JWSR, Volume 3, Number 4, October-December 2006
Official Publication of the Information Resources Management Association
Published: Quarterly in Print and Electronically
ISSN: 1545-7362
EISSN: 1546-5004


EDITORIAL PREFACE:

"Metadata for Web Services"

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

It has been widely realized that semantic meta information is important for effective Web services discovery, dynamic Web services composition, as well as business collaboration at run-time. This issue of the International Journal of Web Services research (JWSR) highlights the theme of a special issue: “Bridging Communities: Semantically Augmented Metadata for Services, Grids, and Software Engineering.” The four articles in this special issue focus primarily on how to organize, analyze, and manage semantic metadata in the context of service-oriented architecture.

RESEARCH PAPERS

PAPER ONE:

"Organizing Thematic, Geographic, and Temporal Knowledge in a Well-Founded Navigation Space: Logical and Algorithmic Foundations for EFGT Nets"

Brunner, L.
Schulz, K. U.
Weigel, F.

We introduce a family of symbolic logical formalisms for reasoning with named entities, associated topics or thematic fields, geographic areas, and temporal periods. We argue that this kind of knowledge is useful for various applications in a Semantic Web context, in other words, for the content-oriented description of Web services and yellow pages. In our approach, entities and their relationships are positioned in a well-founded (i.e., acyclic) navigation space, called an EFGT Net. Large (small) entries regarding the navigation order represent general (specific) topics and large (small) geographic or temporal areas. This acyclic organization of knowledge aims to support indexing, search, and classification tasks directly. Each entry comes with a unique identifier that describes the role of the corresponding concept, using techniques from description logics. A formal semantics for the language of identifiers is given. For the resulting logic, role hierarchies and role-value maps are characteristic and crucial. Based on the semantics of identifiers, a set of intensionally typed links is defined that induces the aforementioned navigation structure on the set of all entries. We then introduce a set of deduction rules and a saturation procedure for computing all links between concepts, as well as intensional types for links. We prove soundness, completeness, and termination of the link derivation calculus.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=6514

PAPER TWO:

"Using Concept Lattices to Support Service Selection"

Aversano, L.
Bruno, M.
Canfora, G.
Di Penta, M.
Distante, D.

When building a service-oriented system, a service integrator retrieves a set of potentially useful services from registries and then inspects their documentation to eventually decide which services to use. This task needs to be supported by proper tools that help service interface/documentation understanding, highlighting the relationships existing between the retrieved services. This paper proposes an approach, based on Formal Concept Analysis, to understand relationships between services, as well as between operations of a complex service, by analyzing service interfaces and documentation. The approach allows an analyst to cluster similar services, highlights hierarchical relationships and, in general, commonalities and differences between services. To support the proposed approach, we developed a tool that provides several service browsing capabilities. Finally, the approach has been evaluated with different case studies built upon real sets of services.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=6515

PAPER THREE:

"Metadata, Ontologies, and Information Models for Grid PSE Toolkits Based on Web Services"

Comito, C.
Mastroianni, C.
Talia, D.

A PSE toolkit is a group of technologies within a software architecture through which multiple PSEs can be built for different application domains. The effective use of a PSE toolkit requires the management of the heterogeneity of the involved resources that can include computers, data, network facilities, sensors, and software tools provided by different organizations. A distributed implementations of a PSE toolkit can be envisioned through the exploitation of features and functionalities offered by a service-oriented Grid framework, so obtaining a Grid PSE toolkit based on Web services. This paper presents a metadata model for Grid PSE toolkits based on Web services and the architecture of an information system that exploits the proposed metadata model. These two components contribute to define a general model of metadata management for supporting the design and implementation of problem solving environments on Grids.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=6516

PAPER FOUR:

"Managing Semantic Metadata for Web/Grid Services"

Chen, L.
Shadbolt, N. R.
Goble, C.
Tao, F.

Web/Grid services metadata and semantics are becoming increasing important for service sharing and effective reuse. In this paper we present a generic framework for engineering and managing services?Semantic Metadata (SMD) with the ultimate purpose of facilitating interoperability, automation, and knowledgeable reuse of services for problem solving. The framework addresses fundamental issues, approaches, and tools for the whole lifecycle of SMD management, in other words, those of acquiring, modeling, representing, publishing, and reusing services?SMD. It adopts ontologies and the Semantic Web technologies as the enabling technologies by which services?metadata are semantically enriched and made interoperable, understandable, and accessible on the Web/Grid for both humans and machines. In particular, mechanisms are proposed to make use of service SMD for service discovery and composition. The paper also describes a service SMD management system in the context of the UK e-Science project GEODISE. A suite of tools are developed, which forms the core of the SMD management infrastructure. We demonstrate the added value of the use of SMD through the integration of SMD management with GEODISE application systems.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=6517

PAPER FIVE:

"Web Service Architectures for Text Mining: An Exploration of the Issues via an E-Science Demonstrator"

Davis, N.
Demetriou, G.
Gaizauskas, R.
Guo, Y.
Roberts, I.

Text mining technology can be used to assist in finding relevant or novel information in large volumes of unstructured data, such as that which is increasingly available in the electronic scientific literature. However, publishers are not text mining specialists, nor typically are the end user scientists who consume their products. This situation suggests a web services based solution, where text mining specialists process the literature obtained from publishers and make their results available to remote consumers (research scientists). In this paper we discuss the integration of web services and text mining within the domain of scientific publishing and explore the strengths and weaknesses of three generic architectural designs for delivering text mining web services. We argue for the superiority of one of these and demonstrate its viability by reference to an application designed to provide access to the results of text mining over the PubMed database of scientific abstracts.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=6518

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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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