JWSR, Volume 1, Number 2, April-June 2004
Official Publication of the Information Resources Management Association
Published: Quarterly in Print and Electronically
ISSN: 1545-7362
EISSN: 1546-5004


EDITORIAL PREFACE:

"Behind the Scenes of Web Services Negotiation and Agreement"

Patrick C.K. Hung, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Hong Kong
Liang-Jie Zhang, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA

Web services have become more and more popular in the research community as well as industry. Web services have cost on one hand, and they also produce benefit on the other hand. Like any for-profit organizations, Web services providers use resources to provide services to requestors in return for benefits. On the other side, Web services requestors pay for services from providers in return for benefits as well. This special issue brings four distinguished papers from the 2003 International Conference on Web Services (ICWS 2003) held in Las Vegas, Nevada, on June 23-26, 2003 and the 2003 International Conference on Web Services – Europe (ICWS-Europe 2003) held in Erfurt, Germany, on September 23-24, 2003.

RESEARCH PAPERS

PAPER ONE:

"QoS-Aware and Federated Enhancement for UDDI"

Zhou, C.
Chia, L.-T.
Lee, B.-S

With more and more Web services appearing on the Web, Web service discovery mechanisms become essential. UDDI is an online registry standard to facilitate the discovery of business partners and services. Service requesters can choose good performance Web services by manual test and comparison. However, this method of choosing is inefficient and costly in terms of time and money. The ability to predict the quality of service is missing in UDDI. Furthermore, UDDI registries in federated organizations should be able to share more about the service requester connection information to make better predictions for services?performances. To address these problems, we propose UX (UDDI eXtension), a system that facilitates requesters to discover services with good performance. In each enterprise domain, the requesters QoS feedback is received and then stored in a local UX server. By sharing these experiences from all the requesters in the local domain, the system can predict the service future performance. To support the discovery between different cooperation domains, we design a general federated service and then enhance the UX system federated discovery ability based on this federated service. The system handles the federated inquiry and provides a simple view over the whole federation. Meanwhile the UX server inquiry interface will still conform to the UDDI Specification.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=4415

PAPER TWO:

"An Extensible Workflow Architecture through Web Services"

Jan, J.
Choi, Y.
Zhao, J.L.

The growing availability of Web services provides a new opportunity for enabling new ways of system integration and interoperability, which are needed to meet the needs of global e-business. In this study, we propose an extensible workflow architecture based on Web services and object-oriented techniques. The proposed architecture contains three components, the Open Kernel Framework, the Universal Resource Manager, and the Process Definition Publisher. We show how this architecture can help extend workflow systems with new features dynamically such as new workflow patterns, new process semantics, new workflow resources, and even new process languages.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=4416

PAPER THREE:

"Web Service Business Context - The Normative Perspective"

Marjanovic, O.

This paper investigates the normative perspective of the Web service business context. The business context includes modeling of the business entities and their relationships, while its normative perspective deals with responsibilities, rights and obligations of both Web service providers and users. The existing literature and practice confirm the gap between the available Web service infrastructure and current understanding of the Web service business context - especially its normative perspective. The paper uses the Web service solution lifecycle to investigate formal modeling of terms and conditions, creation of the normative context for individual Web services as well as composition of Web services and creation and management of the resulting combined normative context. The main objective of this research is to facilitate better understanding of this phenomenon and ultimately initiate development of the new tools for management of the normative aspect both by the service providers and their customers.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=4417

PAPER FOUR:

"Merkle Tree Authentication in UDDI Registries"

Bertino, E.
Carminati, B.
Ferrari, E.

UDDI registries are today the standard way of publishing information on Web services. They can be thought of as a structured repository of information that can be queried by clients to find the Web services that better fit their needs. Even if, at the beginning, UDDI has been mainly conceived as a public registry without specific facilities for security, today security issues are becoming more and more crucial, due to the fact that data published in UDDI registries may be highly strategic and sensitive. In this paper, we focus on authenticity issues by proposing a method based on Merkle Hash Trees, which does not require the party managing the UDDI to be trusted with authenticity. In the paper, besides giving all the details of the proposed solution, we show its benefit with standard digital signature techniques.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=4418

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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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