Cloud computing is a relatively immature computing paradigm that could significantly benefit users. Cloud computing solutions are often associated with potential benefits such as cost reduction, less administrative hassle, flexibility and scalability. For organisations to realize such potential benefits, cloud computing solutions need to be chosen, implemented, managed and governed in a way that is secure, compliant with internal and external requirements and indicative of due diligence. This can be a challenge, given the many concerns and risks commonly associated with cloud computing solutions. One cloud computing solution that is being widely adopted around the world is cloud-based email. One of the foremost adopters of this cloud computing solution is higher education institutions. These higher education institutions stand to benefit greatly from using such services. Cloud-based email can be provisioned to staff and students at these institutions for free. Additionally, cloud service providers (CSPs) are able to provide a better email service than some higher education institutions would be able to provide if they were required to do so in-house. CSPs often provide larger inboxes and many extra services with cloud-based email. Cloud-based email is, therefore, clearly an example of a cloud computing solution that has the potential to benefit organisations. There are however, risks and challenges associated with the use of this cloud computing solution. Two of these challenges relate to ensuring conformance to internal and external (legal, regulatory and contractual obligations) requirements and to providing a mechanism of assuring that cloud-based email related activities are sound. The lack of structured guidelines for assuring the conformance of cloud-based email is putting this service at risk at higher education institutions in South Africa. This work addresses this problem by promoting a best practice based approach to assuring the conformance of cloud-based email at higher education institutions. To accomplish this, components of applicable standards and best practice guidelines for IT governance, IT assurance and IT conformance are used to construct a framework for assuring the conformance of cloud-based email. The framework is designed and verified using sound design science principles. The utility and value of the framework has been demonstrated at a higher education institution in South Africa. This framework can be used to assist higher education institutions to demonstrate due diligence in assuring that they conform to legal and best practice requirements for the management and governance of cloud-based email. This is a significant contribution in the relatively new field of cloud computing governance.

This study is focused on web services testing with SoapUI tool, particularly on verification methodology for Web services testing with SoapUI. The main objective of this thesis is to verify the methodology. Specific goals include introduction to basic concepts and principles related to web services, a description of the testing process including types of the tests and specifics of testing web services, introduction of methodology for Web services testing with SoapUI, practical verification of the methodology on the real information system and a suggestion of how to adapt the methodology on the basis of the verification. The theoretical part summarizes basic knowledge of the web services technology and web services testing. Especially it is devoted to description of the methodology for Web services testing with SoapUI and to the introduction of the SoapUI tool. The practical part consists of the introduction of the test system in Česká pojišťovna, a. s. and Generali pojišťovna, a. s., where the methodology is verified. Next the methodology for Web services testing with SoapUI is verified. Based on this verification, there are suggestions of how to adapt or extend the methodology.

Dans cette thèse nous nous intéressons au problème d’analyse des spécifications des protocoles d’interactions des services Web orientés données. La spécification de ce type de protocoles inclut les données en plus de la signature des opérations et des contraintes d’ordonnancement des messages. L’analyse des services orientés données est complexe car l’exécution d’un service engendre une infinité d’états. Notre travail se concentre autour du problème d’existence d’une relation de simulation quand les spécifications des protocoles des services Web sont représentés en utilisant un système à transition orienté données. D’abord nous avons étudié le modèle Colombo [BCG+05]. Dans ce modèle, un service (i) échange des messages en utilisant des variables ; (ii) modifie une base de donnée partagée ; (iii) son comportement est modélisé avec un système à transition. Nous montrons que tester l’existence de la relation de simulation entre deux services Colombo non bornée est indécidable. Puis, nous considérons le cas où les services sont bornés. Nous montrons pour ce cas que le test de simulation est (i) exptime-complet pour les services Colombo qui n’accèdent pas à la base de donnée (noté ColomboDB=∅), et (ii) 2exptime-complet quand le service peut accéder à une base de donnée bornée (Colombobound). Dans la seconde partie de cette thèse, nous avons défini un modèle générique pour étudier l’impact de différents paramètres sur le test de simulation dans le contexte des services Web orientés données. Le modèle générique est un système à transition gardé qui peut lire et écrire à partir d’une base de donnée et échanger des messages avec son environnement (d’autres services ou un client). Dans le modèle générique toutes les actions sont des requêtes sur des bases de données (modification de la base de données, messages échangés et aussi les gardes). Dans ce contexte, nous avons obtenu les résultats suivant : (i) pour les services gardés sans mise à jour, le test de simulation est caractérisé par rapport à la décidabilité du test de satisfiabilité du langage utilisé pour exprimer les gardes augmenté avec une forme restrictive de négation, (ii) pour les services sans mise à jour mais qui peuvent envoyer comme message le résultat d’une requête, nous avons trouvé des conditions suffisantes d’indécidabilité et de décidabilité par rapport au langage utilisé pour exprimer l’échange de messages, et (iii) nous avons étudié le cas des services qui ne peuvent que insérer des tuples dans la base de donnée. Pour ce cas, nous avons étudié la simulation ainsi que la weak simulation et nous avons montré que : (a) la weak simulation est indécidable quand les requêtes d’insertion sont des requêtes conjonctives, (b) le test de simulation est indécidable si la satisfiabilité du langage de requête utilisé pour exprimer les insertions augmenté avec une certaine forme de négation est indécidable. Enfin, nous avons étudié l’interaction entre le langage utilisé pour exprimer les gardes et celui utilisé pour les insertions, nous exhibons une classe de service où la satisfiabilité des deux langages est décidable alors que le test de simulation entre les services qui leur sont associés ne l’est pas. / In this thesis we address the problem of analyzing specifications of data-centric Web service interaction protocols (also called data-centric business protocols). Specifications of such protocols include data in addition to operation signatures and messages ordering constraints. Analysis of data-centric services is a complex task because of the inherently infinite states of the underlying service execution instances. Our work focuses on characterizing the problem of checking a refinement relation between service interaction protocol specifications. More specifically, we consider the problem of checking the simulation preorder when service business protocols are represented using data-centric state machines. First we study the Colombo model [BCG+05]. In this framework, a service (i) exchanges messages using variables; (ii) acts on a shared database; (iii) has a transition based behavior. We show that the simulation test for unbounded Colombo is undecidable. Then, we consider the case of bounded Colombo where we show that simulation is (i) exptime-complete for Colombo services without any access to the database (noted ColomboDB=∅), and (ii) 2exptime-complete when only bounded databases are considered (the obtained model is noted Colombobound). In the second part of this thesis, we define a generic model to study the impact of various parameters on the simulation test in the context of datacentric services. The generic model is a guarded transition system acting (i.e., read and write) on databases (i.e., local and shared) and exchanging messages with its environment (i.e., other services or users). The model was designed with a database theory perspective, where all actions are viewed as queries (i.e modification of databases, messages exchanges and guards). In this context, we obtain the following results (i) for update free guarded services (i.e., generic services with guards and only able to send empty messages) the decidability of simulation is fully characterized w.r.t decidability of satisfiability of the query language used to express the guards augmented with a restrictive form of negation, (ii) for update free send services (i.e., generic services without guards and able to send as messages the result of queries over local and shared database), we exhibit sufficient conditions for both decidability and undecidability of simulation test w.r.t the language used to compute messages payloads, and (iii) we study the case of insert services (i.e., generic services without guards and with the ability of insert the result of queries into the local and the shared database). In this case, we study the simulation as well as the weak simulation relations where we show that: (i) the weak simulation is undecidable when the insertions are expressed as conjunctive queries, (ii) the simulation is undecidable if satisfiability of the query language used to express the insertion augmented with a restricted form of negation is undecidable. Finally, we study the interaction between the queries used as guards and the ones used as insert where we exhibit a class of services where satisfiability of both languages is decidable while simulation is undecidable.

Thesis describes models and usage of e-services to support e-commerce. Services are di-vided according to their areas of application. Their characteristics are described from both the business and from the integration point of view. The objectives of thesis are divided into two areas: The first area is the market analysis of selected e-services of third parties to support e-commerce business in the Czech Republic in area of SME that can be supported by web services. The second area is simplified case study of the real deployment of selected services for real e-commerce solution. The work summarizes integration of services and analyzing their impact on the business.

Recommender systems support online customers by suggesting products and services of likely interest to them. Research in recommender systems is now starting to recognise the importance of multiple selection criteria and the role of customer context in improving the recommendation output. This thesis investigates the inclusion of criteria and context information in the recommendation process. Firstly, a novel technique for multi-criteria recommendation is proposed. It assumes that some selection criteria for an item (product or a service) will dominate the overall rating, and that these dominant criteria will be different for different users. Following this assumption, users are clustered based on their criteria preferences, creating a “preference lattice”. The recommendation output for a user is then based on ratings by other users from the same or nearby clusters. Secondly, a context similarity metric for context aware recommendation is presented. This metric can help improve the prediction accuracy in two ways. On the one hand, the metric can guide the aggregation of the feedback from similar context to improve the prediction accuracy. This aggregation is important because the recommendation generation based on prior feedback by similar customers reduces the quantum of feedback used, resulting in a reduction in recommendation quality. On the other hand, the value returned by the context similarity metric can also be used to indicate the importance of the context information in the prediction process for a context aware recommendation.The validation of the two proposed techniques and their applications are conducted in the service domain because the relatively high degree of user involvement attracts users to provide detailed feedback from multiple perspectives, such as from criteria and context perspectives. In particular, hotel services and web services areas are selected due to their different levels of maturity in terms of users’ feedback. For each area, this thesis proposes a different recommendation approach by combining the proposed techniques with a traditional recommendation approach. The thesis concludes with experiments conducted on the datasets from the two aforementioned areas to evaluate the proposed techniques, and to demonstrate the process and the effectiveness of the techniques-based recommendation approaches.

As the number of Internet-connected devices rapidly grows, it has become ever more challenging to develop and maintain purpose-made tightly integrated distributed embedded systems. Instead, the Internet of Things (IoT) approach, based on standardized interfaces and open communication protocols, enables support for various applications with the possibility of extension to provide additional services that were not necessarily available at the initial deployment.This thesis presents methods and tools for the development of standard-based Web services for the Internet of Things. Some of the key challenges in using Web services on resource-constrained devices are due to the overhead of the communication protocols, which leads to the need for greater network bandwidth, processing power, and memory usage. A common solution to these problems is to use gateways that translate between the protocols used on one end of the connection (i.e. low-capability devices) and those on the other end (i.e. powerful Web servers). However, this increases the overall complexity of the system. The work presented herein answers the following research questions: 1) Is it feasible to deploy standard Web services on IoT systems without using application layer gateways? 2) What are the trade-offs in using Web services for end-to-end interoperability of resource-constrained embedded systems? 3) What levels of efficiency and functionality can be achieved using binary coding schemes for XML data exchange?The research questions are tested by building and evaluating several prototype IoT systems. These evaluations show that the use of Web services requires more powerful hardware (i.e. CPU and RAM) and a larger form factor in exchange for better interoperability compared to the use of ad hoc application protocols. The main challenge in employing embedded Web services is the large size of the messages, which is due to the use of verbose data formats such as XML. Although it is shown that it is possible to deploy XML-based Web services on low-capability devices without application layer gateways, this approach has severe performance limitations. Using the Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) binary coding scheme overcomes some of these limitations by substantially reducing the size of the XML messages. The main outcome of this thesis is the design and implementation of a software toolkit, called EXIP, for building EXI-based embedded Web services.The trade-offs in the use of embedded Web services are likely to change in the near future as the importance of application layer interoperability increases and IoT devices become faster, more energy efficient, and equipped with more memory. The dominating importance of interoperability can be seen in highly heterogeneous systems such as energy management systems (i.e. smart grids), where embedded Web services are already in use today. With this in mind, future research directions and extensions of this work include the development of performance optimization strategies for the EXIP toolkit to foster the expansion of embedded Web services to an even wider range of IoT applications. / Godkänd; 2014; 20140909 (rumkyu); Nedanstående person kommer att disputera för avläggande av teknologie doktorsexamen. Namn: Rumen Kyusakov Ämne: Industriell elektronik/Industrial Electronics Avhandling: Efficient Web Services for End-To-End Interoperability of Embedded Systems Opponent: Dr Frank Golatowski, Institute of Applied Microelements and CE, University of Rostock, Rostock-Warnemüende, Germany Ordförande: Biträdande professor Jens Eliasson, EISLAB, Institutionen för system- och rymdteknik, Luleå tekniska universitetet, Luleå Tid: Tisdag den 4 november 2014, kl. 13:00 Plats: A109, Luleå tekniska universitet / Embeddable EXI implementation in C, Architecture for Service-Oriented Process – Monitoring and Control, Arrowhead

With businesses’ and organizations’ steadily growing dependence on IT, the infrastructure of Information Systems has become a lot more complex. Reasons such as company mergers and continuously changing markets have made system integration an increasingly important factor for companies today. This was the background for the following study which sought to solve a company’s system integration problem through the use of a more modern, service-oriented approach. A need for systems to communicate and exchange information in a more reliable and efficient manner had yielded demands for an improved integration. Therefore, the objective was to design a robust and flexible architecture that would handle all of the current systems integration needs while the purpose was to find evidence of whether the use of service-orientation along with the introduction of an Enterprise Service Bus would deliver project value.The resulting prototype makes use of a web service and an Enterprise Service Bus to deliver the functions necessary to satisfy the requirements. Several of the requirements were met through the very use of service-orientation which played a small but nonetheless instrumental part in the construction and development process of the integration solution. / <p>Validerat; 20160616 (global_studentproject_submitter)</p>

Workflow systems orchestrate various business tasks to attain an objective. Web services can be leveraged to handle individual tasks. Before anyone intends to leverage service components, it is imperative and essential to evaluate the trustworthiness of these services. Therefore, choosing a trustworthy service has become an important decision while designing a workflow system. Trustworthiness can be defined as the likelihood of a service functioning as it is intended. Selection of a service that satisfies business goals involves collecting relevant information such as security mechanisms, reliability, performance and availability. It is important to arrive at total trustworthiness, which incorporates all of the above mentioned multi-facet values relevant to a service. These values can be gathered and analyzed to derive the total trustworthiness of a service. Measuring trustworthiness of a service involves arriving at a suitable value that would help an end-user make a decision for the given business settings. The primary focus of this thesis is to gather relevant details and measure trustworthiness based on inputs provided by the user. A conceptual model was developed after extensive literature review to identify factors that influence trustworthiness of a service. A mechanism was created to gather concept values for a given service and utilize those values to calculate trustworthiness index value. A proof-of-concept prototype was also developed. The prototype is a web-based application that implements the mechanism to measure the trustworthiness of the service. The prototype was evaluated using a scenario-based analysis method to demonstrate the utility of the trustworthiness mechanism using three different scenarios. Results of the evaluation shows that trustworthiness is a multidimensional concept, the relevant conceptual values can be collected, a trustworthiness index value can be calculated based on the gathered concepts, and a trustworthiness index can be interpreted to select the most relevant service for a given requirement.

Diversos modelos foram criados para representar o processo de desenvolvimento de produto nos últimos anos. Entretanto, a adaptação destes modelos ao desenvolvimento de serviços na era web ainda é incipiente. Nesta área, a sistematização do processo de desenvolvimento de novos serviços necessita de maior fundamentação teórica e prática, principalmente pelo alto crescimento do setor de serviços web. Essa dissertação propõe uma sistematização do processo de gestão do desenvolvimento de novos serviços e-serviços fornecidos exclusivamente pela web, denominados nesse estudo de serviços web. Como forma de atingir este objetivo são propostos nesse trabalho um modelo padronizado de gestão do desenvolvimento para novos serviços web e um método de planejamento da qualidade com base no QFD (Desdobramento da Função Qualidade), considerando indicadores de qualidade e custos para a definição de prioridade de demandas e melhorias aplicado em um portal de jogos casuais. Por fim, apresenta-se uma demonstração de aplicação do modelo de gestão do desenvolvimento e do método de planejamento da qualidade, orientando os gestores no processo de desenvolvimento de novos serviços web para o desenvolvimento de um serviço de classificados online. / In recent years, several models representing the product development process have been created. However, the adaptation of such models to Web services development is yet to grow. In this regard, systematization of the development process for new services requires further practical and theoretical substantiation, particularly because of the significant growth of the Web services sector. This study proposes a systematization of the development management process for new e-services provided exclusively on the Web, hereafter referred to as Web services. Consequently, this study proposes a standardized model to manage the development of new web services and a quality planning method based on Quality Function Deployment, by considering cost and quality indicators as a way to set improvement and demand priorities applied to a casual gaming portal. Finally, the application of the development management model and the quality planning method are demonstrated with regard to development of an online classifieds service, and guidance presented for managers involved in such development processes.

Orientadores: Eleri Cardozo, Eliane Gomes Guimarães / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Eletrica e de Computação / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-08T01:18:40Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Coelho_PauloRodolfodaSilvaLeite_M.pdf: 3632525 bytes, checksum: 73b0d774d1efd6416d8fb34cc8abd4d7 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2006 / Resumo: Este trabalho apresenta uma arquitetura para a construção de laboratórios de acesso remoto (conhecidos como WebLabs). A arquitetura segue o paradigma de computação orientada a serviço (COS). Nesta abordagem cada recurso físico ou lógico do laboratório é modelado como um Serviço Web. Desta forma, os experimentos podem ser disponibilizados pela composição destes serviços. Um modelo conceitual para WebLabs, bem como a implementação deste modelo são apresentados. Experimentos em robótica móvel também foram desenvolvidos como exemplos de utilização deste laboratório / Abstract: This work presents an architeture for building remote access laboratories (also known as WebLabs). The architecture follows the service oriented computing (SOC). In this approach each logical or physical resource of the laboratory is modeled as a Web Service. In this way, the experiments are built through the composition of such services. A conceptual model of WebLabs, as well as an implementation of this model are presented. Experiments in mobile robotic were also developed for this laboratory / Mestrado / Engenharia de Computação / Mestre em Engenharia Elétrica