JWSR, Volume 1, Number 1, January-March 2004
Official Publication of the Information Resources Management Association
Published: Quarterly in Print and Electronically
ISSN: 1545-7362
EISSN: 1546-5004


EDITORIAL PREFACE:

"Challenges and Opportunities for Web Services Research"

Liang-Jie Zhang, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA

Web services are becoming a major research topic for computer scientists, engineers and business consulting professionals. In this preface, I would like to outline the challenges of the current Web services research topics from the modeling, interoperability, and mathematical foundations points of view. Then I will introduce some research opportunities and possible future directions for moving Web services forward via some illustrative ideas such as business semantic computing as well as killer application driven Web services research approaches. For the business semantic computing aspect, I will present some example application domains such as federated Web services discovery, dynamic Web services composition and extended business collaboration.

RESEARCH PAPERS

PAPER ONE:

"A Spanning Tree Based Approach to Identifying Web Services"

Jain, H.
Zhao, H.
Chinta, N.R.

Web service has been envisioned as an important trend in application development and integration. It allows pre-built applications/application components wrapped as web services to interact with each other through standardized interfaces and form larger application systems. This paper describes a formal approach to web services identification, which is a critical step in designing and developing effective web services. The approach takes an analysis level object model, representing a business domain, as input and generates potential web service designs, in which the classes in the object model are grouped into appropriate web services based on static and dynamic relationships between classes. An initial hierarchical grouping of classes is derived using a maximum spanning tree algorithm. A set of managerial goals for evaluating alternative designs is derived based on business strategy of web service fabricator. Since the managerial goals are conflicting, a multi-objective genetic algorithm has been designed to search for alternative non-dominated solutions, from which a preferred solution can be selected. The approach has been implemented in a web services identification tool and used for designing web services in an auto insurance claims domain. The experts evaluated the utility of the approach.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=4250

PAPER TWO:

"Web Services Enabled E-Market Access Control Model"

Wang, H.J.
Cheng, H.K.
Zhao, J.L.

With the dramtic expansion of global e-markets, companies collaborate more and more in order to streamline their supply chains. Companies often form coalitions to reach the critical mass required to bid on a large volume or wide ranges of products. Meanwhile, they also compete with one another for market shares. Because of the complex relationships among companies, controlling the access to shared information found in e-markets is a challenging task. Currently, there is a lack of comprehensive approach in access control that can be used to maintain data security in e-markets. We propose to integrate several known access control mechanisms such as role-based access control, coalition-based access control, and relationship driven access control into an e-market access control (EMAC) model. In this paper, we present a web services based architecture for EMAC and the associated concepts and algorithms. We also illustrate via an automotive e-market example how the EMAC model can support e-market access control.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=4251

PAPER THREE:

"Integration of Business Event and Rule Management With the Web Services Model"

Nagarajan, K.
Lam, H.
Su, S.Y.W.

Web services technology is emerging as a promising infrastructure to support loosely coupled, Internet-based applications that are distributed, heterogeneous and dynamic. It provides a standards-based, process-centric framework for achieving the sharing of distributed heterogeneous applications. While Web services technology provides a promising foundation for developing distributed applications for e-business, additional features are required to make this paradigm truly useful in the real world. In particular, interactions among business organizations need to follow the policies, regulations, security and other business rules of the organizations. An effective way to control, restrict and enforce business rules in the use of Web services is to integrate business event and rule management concepts and techniques into the Web services model. In this paper, we focus on incorporating the business event and rule-management concepts into the Web services model at the service provider side. Based on a code-generation approach, we have developed techniques and implemented tools to generate Web service wrappers and other objects required to integrate an Event-Trigger-Rule (ETR) technology with the Web services technology.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=4252

PAPER FOUR:

"Implementation and Performance of WS-Security"

Makino, S.
Imamura, T.
Nakamura, Y.

This article describes performance improvements for the Web Services Security (WS-Security) specification. In the course of its development and performance measurement, we identified bottlenecks in the XML parsing and public key operations such as RSA signature and encryption. We are working on minimizing the impact of both of these bottlenecks. We implemented a stream-based WS-Security processor and showed its efficiency in XML parsing, in terms of both the processing time and the memory usage. In addition, we introduced the Web Services Secure Conversation (WS-SecureConversation) to avoid expensive public key operations.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=4253

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For full copies of the above articles, check for this issue of the International Journal of Web Services Research (JWSR) in your Institution's library.
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