Ein zentraler Vorteil des Webs gegenüber herkömmlichen Anwendungsplattformen stellt sein großes Potential dar, Aufgaben über Organisationsgrenzen hinweg zu unterstützen. Derzeit lassen sich Tendenzen zu einer Klasse von föderativen Web-Anwendungen beobachten, die dieses Potential verstärkt ausschöpfen. Eine besondere Herausforderung bei ihrer Entwicklung ergibt sich durch die Ausrichtung der Zugangskontrolle auf zugreifende Benutzer, deren Identitäten von Partnerorganisationen verwaltet werden. Die Arbeit erweitert den Stand der Technik im Bereich Web Engineering um Werkzeuge, Modelle, Methoden und Prozesse zum gezielten Unterstützen der Evolution föderativer Systeme. Sie umfasst einen Katalog aus Entwurfsbausteinen für föderative Infrastrukturen, eine Modellierungssprache zur Planung der föderativen Architektur sowie eine Methode zur Integration föderativ geschützter Informationsräume in Web-Anwendungen. / A central advantage of the Web over traditional application plattforms lies in its great potential for supporting tasks beyond organizational boundaries. Presently, a trend towards a new class of federated Web applications can be observed that exploit this potential to a high degree. The development of such applications is particularly challenged by the need for controlling accesses of users whose identities are managed by partner organizations. This work extends the state of the art in the area of Web Engineering with tools, models, methods and processes for supporting the evolution of federated systems. It comprises a catalogue of design building blocks for federated infrastructures, a modeling language for planning federated architectures as well as a method for integrating information spaces of applications that are subject to federated access control.

The first chapter of this thesis is motivated by a puzzle in consumer finance. In high-stakes financial decisions, people leave a substantial amount of money on the table, even when financial education is available. The ubiquity of financial choices makes understanding the effects of incentives and education on mistakes crucial. This chapter experimentally examines the impact of changes in incentives and educational availability on incentivized but hypothetical healthcare choices using Amazon Mechanical Turk. We find that increasing incentives are ineffective in increasing decision-making effort, even when these changes are made clear and salient to the subjects. Yet, surprisingly, despite this lack of effort response, subjects' choices improve when incentives are high. This result highlights an under-appreciated channel of incentives: when stakes become larger, often, the problems become simpler too. We next investigate the effect of available education. Overall, education leads to an increase in decision-making effort and an improvement in choice quality. However, this average effect masks significant heterogeneity across incentive treatments. Subjects are willing to put in the educational effort when either the problems are hard or mistakes are highly costly, but the return of the educational effort is zero for hard problems and positive for easy ones. Thus, only when stakes are high and the problem is easy does education have an effect. These findings suggest that people can be encouraged to get education for high-stakes decisions, and policy-makers have a role in simplifying problems to translate the extra effort into better choices. The second chapter dives deeper into the "easiness" channel of incentives. This chapter uses an experiment to disentangle "easiness" from the standard incentives on savings account choices, again using Amazon Mechanical Turk. We show that increasing the variance of the accounts improves choices without increasing time spent. This is true in both between-subject and within-subject analyses. Besides, we re-investigate the effects of incentives and education. We recover the usual effects of incentives, where paying subjects a higher rate motivates them to spend more time and do better. We also find that easiness and incentives complement education. Consistent with the literature, we show that the effectiveness of education diminishes with time, suggesting that education should be provided as and when people make decisions. In the third chapter finds experimental evidence for preference for flexibility (PFF). Although PFF is very intuitive, documenting PFF experimentally faces challenges from stochastic choices. Because there are random noises in decision-making, experimental data may over-estimate PFF due to such randomness. This chapter tackles stochastic choices by first deriving theoretical upper bounds for PFF. We then measure PFF against these upper bounds using menu choices presented in the Multiple Price Lists (MPLs) in a lab experiment. We find that subjects exhibit more PFF than what can be explained by random noises. Specifically, there are more PFF than two countervailing behaviors, indifference and preference for commitment. We then present two alternative models for PFF, which have different predictions for the effect of the probability of payment on PFF. We suggest a modified experiment to tell these two models apart for future research.

The Representational State Transfer (REST) architecture style surfaced quickly to be the favorable scheme to standardize the communication for network-based hypermedia systems due to its uniform discipline. As a result, various giant web services adopted the REST architecture as their primary architectural choice for their services. Regardless of the REST style's uniform discipline, de-facto practices appeared among REST services. Consequently, numerous studies have analyzed REST services and found to a significant extent, misalignments between the theoretical aspects of REST and the practices of REST. One of the studies examined a set of services that claimed to be REST against a class of 17 design criteria that realize the principles of the REST architecture, and it found that the majority of the subject services were inconsistent in applying the REST principles. This study has followed the research mentioned earlier and examined a limited set of REST services and surveyed REST practitioners to examine their practices against the same class of the 17 design criteria to determine to what extent they are applying the 17 design criteria and analyze the statistical differences between the practices of REST services and the practices of REST practitioners. The study results show that REST services and REST practitioners applied most of the 17 design criteria. However, the study also found heterogeneous practices in REST services that go against the principles of the REST style. Furthermore, the statistical analysis results suggest a misalignment between the practices of REST services and REST practitioners in relation to the 17 design criteria.

This thesis investigates different aspects of implementing a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) for an alarm and crisis management system called Wearable Command Unit (WCU) developed by Saab Security Systems. The WCU system must be able to integrate easily with external systems in order to move into new markets and survive as a product. The focus of this report is a general solution for communicating alarm information from external systems to the WCU. A given requirement was that the solution must be based on SOA. Therefore, the concept of SOA is investigated and its applicability is considered for the WCU architecture. A design proposal based on a combination of open information and communication technologies was made to show how WCU may use SOA to receive alarm information from external systems. The design proposal was evaluated by a load test as well as comparing its conformance to SOA. The load test showed that the proposed solution can process incoming messages at a rate of 2 ms per message when client and server are run on the same machine. The result of the comparison showed that the WCU can, with small modifications, apply a SOA. While this thesis has only investigated the use of SOA in the context of alarm information, there is a clear trend toward integrating information for diverse systems to enable users to have better quality information. Providing first responders with the information that they need, when and where they need it can enable them to save lives, save property, and reduce the risk to the public of incidents. An important result from this thesis is the observation that a system that needs to integrate with many distinct systems can be better prepared if made SOA conformant. This requires the system to have an interface towards other systems based on platform independent protocols. Systems such as the WCU, which are based on Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), can easily add such an interface by configuring WCF in an appropriate way. / Detta examensarbete undersöker olika möjligheter att implementera Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) för ett larm- och krishanteringssystem kallat Wearable Command Unit (WCU) utvecklat av Saab Security Systems. För att kunna nå nya marknader och utvecklas som produkt, är det viktigt att WCU-systemet på ett enkelt sätt kan integreras med externa system. Detta examensarbete fokuserar på att ta fram en generell lösning för att kommunicera larminformation från externa system till WCU. Ett förbestämt krav var att lösningen måste vara baserad på SOA. Begreppet SOA undersöks och dess tillämpningsbarhet för WCU undersöks. Ett designförslag baserat på en kombination av öppna informations- och kommunikationsteknologier gjordes för att visa hur WCU kan använda SOA för att ta emot larminformation från externa system. Designförslaget utvärderades genom ett belastningstest, samt genom att jämföra dess konformitet med SOA. Belastningstestet visade att designförslaget kan processa inkommande larm i en hastighet av 2 ms per meddelande när klienten och servern körs på samma maskin. Resultatet av jämförelsen visade att WCU kan, med små modifieringar, implementera en SOA. Detta examensarbete har endast undersökt användandet av SOA vad gäller larminformation, men det finns även en klar tendens mot att integrera annan information ifrån olika system för att på så sätt ge användare av systemet kvalitativ information. Genom att ge framskjutna enheter lämplig information, när och där de behöver det, kan de bli bättre förberedda på att rädda liv och egendom, och samtidigt minska olycksrisken för allmänheten. Ett viktigt resultat från detta examensarbete är iakttagelsen att ett system som behöver integreras med många andra olika system kan bli bättre förberett genom att göra det SOAbaserat. För att ett system ska vara SOA-baserat krävs att det har ett gränssnitt baserat på plattformsoberoende protokoll mot andra system. System som WCU, som är baserade på Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), kan med lätthet lägga till ett sådant gränssnitt genom lämplig konfigurering av WCF.

Researchers in software engineering proposed design method for distributed applications to construct a set of communicating system components from a global behavior. The joint behaviors of these components must precisely satisfy the specified global behavior. The next concern is to transform the constructed models of these components into executable business processes by ensuring the exchange of asynchronous messages among the generated business processes. The introduction of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has helped to achieve this goal. SOA provides high flexibility in composing loosely-integrated services that can be used among business domains to carry out business transactions; this composition is known as service orchestration. Moreover, SOA supports Model Driven Architecture (MDA) such that services modeled as UML Activity Diagrams (AD) can be transformed into a set of Business Execution Language (BPEL) processes. Many researchers discussed the transformation of UML AD and the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) into BPEL. However, they did not discuss the practical limitations that some of these transformations impose. This thesis addresses the imitations of the transformation from UML AD to BPEL processes using the IBM Rational Software Architect (RSA). We showed here that the tool is unable to create the correct BPEL artifacts from UML AD components in certain cases, for instance when the behavior includes the alternative for receiving single or concurrent messages, a weak loop, or certain choice activities. Furthermore, we provided novel solutions to the transformations in these cases in order to facilitate the transformation from UML AD to BPEL.

Internet search has changed significantly since its beginning and it has also changed the way of information retrieval. Firstly, network search tools were created. However, greater development of internet search tools came after the creation of the Web. One of the first internet search tools were the web directories, such as Yahoo! or content directory Open Directory Project. Nowadays, web search engines are the most commonly used. Apart from general web search engines, there are also specialized or web search engines for particular aim or function, such as DuckDuckGo aimed at privacy, Yandex or Seznam.cz aimed at specific region or computational search engine WolframAlpha. Multimedia search and search adapted for mobile devices is technology trend in the field of internet search. Personalization, localization and social search belong among the contemporary trends. Semantic search is another long-lasting trend.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(情報学) / 甲第20029号 / 情博第624号 / 新制||情||108(附属図書館) / 33125 / 京都大学大学院情報学研究科社会情報学専攻 / (主査)教授 石田 亨, 教授 矢守 克也, 教授 喜多 一 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Informatics / Kyoto University / DFAM

Advanced architectures for cluster-based services that have been recently proposed allow for service differentiation, server overload control and high utilization of resources. These systems, however, rely on centralized functions, which limit their ability to scale and to tolerate faults. In addition, they do not have built-in architectural support for automatic reconfiguration in case of failures or addition/removal of system components. Recent research in peer-to-peer systems and distributed management has demonstrated the potential benefits of decentralized over centralized designs: a decentralized design can reduce the configuration complexity of a system and increase its scalability and fault tolerance. This research focuses on introducing self-management capabilities into the design of cluster-based services. Its intended benefits are to make service platforms dynamically adapt to the needs of customers and to environment changes, while giving the service providers the capability to adjust operational policies at run-time. We have developed a decentralized design that efficiently allocates resources among multiple services inside a server cluster. The design combines the advantages of both centralized and decentralized architectures. It allows associating a set of QoS objectives with each service. In case of overload or failures, the quality of service degrades in a controllable manner. We have evaluated the performance of our design through extensive simulations. The results have been compared with performance characteristics of ideal systems. / QC 20101123

The development of an AJAX-based web application involves several challenges as the webpage is updated by using the AJAX calls without reloading the entire page as in any traditional webpage. This prevents one from going back to the previous view of the page as the browser does not reload the entire page; instead it only updates the page. My hypothesis is that if an AJAX-based application is designed by using the software architecture style called the Representational State Transfer (REST), then it is possible to overcome these challenges, which cannot be handled by using web-services. In order to investigate this, the Material Properties Repository, an AJAX-based application was redesigned by using REST. The results support my initial hypothesis. In this process of designing MPR using REST, a generalized software engineering process was created for designing an AJAX-based application RESTfully.

This thesis aims to design and develop a platform based on a novel concept - the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) constructed by a robotic platform, an Internet of Things (IoT) platform and cloud computing services. A robotic platform enables hardware abstraction, facilitating the management of input/output between software, mechanical devices  andelectronic systems. The IoT platform is a global network enabling a massive number of devices known as things to communicate with each other and transfer data over the Internet. Cloud computing is a shared pool of scalable hardware usually provisioned as cloud services by third party cloud vendors. The integration of these concepts constitutes the core of the IoRT platform, as a global infrastructure facilitating robots to interconnect over the Internet utilizing common communication technology. Moreover, the pool of cloud resources shared by the connected robots enables scalable storage and processing power. The IoRT platform developed in this study constitutes firstly of the Amazon Web Service (AWS) IoT core serving as the IoT platform. Secondly, it incorporates the Robot Operating system (ROS) as the robotic platform and thirdly the cloud services Amazon DynamoDB and AWS Lambda for data storing and data processing respectively.The platform was evaluated in terms of delays & utilization and visualization capabilities. The platform demonstrates promising result in terms of delays exchanging small packages of data, round-trip delays in order of 50-60ms were obtained between a robot placed in Stockholm and the communication platform AWS IoT placed in Dublin, Ireland. Most of the delay is due to the traveling distance, where a round trip ping between Stockholm and Dublin takes around 50ms. The platforms ability to visualize streaming data from the robots, enables an operator to visualize selected data from any service in the platform over the Internet in near real-time, with round-trip delays in order of 250-300ms where the data propagates through multiple cloud service. In conclusion, this report illustrates the feasibility of merging two major platforms together: ROS and AWS IoT, and moreover, the accessibility to exploit the power and potential enabled by the modern data centers. / Avhandlingens syfte är att utforma och utveckla en plattform baserat på konceptet Internet of Robotic Things konstruerat av en robotikplattform, en Internet of Things plattform och molntjänster. En Internet of Things plattform är ett globalt nätverk som tillåter många enheter att kommunicera med varandra och överföra data över Internet. En robotikplattform underlättar kontrollen av in/ut mellan mjukvara, mekaniska enheter och elektroniska system. Molntjänster är en gemensam pool av skalbar hårdvara som vanligtvis erbjuds av tredje parts molnleverantörer. En Internet of Robotic Things plattform är en global infrastruktur som underlättar avancerade robotar att interagera över Internet genom en gemensam kommunikationsteknik, en pool av molntjänster som delas av alla uppkopplade robotar som tillåter skalbar lagring och processorkraft.Plattformens huvudkomponenter är robotikplattformen Robot Operating System, Internet of Things plattformen AWS IoT Core och molntjänsterna Amazon DynamoDB och AWS Lambda för lagring och databearbetning.Plattformen evalueras i form av plattformegenskaperna, fördröjningar & funktionstid och visualiseringsförmåga. Plattformen visar lovande resultat i from av fördröjningar mellan två robotar som utbyter data med hjälp av IoT plattformen, där fördröjningarna är begränsade av distanssträckan. Plattformens egenskap att visualisera strömmande data från robotar möjliggör för en operatör att visualisera utvald data från plattformen över internet i realtid.