Papers by boualem benatallah
Electronic Markets, 2003
The process-based composition of Web services is emerg-
Electronic Markets, 2003
The process-based composition of Web services is emerg-
Web services are emerging as a promising technology for the effective automation of inter-organiz... more Web services are emerging as a promising technology for the effective automation of inter-organizational interactions. However, despite the growing interest, several issues still need to be addressed to provide Web services with benefits similar to what traditional middleware brings to intra-organizational application integration. In this paper, we present a framework that supports the model-driven development of Web services. Specifically, we show how, starting from the external specifications of a Web service (e.g., interface and protocol specifications), we can support the generation of extensible service implementation templates as well as of complete (executable) service specifications, thereby considerably simplifying the service development work.
IEEE Internet Computing, 2007
Towards Patterns of Web Services Composition
... 15. Qiming Chen , Meichun Hsu, Inter-Enterprise Collaborative Business ProcessManagement, Pro... more ... 15. Qiming Chen , Meichun Hsu, Inter-Enterprise Collaborative Business ProcessManagement, Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Data Engineering, p.253-260, April 02-06, 2001. 16. {16} WM Coalition. Terminology and glossary. ...
Web services are emerging as a promising technology for the effective automation of inter-organiz... more Web services are emerging as a promising technology for the effective automation of inter-organizational interactions. Several standards that aim at providing infrastructure to support Web services description, discovery, and composition have recently emerged including WSDL, UDDI, and BPEL4WS. Indeed, advances in this area promise to take cross-organizational application integration a step further by facilitating the automatic discovery and invocation of relevant services. However, despite the growing interest in Web services, several issues still need to be addressed to provide similar benefits to what traditional middleware brings to intra-organizational application integration (e.g., transaction support). In this paper, we identify a framework for defining extended service models to enable the definition of richer Web service abstractions. We also identify and define specific abstractions based on an analysis of existing e-commerce Web portals. Finally, we show how the model and the abstractions are supported by a conversation manager implemented on top of the SELF-SERV platform.
The Vldb Journal, 2005
One of the challenging problems that Web service technology faces is the ability to effectively d... more One of the challenging problems that Web service technology faces is the ability to effectively discover services based on their capabilities. We present an approach to tackling this problem in the context of description logics (DLs). We formalize service discovery as a new instance of the problem of rewriting concepts using terminologies. We call this new instance the best covering problem. We provide a formalization of the best covering problem in the framework of DL-based ontologies and propose a hypergraph-based algorithm to effectively compute best covers of a given request. We propose a novel matchmaking algorithm that takes as input a service request (or query) Q and an ontology \(\mathcal{T}\) of services and finds a set of services called a “best cover” of Q whose descriptions contain as much common information with Q as possible and as little extra information with respect to Q as possible. We have implemented the proposed discovery technique and used the developed prototype in the context of the Multilingual Knowledge Based European Electronic Marketplace (MKBEEM) project.
In today's Web, many functionality-wise similar Web services are offered through heterogeneous in... more In today's Web, many functionality-wise similar Web services are offered through heterogeneous interfaces (operation definitions) and business protocols (ordering constraints defined on legal operation invocation sequences). The typical approach to enable interoperation in such a heterogeneous setting is through developing adapters. There have been approaches for classifying possible mismatches between service interfaces and business protocols to facilitate adapter development. However, the hard job is that of identifying, given two service specifications, the actual mismatches between their interfaces and business protocols.
Data & Knowledge Engineering, 2006
In the area of Web services and service-oriented architectures, business protocols are rapidly ga... more In the area of Web services and service-oriented architectures, business protocols are rapidly gaining importance and mindshare as a necessary part of Web service descriptions. Their immediate benefit is that they provide developers with information on how to write clients that can correctly interact with a given service or with a set of services. In addition, once protocols become an accepted practice and service descriptions become endowed with protocol information, the middleware can be significantly extended to better support service development, binding, and execution in a number of ways, considerably simplifying the whole service lifecycle. This paper discusses the different ways in which the middleware can leverage protocol descriptions, and focuses in particular on the notions of protocol compatibility, equivalence, and replaceability. They characterize whether two services can interact based on their protocol definition, whether a service can replace another in general or when interacting with specific clients, and which are the set of possible interactions among two services.
IEEE Internet Computing, 2008
Web mashups are Web applications developed using contents and services available online. Despite ... more Web mashups are Web applications developed using contents and services available online. Despite rapidly increasing interest in mashups, comprehensive development tools and frameworks are lacking, and in most cases mashing up a new application implies a significant manual programming effort. This article overviews current tools, frameworks, and trends that aim to facilitate mashup development. The authors use a set of characteristic dimensions to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of some representative approaches.
The Internet is going through several major changes. It has become a vehicle of Web services rath... more The Internet is going through several major changes. It has become a vehicle of Web services rather than just a repository of information. Many organizations are putting their core business competencies on the Internet as a collection of Web services. An important challenge is to integrate them to create new value-added Web services in ways that could never be foreseen forming what is known as Business-to-Business (B2B) services. Therefore, there is a need for modeling techniques and tools for reliable Web service composition. In this paper, we propose a Petri net-based algebra, used to model control flows, as a necessary constituent of reliable Web service composition process. This algebra is expressive enough to capture the semantics of complex Web service combinations.
Distributed and Parallel Databases, 2005
The development of new Web services through the composition of existing ones has gained a conside... more The development of new Web services through the composition of existing ones has gained a considerable momentum as a means to realise business-to-business collaborations. Unfortunately, given that services are often developed in an ad hoc fashion using manifold technologies and standards, connecting and coordinating them in order to build composite services is a delicate and time-consuming task. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a system in which services are composed using a model-driven approach, and the resulting composite services are orchestrated following a peer-to-peer paradigm. The system provides tools for specifying composite services through statecharts, data conversion rules, and multi-attribute provider selection policies. These specifications are interpreted by software components that interact in a peer-to-peer way to coordinate the execution of the composite service. We report results of an experimental evaluation showing the relative advantages of this peer-to-peer approach with respect to a centralised one.
Self-Coordinated and Self-Traced Composite Services with Dynamic Provider Selection
Abstract The growth of Internet technologies has unleashed a wave of innovations that are having ... more Abstract The growth of Internet technologies has unleashed a wave of innovations that are having tremendous impact on the way organisations interact with their partners and customers. It has undoubtedly opened new ways of automating Business-to-Business ( ...
The development of user interfaces (UIs) is one of the most timeconsuming aspects in software dev... more The development of user interfaces (UIs) is one of the most timeconsuming aspects in software development. In this context, the lack of proper reuse mechanisms for UIs is increasingly becoming manifest, especially as software development is more and more moving toward composite applications. In this paper we propose a framework for the integration of stand-alone modules or applications, where integration occurs at the presentation layer. Hence, the final goal is to reduce the effort required for UI development by maximizing reuse.
One of the challenging problems that Web service technology faces is the ability to effectively d... more One of the challenging problems that Web service technology faces is the ability to effectively discover services based on their capabilities. We present an approach to tackle this problem in the context of DAML-S ontologies of services. The proposed approach enables to select the combinations of Web services that best match a given request Q and effectively computes the extra information with respect to Q (e.g., the information required by a service request but not provided by any existing service). We study the reasoning problem associated with such a matching process and propose an algorithm derived from hypergraphs theory.
IEEE Internet Computing, 2003
The Self-Serv project uses a P2P-based orchestration model to support the composition of multient... more The Self-Serv project uses a P2P-based orchestration model to support the composition of multienterprise Web services.
The push toward business process automation has generated the need for integrating different ente... more The push toward business process automation has generated the need for integrating different enterprise applications involved in such processes. The typical approach to integration and to process automation is based on the use of adapters and message brokers. The need for adapters in Web services mainly comes from two sources: one is the heterogeneity at the higher levels of the interoperability stack, and the other is the high number of clients, each of which can support different interfaces and protocols, thereby generating the need for providing multiple interfaces to the same service. In this paper, we characterize the problem of adaptation of web services by identifying and classifying different kinds of adaptation requirements. Then, we focus on business protocol adapters, and we classify the different ways in which two protocols may differ. Next, we propose a methodology for developing adapters in Web services, based on the use of mismatch patterns and service composition technologies.
IEEE Internet Computing, 2004
Web services are emerging as a promising technology for effectively automating interorganizationa... more Web services are emerging as a promising technology for effectively automating interorganizational interactions. However, despite the growing interest, several issues remain to be addressed to provide Web services with benefits similar to what traditional middleware brings to intraorganizational application integration. In this article, the authors identify a framework that builds on current standards to help developers define extended service models and richer Web service abstractions. The framework's main feature is a conversation metamodel derived from the authors' analysis of e-commerce portal sites.
Interconnecting heterogeneous information systems
Distributed and Parallel Databases, 1998
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Papers by boualem benatallah