JWSR, Volume 3, Number 2, April-June 2006
Official Publication of the Information Resources Management Association
Published: Quarterly in Print and Electronically
ISSN: 1545-7362
EISSN: 1546-5004


EDITORIAL PREFACE:

"Web Services in Data, Control, and Applications"

Jia Zhang, Northern Illinois University, USA
Liang-Jie Zhang, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA

This issue of the International Journal of Web Services research (JWSR) is a collection of five papers on various topics of Web services.

RESEARCH PAPERS

PAPER ONE:

"Search Strategies for Automatic Web Service Composition"

Milanovic, N.
Malek, M.

This paper investigates architectural properties required for supporting automatic service composition. First, composable service architecture will be described, based on modeling Webn Services as abstract machines supported by formally defined composition operators. Based on the proposed infrastructure, we give several options for achieving automatic service composition by treating it as a search problem. Namely, basic heuristic, probabilistic, learning-based, decomposition and bidirectional automatic composition mechanisms will be presented and compared. Finally, it discusses the impact and outlook for automatic composition.

PAPER TWO:

"XWRAPComposer: A Multi-Page Data Extraction Service"

Liu, L.
Zhang, J.
Han, W.
Pu, C.
Caverlee, J.
Park, S.
Critchlow, T.
Buttler, D.
Coleman, M.

The authors of this paper present a service-oriented architecture and a set of techniques for developing wrapper code generators, including the methodology of designing an effective wrapper program construction facility and a concrete implementation, called XWRAPComposer. This wrapper generation framework has two unique design goals. First, the authors explicitly separate tasks of building wrappers that are specific to a Web service from the tasks that are repetitive for any service. Second, inductive learning algorithms that derive information flow and data extraction patterns by reasoning about sample pages or sample specifications are used. More importantly, the authors design a declarative rule-based script language for multi-page information extraction, encouraging a clean separation of the information extraction semantics from the information flow control and execution logic of wrapper programs.

PAPER THREE:

"An Ontology-Based Content Model for Intelligent Web Content Access Services"

Yang, S. J. H.
Shao, N. W. Y.

Intelligent Web content access is a fundamental Web service, representing the first step toward semantic Web services. A lack of adequate and sufficient interpretation for content in current methods impedes access to content. This study regards Web content as any content described and published in the format of a markup language such as HTML or XML. In this paper, the authors present the Content Model, combining subjective information from the content itself with objective information from people perceptions of this content, providing an integrated interpretation of a content item. During accessing, a search engine examines the description of a content item, as found in the Content Model, to find matching files. An ontology-based Content Model is developed and applied to the Web environment to enhance Web content accessibility. Results of this study demonstrate that the proposed Content Model provides essential content descriptions for locating, accessing, and interacting with content providers.

PAPER FOUR:

"Self-Reconfiguration of Service-Based System for Service Level Agreements and Resource Optimization"

Li, Y.
Sun, K.
Qiu, J.
Chen, Y.

In this paper, the authors propose an autonomic computing approach to the problem of reconfiguration, that is, enabling the service-based system to configure itself by means of a loop of monitoring, analyzing, planning and executing. This article begins by formalizing the definition of reconfiguration. Then, a description is given on how to implement the autonomic computing mechanisms for reconfiguring service-based systems to satisfy Service Level Agreements with minimal resource consumption. The approach is demonstrated on a resilient service provisioning environment. Finally, the preliminary experiments are evaluated to determine the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

PAPER FIVE:

"UML-Based Support for Designing and Validating Web Service Descriptions"

Jiang, J.
Systa, T.

WSDL descriptions, often characterized as IDLs for Web services, are a key for Web service interoperability. Therefore, special care should be taken in designing WSDL descriptions. In this paper, the authors present an approach that provides UML-based support to design and validate WSDL descriptions. To promote Web service interoperability, WS-I organization provides a Basic Profile that defines clarifications, refinements, interpretations, and amplifications of Web service specifications, including WSDL. The article suggests UML-based profiles to define structural rules of WSDL documents as well as Basic Profile recommendations for WSDL descriptions. These profiles can be used to guide the user in designing correct and Basic-Profile-compliant WSDL descriptions and to check the validity of existing WSDL descriptions. A method and tools for such validity checking is proposed, and the applicability of the approach with case studies.

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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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