JWSR, Volume 5, number 4, October-December 2008
Official Publication of the Information Resources Management Association
Published: Quarterly in Print and Electronically
ISSN: 1545-7362
EISSN: 1546-5004


EDITORIAL PREFACE:

“Business Process Management and Services Discovery”

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

This issue of the International Journal of Web Services Research (JWSR) collects five papers on various topics of Web services.

The first article is titled Karma2: Provenance Management for Data Driven Workflows. Simmhan, Plale, and Gannon address the issue of how to record uniform and usable provenance metadata of a workflow, which meets the domain needs while minimizing the modification burden on the service authors and the performance overhead on the workflow engine and the services. They propose a framework that generates discrete provenance activities during the lifecycle of a workflow execution that can be aggregated to form data and process provenance graphs.

RESEARCH PAPERS

PAPER ONE:

“Karma2: Provenance Management for Data-Driven Workflows ”

Simmhan, Yogesh L.; Plale, Beth; Gannon, Dennis

The increasing ability for the sciences to sense the world around us is resulting in a growing need for data driven e-Science applications that are under the control of workflows composed of services on the Grid. The focus of our work is on provenance collection for these workflows that are necessary to validate the workflow and to determine quality of generated data products. The challenge we address is to record uniform and usable provenance metadata that meets the domain needs while minimizing the modification burden on the service authors and the performance overhead on the workflow engine and the services. The framework is based on generating discrete provenance activities during the lifecycle of a workflow execution that can be aggregated to form complex data and process provenance graphs that can span across workflows. The implementation uses a loosely coupled publish-subscribe architecture for propagating these activities, and the capabilities of the system satisfy the needs of detailed provenance collection. A performance evaluation of a prototype finds a minimal performance overhead (in the range of 1% for an eight-service workflow using 271 data products).

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-global.com/articles/details.asp?ID=8011

PAPER TWO:

“Mining and Improving Composite Web Services Recovery Mechanisms”

Bhiri, Sami;Gaaloul, Walid;Godart, Claude

Ensuring composite services reliability is a challenging problem. Indeed, due to the inherent autonomy and heterogeneity of Web services, it is difficult to predict and reason about the behavior of the overall composite service (CS). Generally, previous approaches develop, using their modeling formalisms, a set of techniques to analyze the composition model and check ?correctness? properties. Although powerful, these approaches may fail in some cases in order to ensure CS-reliable executions, even if they formally validate its composition model. This is because properties specified in the studied composition model remain assumptions that may not coincide with the reality (i.e., effective CS executions). Sharing the same issue, we present a reengineering approach that starts from CS executions log to improve its recovery mechanisms. Basically, we propose a set of mining techniques to discover CS transactional behavior from an event-based log. Then, based on this mining step, we use a set of rules in order to improve its reliability.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-global.com/articles/details.asp?ID=8012

PAPER THREE:

“Business Process Control-Flow Complexity: Metric, Evaluation, and Validation”

Cardoso, Jorge

Organizations are increasingly faced with the challenge of managing business processes, workflows, and recently, Web processes. One important aspect of business processes that has been overlooked is their complexity. High complexity in processes may result in poor understandability, errors, defects, and exceptions, leading processes to need more time to develop, test, and maintain. Therefore, excessive complexity should be avoided. Business process measurement is the task of empirically and objectively assigning numbers to the properties of business processes in such a way so as to describe them. Desirable attributes to study and measure include complexity, cost, maintainability, and reliability. In our work, we will focus on investigating process complexity. We present and describe a metric to analyze the control-flow complexity of business processes. The metric is evaluated in terms of weyukers properties in order to guarantee that it qualifies as good and comprehensive. To test the validity of the metric, we describe the experiment we have carried out for empirically validating the metric.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-global.com/articles/details.asp?ID=8013

PAPER FOUR:

“Result Refinement in Web Services Retrieval Based on Multiple Instances Learning”

Zou, Yanzhen; Zhang, Lu; Li, Yan; Xie, Bing; Mei, Han

Web services retrieval is a critical step for reusing existing services in the SOA paradigm. In the UDDI registry, traditional category-based approaches have been used to locate candidate services. However, these approaches usually achieve relatively low precision because some candidate Web Services in the result set cannot provide actually suitable operations for users. In this article, we present a new approach to improve this kind of category-based Web Services retrieval process that can refine the coarse matching results step by step. The refinement is based on the idea that operation specification is very important to service reuse. Therefore, a Web Service is investigated via multiple instances view in our approach, which indicates that a service is labeled as positive if and only if at least one operation provided by this service is usable to the user. Otherwise, it is labeled as negative. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can increase the retrieval precision to a certain extent after one or two rounds of refinement.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://www.igi-global.com/articles/details.asp?ID=8014

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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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