Recentemente, por conta do dinamismo existente no ambiente de negócio no qual as organizações devem adequar-se mais rapidamente às mudanças, os Sistemas de Informação (SIs) precisam também adequar-se para continuar agregando valor. Diante desse cenário e do uso de serviços eletrônicos distribuídos na rede para o desenvolvimento de sistemas, faz-se necessário o surgimento de novas abordagens em engenharia de sistemas. Sendo assim, surge a disciplina de Engenharia de Requisitos Orientada a Serviços (EROS) que trata da definição de processos e metodologias para captar os requisitos de serviços tanto do ponto de vista de consumidores de serviço quanto de fornecedores de serviço. No contexto de EROS, este trabalho explora alternativas às descrições sugeridas para os metamodelos RGPS (do inglês: Role, Goal, Process and Service) uma abordagem em EROS propondo uma nova definição que visa, principalmente, incorporar à RGPS as vantagens de outros modelos já estabelecidos na literatura. Sendo assim, a nova abordagem aqui proposta, chamada de WS&i*-RGPS, para a descrição das camadas Papel e Meta, propõe o uso do framework i*. E, para a descrição das camadas Processo e Serviço, a nova abordagem propõe o uso de WS-BPEL/WSDL. Esse trabalho apresenta também uma comparação sistemática entre a abordagem WS&i*-RGPS e outras abordagens semelhantes identificadas na literatura EROS. A comparação sistemática entre as abordagens em EROS, incluindo a nova abordagem aqui proposta, considera três parâmetros comparativos e identifica que a abordagem WS&i*-RGPS cobre mais parâmetros que as abordagens em EROS que se baseiam nos metamodelos RGPS, indicando que WS&i*-RGPS é uma alternativa melhor às soluções inicialmente propostas pelos autores dos metamodelos RGPS. / Due to the recent business environment dynamism in which organizations must quickly adapt to the changes, Information Systems also need to adapt to these changes in order to keep adding value. Taking into account this scenario and the use of electronic services distributed on the network to develop systems, the advent of new approaches in Systems Engineering is necessary. Therefore, a new discipline, Service-Oriented Requirements Engineering (SORE), was proposed, which deals with the definition of processes and methodologies in order to capture services requirements beneath two different perspectives: service consumers and service providers. In SORE context, this work aims at exploring some alternatives for those descriptions proposed by the Role, Goal, Process and Service (RGPS) meta-models, proposing a new approach called WS&i*-RGPS in order to incorporate to RGPS the advantages of other models well established in the literature. Accordingly, in order to describe the Role and Goal layers, this new approach proposes the use of the i* framework. Additionally, in order to describe the Process and Service layers, this new approach proposes the use of WS-BPEL/WSDL languages. This work also presents a systematic comparison among SORE approaches, including WS&i*-RGPS. This comparison considers three comparative parameters and identifies that WS&i*-RGPS covers more parameters than other approaches in SORE that uses RGPS metamodels. These results indicates WS&i*-RGPS as a better alternative comparing it to other RGPS approaches.

Service Oriented Computing(SOC) is becoming a major paradigm for developing next generation of software systems, and one of the major challenges of Service Oriented Computing is testing interactions and collaborations among the distributed and dynamically integrated web services. To support automated test of web service‟s collaborations, a formal specification is needed. This thesis proposes a specification of web services collaborations based on Web Services Choreography Description Language (WS-CDL). We identify the basic constructs that can be found in any web services collaboration, and we mapped them to the new WS-CDL based language (WS-CDL+). Finally, A scenario of web services collaboration is developed and specification in WS-CDL+ is provided. This work builds a foundation for automated web services testing in a service oriented computing environment.

Web service selection problem focuses on how to choose component Web services to satisfy user¡¦s non-functional (or QoS) need, and it has been extensively studied in the past. The QoS measures include reliability, response time, and execution cost. However, in some applications, execution result, as demonstrated on some output values, matters, and this is seldom addressed by previous researches. In our work, we proposed an approach to guide the WS selection with the goal to meet user¡¦s preferences on the composition execution outcome. In addition, we consider the partner relationship between Web services. Some partner Web services may produce more desired execution result, such as better quality or a discount, than others. In our approach, we use Bayesian Network to guide Web services selection. Specifically, we propose two Bayesian Network-based methods: Partner-first Bayesian Network and Probability-first Bayesian Network. Both methods rank Web services by considering user¡¦s preference, user¡¦s input variables, and the past execution results of Web services. The experiment result shows that the proposed Bayesian Network methods perform better than the other more straightforward methods.

Sistemas computacionais são constituídos por componentes de hardware e software que podem eventualmente falhar. Por esse motivo, o mecanismo de transação sempre foi imprescindível para a construção de sistemas robustos. O suporte transacional para a tecnologia Web services foi definido em agosto de 2005, num conjunto de três especificações denominadas WS-Coordination, WS-AtomicTransaction e WS-BusinessActivity. Juntas, essas especificações definem um alicerce sobre o qual aplicações robustas baseadas em Web services podem ser construídas. Nesta dissertação realizamos um estudo sobre transações atômicas em ambientes Web services. Em particular, estendemos o gerenciador de transações presente no servidor de aplicações JBoss, de modo que ele passasse a comportar transações distribuídas envolvendo Web services. Além disso, avaliamos o desempenho desse gerenciador de transações quando ele emprega cada um dos seguintes mecanismos de chamada remota: Web services/SOAP, CORBA/IIOP e JBoss Remoting. Finalmente, realizamos experimentos de escalabilidade e interoperabilidade. / Computing systems consist of a multitude of hardware and software components that may fail. For this reason, the transaction mechanism has always been essential for the development of robust systems. Transactional support for the Web services technology was defined in August 2005, in a set of three specifications, namely WS-Coordination, WS-AtomicTransaction, and WS-BusinessActivity. Together, such specifications enable the development of robust Web services applications. In this dissertation we studied atomic transactions in the Web services realm. Particularly, we added Web services atomic transaction support to the existing JBoss application server transaction manager. Furthermore, we evaluated the performance of this transaction manager when it employs each of the following remote method invocation mechanisms: Web services/SOAP, CORBA/IIOP and JBoss Remoting. Finally, we performed scalability and interoperability experiments.

Thesis ( M Med ( Psychiatric ) ) -- University of Limpopo (Medunsa Campus), 2012. / Background Child and adolescence mental health is a huge concern throughout the world, especially in developing countries were children and adolescence form majority of the population. Hyperactivity is one of the most common behavioural problems seen in child and adolescent psychiatric outpatient units. This behavioural problem may be accompanied by an underlying childhood psychiatric disorders. Objectives To determine the number of children with hyperactivity, establish gender differences, as well as profile of psychiatric disorders associated with hyperactivity at Dr George Mukhari Hospital child psychiatry outpatient unit. Method This was a retrospective descriptive study that included children who presented for the first time at Dr George Mukhari outpatient child psychiatry outpatient unit from January 2009 to December 2009. Children of all genders were equally considered and were within the age group of 3 to 14 years. Data of all children included was collected from the children’s records. All the records of children with hyperactivity were separated from those without this behavioural problem. Gender differences as well as underlying psychiatric disorders were determined. Diagnoses made during the first assessment were based on Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition text revision (DSM IV TR). Results A total of 49 new children who were assessed during the study period were included. Males were over-represented than females, and accounted to 79.49% and 20.4% respectively. Almost half of the children presented with hyperactivity (48.98%). Most of the children with hyperactivity were less 2 than 6 years (50%), followed by school aged group (41.67%) and then adolescents (8.33%). Majority of children with hyperactivity were males (83.33%) than females (16.67%). The most common disorder associated with hyperactivity was mental retardation (62.50%), followed by attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (29.17%); and then mania due to HIV (4.17%) and sensorineural hearing deficit with hyperactivity (4.17%). Conclusion Hyperactivity is a common behavioural problem or complaint at Dr George Mukhari child psychiatry outpatient unit. It is common in males than females, and is associated with underlying childhood psychiatric disorders. Therefore, health professionals should be trained to identify behavioural problems, and community awareness considered since hyperactivity is associated with childhood psychiatric disorders. This is important because early identification and intervention will subsequently yield a good outcome.

This research explores the problems associated with caching of SOAP Web Service request/response pairs, and presents a domain independent framework enabling transparent caching of Web Service requests for mobile clients. The framework intercepts method calls intended for the web service and proceeds by buffering and caching of the outgoing method call and the inbound responses. This enables a mobile application to seamlessly use Web Services by masking fluctuations in network conditions. This framework addresses two main issues, firstly how to enrich the WS standards to enable caching and secondly how to maintain consistency for state dependent Web Service request/response pairs.

Business processes are increasingly used by organizations to automate their activities. Written in languages like WS-BPEL, they allow an institution to describe precisely its internal operations. As the pace of change increases, however, both organizations and their internal processes are required to be more flexible; they have to account for an increasing amount of externally-driven environment state, or context, and modify their behavior accordingly. This puts a significant burden on business-process programmers, who now have to source, track, and update context from multiple entities, in addition to implementing and maintaining core business logic. Implementing this state-maintenance logic in a WS-BPEL business process is involved. This is because WS-BPEL business processes are modeled as if they were the only thing operating in, and making changes to, the business environment. This mental model does not reflect the real world, where organizations and entities depend on state that is outside their control – state that is modified independent of, and concurrent with, the organization’s activities. This makes it hard for business-process programmers to write context-dependent processes in a concise manner. This thesis presents a solution to this problem based on the notion of a context variable for WS-BPEL business processes. It describes how context variables are designed using the WS-BPEL language-extension mechanism, and how these variables can be used in business processes. It also outlines an architecture for offering context in the web services environment that uses constructs from the WS-Resource Framework specification. It shows how changes in context can be propagated from these context sources to WS-BPEL context variables using WS-Notification-based publish/subscribe. The design also includes a standards-compliant method for extending web-service responses with references to context sources. Finally, a prototype validating the overall system is described, and enhancements for increasing the utility of context variables proposed. This solution offers significant advantages: it builds on established practices and well-understood message-exchange patterns, leverages widely used languages, frameworks and specifications, is standards compliant, and has a low barrier-to-entry for business-process programmers. Moreover, when compared to existing alternatives, this solution requires significantly less process logic and fewer interface changes to maintain constantly changing environment state.

Business processes are increasingly used by organizations to automate their activities. Written in languages like WS-BPEL, they allow an institution to describe precisely its internal operations. As the pace of change increases, however, both organizations and their internal processes are required to be more flexible; they have to account for an increasing amount of externally-driven environment state, or context, and modify their behavior accordingly. This puts a significant burden on business-process programmers, who now have to source, track, and update context from multiple entities, in addition to implementing and maintaining core business logic. Implementing this state-maintenance logic in a WS-BPEL business process is involved. This is because WS-BPEL business processes are modeled as if they were the only thing operating in, and making changes to, the business environment. This mental model does not reflect the real world, where organizations and entities depend on state that is outside their control – state that is modified independent of, and concurrent with, the organization’s activities. This makes it hard for business-process programmers to write context-dependent processes in a concise manner. This thesis presents a solution to this problem based on the notion of a context variable for WS-BPEL business processes. It describes how context variables are designed using the WS-BPEL language-extension mechanism, and how these variables can be used in business processes. It also outlines an architecture for offering context in the web services environment that uses constructs from the WS-Resource Framework specification. It shows how changes in context can be propagated from these context sources to WS-BPEL context variables using WS-Notification-based publish/subscribe. The design also includes a standards-compliant method for extending web-service responses with references to context sources. Finally, a prototype validating the overall system is described, and enhancements for increasing the utility of context variables proposed. This solution offers significant advantages: it builds on established practices and well-understood message-exchange patterns, leverages widely used languages, frameworks and specifications, is standards compliant, and has a low barrier-to-entry for business-process programmers. Moreover, when compared to existing alternatives, this solution requires significantly less process logic and fewer interface changes to maintain constantly changing environment state.

This research explores the problems associated with caching of SOAP Web Service request/response pairs, and presents a domain independent framework enabling transparent caching of Web Service requests for mobile clients. The framework intercepts method calls intended for the web service and proceeds by buffering and caching of the outgoing method call and the inbound responses. This enables a mobile application to seamlessly use Web Services by masking fluctuations in network conditions. This framework addresses two main issues, firstly how to enrich the WS standards to enable caching and secondly how to maintain consistency for state dependent Web Service request/response pairs.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is intended for the integration of heterogeneous applications. Complex business processes are composed by a group of specific Web services using WS-BPEL (Business Process Execution Language), and these Web services may be designed by the enterprise itself or third-party services providers. Today there are many WS-BPEL engines that support the deployment and execution of WS-BPEL files. However, the WS-BPEL activities have to be pre-defined, and if at runtime a Web service call fails, the entire business process is pronounced to be failed, thereby jeopardizing the reliability of SOA. Although the WS- BPEL supports compensation mechanism, it is complex and not flexible. In this work, we propose a process design model to support dynamic Web services selection that eases the designer¡¦s job. This model has been implemented, and the prototype is evaluated to demonstrate that it indeed improves the overall business process reliability.