Web Services can be seen from two views ? one that it is a purely technological advance and the other that it is a capability that an organisation can deploy to meet a business objective. Much has been said about the first view but not much has been said about the second view. The underlying premise of this research is that in the context of an ever-increasing competitive environment, an organisation needs to take into account these important aspects: What is the business strategy of the organisation, which adopts Web Services? Does the IT align with the business strategy of the organisation? The aim of this research is to capture and describe business-IT problems in the context of strategic requirements and Web Services. As a means to align a Web Services initiative with business strategy, we propose a Requirements Engineering framework to capture the business objectives of an organisation from strategy to implementation. The methodology that we propose provides a roadmap from business strategy, to the strategic objectives to implementation in four dimensions: innovation, customer relationship management, infrastructure management and financials. The proposed framework extends the e-Business Modelling Ontology (eBMO) of Pigneur and Osterwalder by applying Bleistein et al?s Progression of Problems to understand the strategic objectives and the business context. We have presented 2 examples as proof of concept. We have experimented with our methodology on Amazon.com and Dell.com ?cases developed from the literature? as these organisations are aggressively pursuing Web Services as a part of their IT and business strategy. We use the Problem Frames approach to capture the business objectives and the problem context of an organisation deploying Web Services and to create a strategic alignment between the business strategy and the information technology. The approach presented in this thesis is used to understand Amazon and Dell?s strategy and strategic objectives. It was possible to capture strategic objectives and the strategic context through combination of the eBMO and Progression of Problems. It was also possible to trace this to Web Services requirement description through application of Problem Frames. The framework combines with Bleistein et al?s Progression of Problems at the strategic level and applies Problem Frames at the operational level. It takes the problem-oriented view of the whole process, but does not apply Problem Frames throughout, at least not in their original formulation by Jackson.

Doctor of Philosophy(PhD) / An exciting trend in enterprise computing lies in the integration of applications across an organisation and even between organisations. This allows the provision of services by automated business processes that coordinate business activity among several collaborating organisations. The best successes in this type of integrated distributed system come through use of Web Services and Service-based Architecture, which allow interoperation between applications through open standards based on XML and SOAP. But still, there are unresolved issues when developers seek to build a reliable and robust system. An important goal for the designers of a loosely coupled distributed system is to maintain consistency for each long running business process in the presence of failures and concurrent activities. Our approach to assist the developers in this domain is to guide the developers with the key principles they must consider, and to provide programming models and protocols, which make it easier to detect and avoid consistency faults in service-based system. We start by defining a realistic e-procurement scenario to illustrate the common problems faced by the developers which prevent them from building a reliable and robust system. These problems make it hard to maintain the consistency of the data and state during the execution of a business process in the occurrence of failures and interference from concurrent activities. Through the analysis of the common problems, we identify key principles the developers must consider to avoid producing the common problems. Then based on the key principles, we provide a framework called GAT in the orchestration infrastructure. GAT allows developers to express all the necessary processing to handle deviations including those due to failures and concurrent activities. We discuss the GAT framework in detail with its structure and key features. Using an example taken from part of the e-procurement case study, we illustrate how developers can use the framework to design their business requirements. We also discuss how key features of the new framework help the developers to avoid producing consistency faults. We illustrate how systems based on our framework can be built using today’s proven technology. Finally, we provide a unified isolation mechanism called Promises that is not only applicable to our GAT framework, but also to any applications that run in the service-based world. We discuss the concept, how it works, and how it defines a protocol. We also provide a list of potential implementation techniques. Using some of the implementation techniques we mention, we provide a proof-of-concept prototype system.

In this thesis, we provide a overview of Web Services and ebXML. We discuss that mobile computing is the future trend of the networks. From kinds of new technologies, we choose Web Services and ebXML as the candidates of the future network trends. 　In Web Services, there are three components：SOAP, UDDI, and WSDL. SOAP is a message exchange protocol, UDDI is a repository of service profiles, and WSDL is the language that describes the contents of the services. The three components constitute a complete Web Services infrastructure. This thesis maps Web Services into Internet and explains how this infrastructure works.EbXML, founded by UN/CEFACT and OASIS, will be a new standard for business processes. It establishes common business process in order to let business partners do transactions more easily. 　This thesis combines the two technologies above mentioned to create a new business network environment. This new environment will reduce cost, increase effectiveness, and improve communications abilities. We provide a simple demo system to show the concepts and hope this thesis will be a better reference for readers.

L'échange de documents multimédia composés de plusieurs médias élémentaires tels que des vidéos, des images ou du texte, est l'une des applications les plus populaires d'Internet. Idéalement, tout usager d'Internet devrait pouvoir accéder à ces contenus et les recevoir dans un format adapté au contexte dans lequel il travaille. Un contexte utilisateur peut être défini par les caractéristiques personnelles de l'utilisateur (ex : sa langue parlée, son handicap et ses centres d'intérêt), ses préférences de présentation des contenus multimédia (ex : son lecteur multimédia préféré ou la taille d'image souhaitée), les capacités de son terminal (ex : la taille de l'écran du terminal ou les lecteurs multimédia présents) et les caractéristiques de son réseau d'accès (ex : la bande passante). Compte tenu de la combinatoire des éléments de contexte, il n'est pas envisageable de fournir autant de versions des documents multimédia que de contextes possibles : l'adaptation des contenus est donc nécessaire. L'accroissement des utilisateurs des terminaux à capacités réduites tels que les assistants personnels (par ex. PDA) exclut une adaptation côté client (ou utilisateur final). L'adaptation, côté source du document multimédia, nécessite l'implémentation de modules supplémentaires qui n'est pas toujours possible et qui peut créer une charge supplémentaire indésirable. L'adaptation par un ou plusieurs intermédiaires répond le mieux aux besoins de passage à l'échelle et d'extensibilité. Une machine intermédiaire est un nœud inséré entre le client et le serveur et dédié, par exemple, à la découverte ou à l'adaptation de services (ex : réduction de la taille d'une image ou traduction et insertion de sous-titres au sein d'une vidéo). L'intermédiation ainsi réalisée apporte une valeur ajoutée en évitant de charger l'utilisateur final et la source du document de tâches spécifiques consommatrices de ressources sans rapport direct avec le service final offert. Cette approche est celle qui est prise dans la plupart des solutions existantes. Celles-ci utilisent des intermédiaires dédiés. Il en résulte une configuration d'adaptation figée ne garantissant pas la gestion de nouvelles techniques d'adaptation (ex : les adaptations relatives à l'handicap) et ne passant pas à l'échelle. Certaines solutions, basées sur ce même modèle, intègrent l'adaptation distribuée en répartissant la charge entre les intermédiaires qui réalisent l'adaptation. Elles ne traitent cependant pas la gestion dynamique des adaptateurs qui consiste à aller chercher des adaptateurs dans le réseau, les composer et les recomposer dynamiquement en cas de disparition. Elles ne traitent pas non plus l'adaptation des documents multimédia composés qui demande un effort supplémentaire d'analyse du document et de synchronisation des médias élémentaires le composant. La première contribution de cette thèse est la conception d'une architecture appelée PAAM (pour Architecture for the Provision of AdAptable Multimedia composed documents) qui a pour but d'adapter des documents multimédia composés au contexte des usagers. L'une des originalités de cette architecture est de mettre en place une adaptation distribuée sur différents nœuds du réseau en évitant de confier l'adaptation à un serveur ou à un intermédiaire dédié. La plate-forme d'adaptation de PAAM intègre aussi bien des fournisseurs de services d'adaptation que des particuliers qui se porteraient volontaires pour exécuter des fonctions d'adaptation en donnant un peu de leurs ressources matérielles et logicielles. Les principaux éléments fonctionnels de PAAM sont : le gestionnaire du contexte utilisateur, le gestionnaire des documents multimédia composés, le planificateur et le gestionnaire d'adaptation. Le gestionnaire du contexte utilisateur et le gestionnaire des documents multimédia composés récupèrent, analysent et agrégent respectivement les informations contextuelles de l'utilisateur et les informations descriptives des documents multimédia. Le planificateur implémente un algorithme de prise de décision reposant sur des politiques d'adaptation. Ce planificateur produit un graphe d'adaptation, c'est-à-dire un ensemble d'adaptateurs organisés en parallèle ou en séquence. Ce graphe est utilisé en entrée du gestionnaire d'adaptation qui recherche ces adaptateurs là où ils se trouvent, les instancie, les compose, si nécessaire, et les recompose si un ou plusieurs adaptateurs disparaissent. Nous avons choisi d'utiliser les services Web pour implémenter PAAM afin qu'elle soit distribué, extensible, modulable, tolérante aux fautes et passant à l'échelle, répondant ainsi aux limitations des autres architectures d'adaptation. Cette solution technologique permet à PAAM de décrire des ressources d'adaptation, de les publier, de les rechercher et les instancier. Dans le cadre de la composition et de l'orchestration des services Web, nous présentons BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) et son éventuelle intégration au sein d'un gestionnaire d'adaptation pour gérer l'exécution d'un graphe d'adaptation. La seconde contribution de cette thèse est la gestion des adaptateurs (description, recherche et instanciation). Nous proposons, pour cela, une nomenclature incluant un grand nombre d'adaptateurs. Nous proposons aussi une description d'adaptateurs qui étend WSDL, et qui facilite la recherche, l'instanciation et la composition de ces ressources d'adaptation. Nous exposons par la suite le protocole de négociation et d'acceptation établi entre un gestionnaire d'adaptation et un adaptateur permettant de déterminer si cet adaptateur peut réaliser l'adaptation ou non. PAAM gérant l'adaptation distribuée sur différents nœuds du réseau, susceptibles de se déconnecter à chaque instant, nous proposons des solutions pour gérer les déconnexions dans PAAM afin de lui procurer un aspect dynamique. Afin de démontrer la faisabilité de notre architecture, nous implémentons une chaîne d'adaptation complète incluant les principales fonctionnalités de PAAM : le gestionnaire du contexte utilisateur, le gestionnaire des documents multimédia composés, le planificateur et le gestionnaire d'adaptation. Nous présentons, par la suite, une étude des coûts induits par notre implémentation de PAAM et des tests de performances qui montrent que l'utilisation des services Web n'introduit pas de surcoûts significatifs par rapport au gain obtenu en distribuant l'adaptation sur différents nœuds. Pour conclure, parce qu'elle permet de gérer une grande variété d'adaptateurs de manière distribuée, l'architecture PAAM répond bien aux limitations des architectures d'adaptation basées sur une configuration client/serveur. L'intérêt de cette approche est la possibilité d'étendre et d'enrichir le système d'adaptation et de le déployer à large échelle tout en garantissant sa robustesse.

<p>This thesis was written on behalf of ESAB Research and Development department, in LaxåSweden. One of ESAB’s product areas is developing various welding systems.Today if ESAB’s customers experience a problem with one of their welding systems they callESAB’s service center. If the problem seems to have been caused by software, or if it requireslog files to be analyzed, ESAB needs a way to get this system information from the customer’swelding system to ESAB’s employees.One of the goals with this project thesis was to perform an analysis answering how the systeminformation should be sent, stored and what unit in the customer’s welding system that shouldsend it. Another goal was to implement the solution that the analysis presented.The analysis shows that WeldPoint in combination with a web service is the best way to sendthe system information from the customer’s welding system. WeldPoint is a PC control and logsoftware connected to the customer’s welding system. A web service provides a serviceinterface enabling clients to interact with a web server. Clients communicate with the webservice using HTTP, this means that clients can easily communicate across firewalls and othernetwork obstacles.The thesis work resulted in three different applications written in C#.NET. The first applicationis a simple form called WeldPoint Remote Support (WRS). This form extracts customerinformation, welding system information and log files from the customer and the customer’swelding system. All this information is called a case. The case is received by ESAB using thesecond application, WeldPoint Web service (WWS). WWS stores the received case in adatabase. The third application is called WeldPoint Remote Support Center (WRSC). Thisapplication is used by the ESAB employee’s to view the case sent from the customer’s weldingsystem.The above implementation has been tested and supports a robust and secure way to send andview the system information from the customer’s welding system. The conclusions showed thatall goals and requirements set by ESAB were met.</p>

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<p>Web services provide a framework for data interchange between applications by incorporating standards such as XMLSchema, WSDL, SOAP, HTTP etc. They define operations to be invoked over a network to perform the actions. These operations are described publicly in a WSDL document with the data types of their argument and result. Searching data accessible via web services is essential in many applications. However, web services don’t provide any general query language or view capabilities. Current web services applications to access the data must be developed using a regular programming language such Java, or C#. The thesis provides an approach to simplify querying web services data and proposes efficient processing of database queries to views of wrapped web services. To show the effectiveness of the approach, a prototype, <em>webService MEDiator system (WSMED</em>), is developed. WSMED provides general view and query capabilities over data accessible through web services by automatically extracting basic meta-data from WSDL descriptions. Based on imported meta-data, the user can then define views that extract data from the results of calls to web service operations. The views can be queried using SQL. A given view can access many different web service operations in different ways depending on what view attributes are known. The views can be specified in terms of several declarative queries to be applied by the query processor. In addition, the user can provide semantic enrichments of the meta-data with key constraints to enable efficient query execution over the views by automatic query transformations. We evaluated the effectiveness of our approach over multilevel views of existing web services and show that the key constraint enrichments substantially improve query performance.</p> / SIDA

Thesis (M.Sc.)--York University, 2003. Graduate Programme in Computer Science. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 107-113). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: LINK NOT YET AVAILABLE.

Data integration has been an active topic of research in the past. With the advances in technology in the context of web, data integration faces new challenges imposed by heterogeneity of source, their autonomy and independence. Web services, which are universally accessible software components deployed on the web, are becoming the focus of recent researches due to their ability to interconnect systems and cost optimizations. At the same time, XML has also become one of the core technologies for business applications. By offering a standard, flexible and inherently extensible data format, XML significantly reduces the burden of deploying the many technologies needed to ensure the success of Web services. This thesis examines the opportunities for data integration in the context of web services development paradigm. It examines the existing technologies and standards of web services and XML and provides an example of how web services can be used to unlock heterogeneous systems to extract and integrate data. The approach followed to illustrate this uses embedded web service calls inside XML documents. The main contributions of this paper are: 1) comprehensive research of existing technologies 2) architecture to support invocation of embedded web services 3) implementation of an application to show the results 4) use of existing technologies to implement the proposed system.

Web Services (WS) are one of the most promising approaches for building loosely coupled systems. However, due to the heterogeneous and dynamic nature of the WS environment, ensuring good QoS is still non-trivial. While WS tend to scale better than tightly coupled systems, they introduce a larger communication overhead and are more susceptible to server/resource latency. Traditionally this problem has been addressed by relying on negotiated Service Level Agreement to ensure the required QoS, or the development of elaborate compensation handlers to minimize the impact of undesirable latency.<p> This research focuses on the use of cooperation between consumers and providers as an effective means of optimizing resource utilization and consumer experiences. It introduces a novel cooperative approach to implement the cooperation between consumers and providers.