Lithuanian healthcare is highly fragmented enterprise, with complex paper-based processes, that are inefficient, error prone, and often redundant. These shortcomings create formidable barriers to collaborative medical research. This paper is a research of Service Oriented Architecture solutions for solving interoperability problems when exchanging patient data between heterogeneous healthcare systems. The Lithuanian healthcare information needs analysis was made to create the Service Oriented Architecture based model for exchanging patient data. The model prototype was developed to demonstrate the reusability and flexibility of service oriented solutions.

This thesis presents a Web services implementation of the infrastructure for e-Marketplaces based on e-Marketplace business patterns. Business patterns implemented by the infrastructure include User-to-Business, User-to-Online Buying, User-to-User, and Business-to-Business integration. The implementation of the User-to-Business pattern provides for all non-commercial user transactions with the e-Marketplace, including the registration processes, aggregating the e-Marketplace catalog with product and service offers, response to requests for quote, and purchase order checking and processing. The implementation of the User-to-Online Buying pattern provides for all commercial transactions that a user may conduct with the e-Marketplace, including catalog-based buying, contract-based buying, auction bidding, exchange bid offering, and the publication of requests for quote. The implementation of the User-to-User pattern supports e-Marketplace user communication. The implementation of the Business-to-Business integration pattern enables commerce systems of the suppliers and procurement systems of the buyers to integrate with the e-Marketplace to conduct commerce and non-commerce transactions. <br><br> The implemented e-Marketplace infrastructure provides a foundation for building concrete e-Marketplaces, by e-Marketplace builders, to present the e-Marketplace functionalities to the end users such as e-Marketplace administrators and traders. The infrastructure is implemented using Web services technology to provide system-independent accessibility to clients of concrete e-Marketplaces that are built on the infrastructure. The infrastructure implements the business patterns in the form of groups of collaborating Web services.

The growing popularity of mobile platforms is changing the Internet user’s computing experience. Current studies suggest that the traditional ubiquitous computing landscape is shifting towards more enhanced and broader mobile computing platform consists of large number of heterogeneous devices. Smartphones and tablets begin to replace the desktop as the primary means of interacting with IT resources. While mobile devices facilitate in consuming web resources in the form of web services, the growing demand for consuming services on mobile device is introducing a complex ecosystem in the mobile environment. This research addresses the communication challenges involved in mobile distributed networks and proposes an event-driven communication approach for information dissemination. This research investigates different communication techniques such as synchronous and asynchronous polling and long-polling, server-side push as mechanisms between client-server interactions and the latest web technologies namely HTML5 standard WebSocket as communication protocol within a publish/subscribe paradigm. Finally, this research introduces and evaluates a framework that is hybrid of REST and event-based publish/subscribe for operating in the mobile environment.

RESTful Web Services are gaining increasing attention from both the service and the Web communities. The rising number of services being implemented and made available on the Web is creating a demand for modelling techniques that can abstract REST design from the implementation in order better to specify, analyse and implement large-scale RESTful Web systems. It can also help by providing suitable RESTful Web Service composition methods which can reduce costs by effi ciently re-using the large number of services that are already available and by exploiting existing services for complex business purposes. This research considers RESTful Web Services as state transition systems and proposes a novel Linear Logic based approach, the first of its kind, for both the modelling and the composition of RESTful Web Services. The thesis demonstrates the capabilities of resource-sensitive Linear Logic for modelling five key REST constraints and proposes a two-stage approach to service composition involving Linear Logic theorem proving and proof-as-process based on the π-calculus. Whereas previous approaches have focused on each aspect of the composition of RESTful Web Services individually (e.g. execution or high-level modelling), this work bridges the gap between abstract formal modelling and application-level execution in an efficient and effective way. The approach not only ensures the completeness and correctness of the resulting composed services but also produces their process models naturally, providing the possibility to translate them into executable business languages. Furthermore, the research encodes the proposed modelling and composition method into the Coq proof assistant, which enables both the Linear Logic theorem proving and the π-calculus extraction to be conducted semi-automatically. The feasibility and versatility studies performed in two disparate user scenarios (shopping and biomedical service composition) show that the proposed method provides a good level of scalability when the numbers of services and resources grow.

Sensor network web services have recently emerged as promising tools to provide remote management, data collection and querying capabilities for sensor networks. They can be utilized in a large number of elds among which Demand-Side Energy Management (DSEM) is an important application area that has become possible with the smart electrical power grid. DSEM applications generally aim to reduce the cost and the amount of power consumption. In the traditional power grid, DSEM has not been implemented widely due to the large number of households and lack of ne-grained automation tools. However by employing intelligent devices and implementing communication infrastructure among these devices, the smart grid will renovate the existing power grid and it will enable a wide variety of DSEM applications. In this thesis, we analyze various DSEM scenarios that become available with sensor network web services. We assume a smart home with a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) where the sensors are mounted on the appliances and they are able to run web services. The web server retrieves data from the appliances via the web services running on the sensor nodes. These data can be stored in a database after processing, where the database can be accessed by the utility, as well as the inhabitants of the smart home. We showthat our implementation is e cient in terms of running time. Moreover, the message sizes and the implementation code is quite small which makes it suitable for the memory-limited sensor nodes. Furthermore, we show the application scenarios introduced in the thesis provide energy saving for the smart home.

One of the main aims of Component adaptation [Szy97] is to help application developers reuse components so that they can plug-in third party components into their application. This research concentrates on this type of adaptation but in the context of Web Services. Web Services are becoming increasingly popular. Web Services often fit the requirements of being a component, and can be reused in a very similar manner. Hence there is a requirement for adaptation of Web Services just as there is the need for adaptation of software components. There are now quite a few adaptation techniques, but few of them have identified adaptation techniques for Web Services. This approach to adaptation allows for the modification of data and behaviour of existing Web Services. The approach to adaptation uses eXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) transformation applied to the message passed between Web Services. These messages are commonly in XML format, hence XSL can be used to modify them. The application of the transformation is guided by a specification written in XML. The adaptation is executed by a generic runtime system that uses these specifications which are referred to as Guiding Specifications. This has been demonstrated by way of a motivating real world example implemented on the .Net platform. It is shown how an adapter can be specified using a simplistic Guiding Specification and related XSLT documents. This allows the implementation to work more efficiently than hand coding each adapter. It is the underlying generic runtime support that provides much of this benefit. Component based software engineering (CBSE) constructs applications by assembling components together, CBSE has been of great help to application developers due to the very fact that tailor made components can be purchased from third party vendors and can be plugged-in to a system to form a working application. But in practice 'as-is' reuse is very unlikely to occur, and most components need to be changed in some way to match the requirements of the application architecture and other components. The process of changing thecomponent for use in a particular application is often referred to as Component Adaptation.

This thesis addresses the question of what would be a domain independent taxonomy that is capable of representing the non-functional properties of conventional, electronic and web services. We cover all forms of services, as we prefer not to make any distinction between the three forms. Conventional service descriptions, such as newspaper advertisements, are rich in detail, and it is this richness that we wish to make available to electronic and web service descriptions. In a conventional service context, when we ask a service provider for details, perhaps by phoning the service provider, we are seeking ways to assist with decision making. It is this same decision making or reasoning that we wish to be available to electronic services. Historically, services have always been distinguished according to some criteria of a service requestor. Examples are price, payment alternatives, availability and security. We are motivated to ensure that the criteria used to evaluate conventional services are also available for electronic and web services. We believe that the ability to richly and accurately describe services has significant applicability in the areas of electronic service discovery, dynamic service composition, service comparison, service optimisation, and service management. In particular, the increased level of descriptive depth will also facilitate more thorough decision-making by a service requestor. Whilst we acknowledge the importance of service functionality, this thesis is primarily concerned with the non-functional properties of services. A service is not a function alone. It is a function performed on your behalf at a cost. And the cost is not just some monetary price; it is a whole collection of limitations. This thesis is all about these. We believe that to accurately represent any service, a description requires information relating to both the functionality and the associated constraints. We consider these constraints over the functionality of the service to be non-functional properties. We believe that a service description is only complete once the non-functional aspects are also expressed. We undertook a significant analysis of services from numerous domains. From our analysis we compiled the non-functional properties into a series of 80 conceptual models that we have categorised according to availability (both temporal and locative), payment, price, discounts, obligations, rights, penalties, trust, security, and quality. Our motivation is to provide a theoretical basis for automated service discovery, comparison, selection, and substitution. The need to describe a service is analogous with labelling for goods or products. Product labelling occurs for the safety and benefit of purchasers. Why is the same labelling not afforded for the benefit of service requestors?

In Service-Oriented Architectures, everything is a service and services can interact with each other when needed. Web services (or simply services) are loosely coupled software components that are published, discovered, and invoked across the Web. As the use of Web services grows, in order to correctly interact with the growing services, it is important to understand the business protocols that provide clients with the information on how to interact with services. In dynamic Web services environments, service providers need to constantly adapt their business protocols for reflecting the restrictions and requirements proposed by new applications, new business strategies, and new laws, or for fixing the problems found in the protocol definition. However, the effective management of such a protocol evolution raises critical problems: one of the most critical issues is to handle instances running under the old protocol when their protocol has been changed. Simple solutions, such as aborting them or allowing them to continue to run according to the old protocol, can be considered, but they are inapplicable for many reasons (e.g., the lose of work already done and the critical nature of work). We present a framework that supports service administrators in managing the business protocol evolution by providing several features, such as a set of change operators allowing modifications of protocols, a variety of protocol change impact analyses automatically determining which ongoing instances can be migrated to the new version of protocol, and data mining techniques inducing a model for classifying ongoing instances migrateable to the new protocol. To support the protocol evolution process, we have also developed database-backed GUI tools on top of our existing system. The proposed approach and tools can help service administrators in managing the evolution of ongoing instances when the business protocols of services with which they are interacting have changed.

Zugl.: Karlsruhe, Univ., Diss., 2007

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Texas, Aug., 2007. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.