest interactions with a developer. The proposed method is proved to achieve higher efficiency for resolving protocol-level mismatch issues than traditional ones.
Optimal Fault Tolerance Strategy Selection for Web Services
Authors: Zheng Zibin , Lyu Michael R.
Published: February 2011

Service-oriented systems are usually composed by heterogeneous Web services, which are distributed across the Internet and provided by organizations. Building highly reliable service-oriented systems is a challenge due to the highly dynamic nature of Web services. In this paper, the authors apply software fault tolerance techniques for Web services, where the component failures are handled by fault tolerance strategies. In this paper, a distributed fault tolerance strategy evaluation and selection framework is proposed based on versatile fault tolerance techniques. The authors provide a systematic comparison of various fault tolerance strategies by theoretical formulas, as well as real-world experiments. This paper also presents the optimal fault tolerance strategy selection algorithm, which employs both the QoS performance of Web services and the requirements of service users for selecting optimal fault tolerance strategy. A prototype is implemented and real-world experiments are conducted to illustrate the advantages of the evaluation framework. In these experiments, users from six different locations perform evaluation of Web services distributed in six countries, where over 1,000,000 test cases are executed in a collaborative manner to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach.
Reducing User Perceived Latency with a Proactive Prefetching Middleware for Mobile SOA Access
Authors: Schreiber Daniel , Göb Andreas , Aitenbichler Erwin , Mühlhäuser Max
Published: February 2011

Network latency is one of the most critical factors for the usability of mobile SOA applications. This paper introduces prefetching and caching enhancements for an existing SOA framework for mobile applications to reduce the user perceived latency. Latency reduction is achieved by proactively sending data to the mobile device that could most likely be requested at a later time. This additional data is piggybacked onto responses to actual requests and injected into a client side cache, so that it can be used without an additional connection. The prefetching is done automatically using a sequence prediction algorithm. The benefit of prefetching and caching enhancements were evaluated for different network settings and a reduction of user perceived latency of up to 31% was found in a typical scenario. In contrast to other prefetching solutions, our piggybacking approach also allows to significantly increase battery lifetime of the mobile device.
Acid-Sensing Ion Channels Contribute to the Effect of Acidosis on the Function of Dendritic Cells
Authors: Tong Jing , Wu Wen-Ning , Kong Xiaoling , Wu Peng-Fei , Tian Li , Du Wenjiao , Fang Min , Zheng Fang , Chen Jian-Guo , Tan Zheng , Gong Feili
Published: February 2011

As an H+-gated subgroup of the degenerin/epithelial Na+ channel family, acid-sensing ion channels (ASICs) were reported to be involved in various physiological and pathological processes in neurons. However, little is known about the role of ASICs in the function of dendritic cells (DCs). In this study, we investigated the expression of ASICs in mouse bone marrow-derived DCs and their possible role in the function of DCs. We found that ASIC1, ASIC2, and ASIC3 are expressed in DCs at the mRNA and protein levels, and extracellular acid can evoke ASIC-like currents in DCs. We also demonstrated that acidosis upregulated the expression of CD11c, MHC class II, CD80, and CD86 and enhanced the Ag-presenting ability of DCs via ASICs. Moreover, the effect of acidosis on DCs can be abolished by the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs ibuprofen and diclofenac. These results suggest that ASICs are involved in the acidosis-mediated effect on DC function.
Primordial Linkage ofβ2-Microglobulinto the MHC
Authors: Ohta Yuko , Shiina Takashi , Lohr Rebecca L. , Hosomichi Kazuyoshi , Pollin Toni I. , Heist Edward J. , Suzuki Shingo , Inoko Hidetoshi , Flajnik Martin F.
Published: February 2011

β2-Microglobulin (β2M) is believed to have arisen in a basal jawed vertebrate (gnathostome) and is the essential L chain that associates with most MHC class I molecules. It contains a distinctive molecular structure called a constant-1 Ig superfamily domain, which is shared with other adaptive immune molecules including MHC class I and class II. Despite its structural similarity to class I and class II and its conserved function, β2M is encoded outside the MHC in all examined species from bony fish to mammals, but it is assumed to have translocated from its original location within the MHC early in gnathostome evolution. We screened a nurse shark bacterial artificial chromosome library and isolated clones containing β2M genes. A gene present in the MHC of all other vertebrates (ring3) was found in the bacterial artificial chromosome clone, and the close linkage of ring3 and β2M to MHC class I and class II genes was determined by single-strand conformational polymorphism and allele-specific PCR. This study satisfies the long-held conjecture that β2M was linked to the primordial MHC (Ur MHC); furthermore, the apparent stability of the shark genome may yield other genes predicted to have had a primordial association with the MHC specifically and with immunity in general.
Aβ Internalization by Neurons and Glia
Authors: Mohamed Amany , Posse de Chaves Elena
Published: February 2011

In the brain, the amyloid β peptide (Aβ) exists extracellularly and inside neurons. The intracellular accumulation of Aβ in Alzheimer′s disease brain has been questioned for a long time. However, there is now sufficient strong evidence indicating that accumulation of Aβ inside neurons plays an important role in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer′s disease. Intraneuronal Aβ originates from intracellular cleavage of APP and from Aβ internalization from the extracellular milieu. We discuss here the different molecular mechanisms that are responsible for Aβ internalization in neurons and the links between Aβ internalization and neuronal dysfunction and death. A brief description of Aβ uptake by glia is also presented.
Aggressive Cardiac Involvement in Systemic Lupus Erythematosus: A Case Report and a Comprehensive Literature Review
Authors: Ashrafi Reza , Garg Pankaj , McKay Ewan , Gosney John , Chuah Som , Davis Gershan
Published: February 2011

Background. We present the case of a 35-year-old gentleman who presented with an aggressive cardiomyopathy with normal coronary arteries. He was later diagnosed with systemic lupus-related cardiomyopathy.Methods. We undertook an extensive review of the literature regarding cardiac manifestations of lupus and used over 100 journals to identify the key points in pathology, diagnosis, and treatment.Results. We have shown that cardiac lupus can be rapidly progressive and, unless treated early, can have severe consequences. The predominant pathologies are immune complex and accelerated atherosclerosis drive. Treatment comprised of high-level immunosuppression.
ApoE4‐Driven Accumulation of Intraneuronal Oligomerized Aβ42 following Activation of the Amyloid Cascade In Vivo Is Mediated by a Gain of Function
Authors: Zepa Lia , Frenkel Moran , Belinson Haim , Kariv-Inbal Zehavit , Kayed Rakez , Masliah Eliezer , Michaelson Daniel M.
Published: February 2011

Activating the amyloid cascade by inhibiting the Aβ‐degrading enzyme neprilysin in targeted replacement mice, which express either apoE4 or apoE3, results in the specific accumulation of oligomerized Aβ42 in hippocampal CA1 neurons of the apoE4 mice. We presently investigated the extent to which the apoE4‐driven accumulation of Aβ42 and the resulting mitochondrial pathology are due to either gain or loss of function. This revealed that inhibition of neprilysin for one week triggers the accumulation of Aβ42 in hippocampal CA1 neurons of the apoE4 mice but not of either the corresponding apoE3 mice or apoE‐deficient mice. At 10 days, Aβ42 also accumulated in the CA1 neurons of the apoE‐deficient mice but not in those of the apoE3 mice. Mitochondrial pathology, which in the apoE4 mice is an early pathological consequence following inhibition of neprilyisn, also occurs in the apoE‐deficient but not in the apoE3 mice and the magnitude of this effect correlates with the levels of accumulated Aβ42 and oligomerized Aβ42 in these mice. These findings suggest that the rate‐limiting step in the pathological effects of apoE4 on CA1 neurons is the accumulation of intracellular oligomerized Aβ42 which is mediated via a gain of function property of apoE4.
A Complete Classification of AI Algebras with the Ideal Property
Authors: Ji Kui , Jiang Chunlan
Published: February 2011

LetAbe an AI algebra; that is,Ais the C*-algebra inductive limit of a sequence

whereare [0, 1],kn, and [n,i] are positive integers. Suppose thatAhas the ideal property: each closed two-sided ideal ofAis generated by the projections inside the ideal, as a closed two-sided ideal. In this article, we give a complete classification of AI algebras with the ideal property.