JWSR, Volume 4, Number 2, April-June 2007
Official Publication of the Information Resources Management Association
Published: Quarterly in Print and Electronically
ISSN: 1545-7362
EISSN: 1546-5004


EDITORIAL PREFACE:

"Special Issue: Services Engineering"

S.C. Cheung, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong
Jun Han, Swinburne University of Technology, Australia
Liang-Jie Zhang, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA

Services engineering covers how to use engineering principles to establish reliable, distributed, and autonomous services based on Web services and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). This issue of the International Journal of Web Services research (JWSR) highlights the theme of a special issue “Services Engineering.” Guest Editors S.C. Cheung and Jun Han organized four articles in this special issue focusing primarily on various approaches on services engineering.

RESEARCH PAPERS

PAPER ONE:

"Service Portfolio Measurement: Evaluating Financial Performance of Service-Oriented Business Processes"

Vom Brocke, J.

Service-oriented architectures offer promising means to flexibly organize business processes. At the same time, new challenges for management arise in order to realize these potentials. Given the technological opportunities, these challenges essentially lie in choosing the right mix of services on the basis of an appropriate infrastructure supporting value adding activities. In order to support this management perspective, a focus on service-oriented business processes is suggested in this article. Hence, a shift from technical aspects of designing service-oriented information systems to economic aspects of using them according to business needs is drawn. For this purpose, findings on the evaluation of financial performance of service-oriented business processes are presented in this paper. The objective is to develop a measurement system for decision support on the con-figuration of a company? service portfolio reflecting specific economic conditions relevant in a certain situation. Following a design science approach, general principles of a measurement system are worked out and structured in a comprehensive framework. Then, the application of a corresponding system is presented with a practical study. Finally, perspectives on the specification and implementation of the system are sketched.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=6787

PAPER TWO:

"WSMoD: A Methodology for QoS-Based Web Services Design"

Comerio, M.
De Paoli, F.
Grega, S.
Maurino, A.
Batini, C.

Web services are increasingly used as an effective means to create and streamline processes and collaborations among governments, businesses, and citizens. As the number of available Web services is steadily increasing, there is a growing interest in providing methodologies that address the design of Web services according to specific qualities of service (QoS) rather than functional descriptions only. In this paper, we present WSMoD (Web Services MOdeling Design), a methodology that explicitly addresses this issue. Furthermore, we exploit general knowledge available on services, expressed by ontologies describing services, their qualities, and the context of use, to help the designer in expressing service requirements. Ontologies are used to acquire knowledge among the entities involved in service design and to check the consistency of the Web service. The discussion of a QoS-based Web service design within a real case study bears evidence of the potentials of WSMoD.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=6788

PAPER THREE:

"A Metamorphic Testing Approach for Online Testing of Service-Oriented Software Applications:"

Chan, W.
Cheung, S.
Leung, K.

Testing the correctness of services assures the functional quality of service-oriented applica-tions. A service-oriented application may bind dynamically to its supportive services. For the same service interface, the supportive services may behave differently. A service may also need to realize a business strategy, like best pricing, relative to the behavior of its counterparts and the dynamic market situations. Many existing works ignore these issues to address the problem of identifying failures from test results. This article proposes a metamorphic approach for online services testing. The off-line testing determines a set of successful test cases to construct their corresponding follow-up test cases for the online testing. These test cases will be executed by metamorphic services that encapsulate the services under test as well as the implementations of metamorphic relations. Thus, any failure revealed by the metamorphic testing approach will be due to the failures in the online testing mode. An experiment is included.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=6789

PAPER FOUR:

"Architecture-Driven Service Discovery for Service Centric Systems"

Kozlenkov, A.
Spanoudakis, G.
Zisman, A.
Fasoulas, V.
Sanchez, F.

Service discovery has been recognized as an important aspect in the development of service-centric systems, i.e., software systems which deploy Web services. To develop such systems, it is necessary to identify services that can be combined in order to fulfill the functionality and achieve quality criteria of the system being developed. In this paper, we present a framework supporting architecture-driven service discovery (ASD)?hat is the discovery of services that can provide functionalities and satisfy properties and constraints of systems as specified during the design phase of the development lifecycle based on detailed system design models. Our framework assumes an iterative design process and allows for the (re-)formulation of design models of service-centric systems based on the discovered services. The framework is composed of a query extractor, which derives queries from behavioral and structural UML design models of service-centric systems, and a query execution engine that executes these queries against service registries based on graph matching techniques. The article describes a prototype tool that we have developed to demonstrate and evaluate our framework and the results of a set of preliminary experiments that we have conducted to evaluate it.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=6790

PAPER FIVE:

"Pricing Utility Computing Services"

Denne, M.

Utility computing is the emerging term for the delivery of information technology in a ?ayas-you go?model. It has attracted considerable attention as a means of delivering lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and more predictable service levels for in-house IT. At its heart, utility transformation allows IT consumers to switch from capital-based procurement of IT assets to operational cost procurement of IT services. Unsurprisingly, the change is closely linked with the adoption of service oriented architectures (SOA) and service oriented infrastructures (SOI). In fact, utility transformation often provides the overarching business and financial framework for driving a move to SOA. It defines the IT chargeback environment and the resulting compelling business context.Key to the success of utility transformation is the implementation of appropriate service pricing models. A variety of innovative pricing models can be used to improve service predictability, to create incentives for certain behaviors, and to manage the flow of notional revenue to the IT organization (ITO). They are invaluable to the SOA business case. This article examines several such models.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-pub.com/articles/details.asp?ID=6914

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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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