ABSTRACT:
Web-based collaborations have become essential in todays business environments. Due to the availability of various SOA frameworks, Web services emerged as the de facto technology to realize flexible compositions of services. While most existing work focuses on the discovery and composition of software based services, we highlight concepts for a people-centric Web. Knowledge-intensive environments clearly demand for provisioning of human expertise along with sharing of computing resources or business data through software-based services. To address these challenges, we introduce an adaptive approach allowing humans to provide their expertise through services using SOA standards, such as WSDL and SOAP. The seamless integration of humans in the SOA loop triggers numerous social implications, such as evolving expertise and drifting interests of human service providers. Here we propose a framework that is based on interaction monitoring techniques enabling adaptations in SOA-based socio-technical systems.
PROJECT PURPOSE:
Human-Provided Services (HPS) Framework enables human participation in a SOA environment. A typical example is a document translation service that could be implemented in software too, but mostly only with insufficient quality. HPS allows humans to provide translation services in the same manner by letting them receive and process requests through Web service interfaces. With the human in the loop, traditional service oriented architectures (SOA) transform from pure technical systems into socio-technical systems. These systems are characterized by both technical and human/social aspects that are tightly bound and interconnected. The technical aspects are very similar to traditional SOAs, including facilities to deploy, register and discover services, as well as to support flexible interactions. Additionally, the social system includes people and their habitual attitudes, values, behavioral styles and relationships. In particular, considering drifting interests of people, evolving skills, and varying collaboration incentives requires enhanced technical infrastructures in terms of flexibility and adaptability. Due to the support of loose coupling, sophisticated discovery mechanisms, and dynamic binding, Web services and SOA deem to be the ideal technical framework to realize large-scale socio-technical systems on the Web. We call the mix of software services and humans interacting on the Web a Mixed Service-oriented System.
PROJECT SCOPE:
Various reasons require timely adaptations of services that may affect the whole mixed serviceoriented system. In particular, we study:
Client-driven interventions are the means to protect customers from unreliable services. For example, services that miss deadlines or do not respond at all for a longer time are replaced by other more reliable services in future discovery operations.
Provider-driven interventions are desired and initiated by the service owners to shield themselves from malicious clients. For instance, requests of clients performing a denial of service attack by sending multiple requests in relatively short intervals are blocked (instead of processed) by the service.
PRODUCT FEATURES:
Web service interfaces to interact with clients, and compose them, thus, predefine the capabilities of the instances managed by their avatars. While these initial decisions represent the rather static properties of an avatar, personal profiles are periodically updated by our system to reflect social aspects, such as interests, interaction behavior and provided service quality. Together these static and dynamic properties characterize the avatar. The link between situation dependent profiles and composition decisions of the owner define the avatars current providable instances. A high current load of the owner, for example, must not only update the current profile but also influence the avatars deployment strategy.
