Protecting web services with service oriented traceback architecture

Service oriented architecture (SOA) is a way of reorganizing software infrastructure into a set of service abstracts. In the area of applying SOA to Web service security, there have been some well defined security dimensions. However, current Web security systems, like WS-Security are not efficient enough to handle distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Our new approach, service oriented traceback architecture (SOTA), provides a framework to be able to identify the source of an attack. This is accomplished by deploying our defence system at distributed routers, in order to examine the incoming SOAP messages and place our own SOAP header. By this method, we can then use the new SOAP header information, to traceback through the network the source of the attack. According to our experimental performance evaluations, we find that SOTA is quite scaleable, simple and quite effective at identifying the source.

Towards extended machine translation model for next generation world wide web

In this paper, we proposed a Data Translation model which potentially is a major promising web service of the next generation world wide web. This technique is somehow analogy to the technique of traditional machine translation but it is far beyond what we understand about machine translation in the past and nowadays in terms of the scope and the contents. To illustrate the new concept of web services based data translation, a multilingual machine translation electronic dictionary system and its web services based model including generic services, multilingual translation services are presented. This proposed data translation model aims at achieving better web services in easiness, convenience, efficiency, and higher accuracy, scalability, self-learning, self-adapting.

End-user control in web-based electronic services : a case study

This paper reports a case study of end-user control in delivery of Web-based electronic services. The case study concentrates the adoption of a Web-based electronic system being implemented in processing student’s admission applications on a Web site. The end-user’s control interface provides information on the detail existing in the Web-based electronic service. This insight into end-user synthesis in developing effective control in Web service environment relates to ease of use in doing the task. To assume the leverage of end-user control strictly on the basis of the Web service usage would limit the purpose of understanding. Rather it is suggested that it would be better to develop an approach to study the end-user ease of use interface in doing the task with the user’s perception towards Web-based interactivity.

Agents for invocation of web services

Web services are becoming popular and widely accepted on the Internet. UDDI is the standard for publishing and discovery of web services. In this paper, we investigate semantics description of web services based on domain ontology; based on this language, we propose an architecture for invoking agents to consume services within the UDDI registry. The semantics service description language together with agent creation
architecture provides a new way to discover and utilise published web services. This method is flexible and extendable to accomplish complex web service requests.

The research and development of ChemGrid in CGSP

With the rapid development of computing technologies and network technologies, Grid technology has emerged as the solution for high-performance computing. Recently, the grid of orient-services has become a hot issue in this research area. In this paper, we propose an architecture of ChemGrid in CGSP (China Grid Support Platform). The effectiveness of the proposed architecture is demonstrated by an example which is developed as a Web service based on CGSP; the Web service is used for searching elements in the periodic table. An improvement of the user interface for applications is proposed in order to obtain results interactively. Finally, an extension of ChemGrid is discussed in order to integrate different types of resources and provide specialized services.

Publishing dynamic state changes of resources through state aware WSDL

A common architecture in today's development of distributed systems is the service-oriented architecture (SOA) implemented using Web services. Until recently, it was difficult to build a SOA based grid/distributed system using Web services due to the inability to learn the state of services. The state of a Web service could only be accessed through specialized clients and/or services. Should the specialized client or service fail, the state can't be accessed. This paper shows the innovative resources via Web instances (RVWI) framework. RVWI grants to web services the ability to show the state of dynamic resources in their WSDL. This was achieved via software components called connectors which watch for any changes in a resource and updates the web service. The significance of this report is the support for resources which can change state between requests and the innovation is the improvement of state updates between the service and discovery services.

Delivering categorized news items using RSS feeds and web services

In the past decade the massive growth of the Internet brought huge changes in the way humans live their daily life; however, the biggest concern with rapid growth of digital information is how to efficiently manage and filter unwanted data. In this paper, we propose a method for managing RSS feeds from various news websites. A Web service was developed to provide filtered news items extracted from RSS feeds and these were categorized based on classical text categorization algorithms. A client application consuming this Web service retrieves and displays such filtered information. A prototype was implemented using Rapidminer 4.3 as a data mining tool and SVM as a classification algorithm. Experimental results suggest that the proposed method is effective and saves a significant amount of user processing time.

Grid transaction management and an efficient development kit

Grid transaction management aims at guaranteeing the system consistency in face of various failures in Grid environments. In this paper, we propose a Grid transaction service (GridTS) and design coordination mechanisms for atomic, long-lived and real-time Grid transactions respectively, based on the features of Grid environments. GridTS has the following three advantages. Firstly, it separates the transaction management unit with transaction coordination algorithms so that it can coordinate the above three categories of transactions in a uniform way. Secondly, GridTS can dynamically generate compensating transactions during the long-lived transaction processing. Finally, it provides the programming interfaces similar to traditional distributed transactions. Moreover, we implement a Grid transaction development kit (GridTDK) for application programmers based on our GridTS. We evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of GridTS by developing an application system using our GridTDK. ©2012 CRL Publishing Ltd.

Web services for things

In this chapter, we introduce an interesting type of Web services for "things". Existing Web services are applications across the Web that perform functions mainly to satisfy users' social needs "from simple requests to complicated business processes". Throughout history, humans have accumulated lots of knowledge about diverse things in the physical world. However, human knowledge about the world has not been fully used on the current Web which focuses on social communication; the prospect of interacting with things other than people on the future Web is very exciting. The purpose of Web services for "things" is to provide a tunnel for people to interact with things in the physical world from anywhere through the Internet. Extending the service targets from people to anything challenges the existing techniques of Web services from three aspects: first, an unified interface should be provided for people to describe the needs of things; then basic components should be designed in a Web service for things; finally, implementation of a Web service for things should be optimized when mashing up multiple sub Web services. We tackle the challenges faced by a Web service for things and make the best use of human knowledge from the following aspects. We first define a context of things as an unified interface. The users' description (semantic context) and sensors (sensing context) are two channels for acquiring the context of things. Then, we define three basic modules for a Web service for things: ontology Web services to unify the context of things, machine readable domain knowledge Web services and event report Web services (such as weather report services and sensor event report services). Meanwhile, we develop a Thing-REST framework to optimally mashup structures to loosely couple the three basic modules. We employ a smart plant watering service application to demonstrate all the techniques we have developed.

Keyword search for building service-based systems

With the fast growth of applications of service-oriented architecture (SOA) in software engineering, there has been a rapid increase in demand for building service-based systems (SBSs) by composing existing Web services. Finding appropriate component services to compose is a key step in the SBS engineering process. Existing approaches require that system engineers have detailed knowledge of SOA techniques which is often too demanding. To address this issue, we propose KS3 (Keyword Search for Service-based Systems), a novel approach that integrates and automates the system planning, service discovery and service selection operations for building SBSs based on keyword search. KS3 assists system engineers without detailed knowledge of SOA techniques in searching for component services to build SBSs by typing a few keywords that represent the tasks of the SBSs with quality constraints and optimisation goals for system quality, e.g., reliability, throughput and cost. KS3 offers a new paradigm for SBS engineering that can significantly save the time and effort during the system engineering process. We conducted large-scale experiments using a real-world Web service dataset to demonstrate the practicality, effectiveness and efficiency of KS3.

State aware WSDL

With the recent innovations in stateful web services, they are now being used to support the construction of distributed systems using software as a service. While the state of web services is preserved, the state is still hidden from clients thus searches for both functionality and state remains a two step process. Proposed in this report is the Resources Via Web Instances (RVWI) framework. RVWI grants to web services the ability to include their state and characteristics in their WSDL. This was done by allowing snapshots (instances) of a web service to be listed in the WSDL of the web service. Instances were utilised as they contain state and characteristic information directly from the web service. Thanks to the inclusion of state and characteristics, queries for web services can now be carried out on the availability of a web service and the 'dimensions' of resources..

Guest editorial : In Journal of networks, v7 n.6

This special issue mainly focuses on the timely topic of “Data and Security in Web Service”. More specially, from the perspective of service construction, the future Web service should address issues such as how to construct an intelligent service which can effectively perceive the individual behavior, identify and satisfy individual requirements. On the other hand, from the perspective of service utilization, in the dynamic environment, Web services should address issues such as how to utilizing security-related techniques. In this JNW special issue, we select and edit 6 most relevant papers with higher reviewer scores from 16 submissions, which give effective discussion about Web service management methodologies from different perspective.

A suite of visual languages for model-driven development of statistical surveys and services

Objective: To provide statistician end users with a visual language environment for complex statistical survey design and implementation. Methods: We have developed, in conjunction with professional statisticians, the Statistical Design Language (SDL), an integrated suite of visual languages aimed at supporting the process of designing statistical surveys, and its support environment, SDLTool. SDL comprises five diagrammatic notations: survey diagrams, data diagrams, technique diagrams, task diagrams and process diagrams. SDLTool provides an integrated environment supporting design, coordination, execution, sharing and publication of complex statistical survey techniques as web services. SDLTool allows association of model components with survey artefacts, including data sets, metadata, and statistical package analysis scripts, with the ability to execute elements of the survey design model to implement survey analysis. Results: We describe three evaluations of SDL and SDLTool: use of the notation by expert statistician to design and execute surveys; useability evaluation of the environment; and assessment of several generated statistical analysis web services. Conclusion: We have shown the effectiveness of SDLTool for supporting statistical survey design and implementation. Practice implications: We have developed a more effective approach to supporting statisticians in their survey design work.

A visual language and environment for enterprise system modelling and automation

Objective: We want to support enterprise service modelling and generation using a more end user-friendly metaphor than current approaches, which fail to scale to large organisations with key issues of "cobweb" and "labyrinth" problems and large numbers of hidden dependencies. Method: We present and evaluate an integrated visual approach for business process modelling using a novel tree-based overlay structure that effectively mitigate complexity problems. A tree-overlay based visual notation (EML) and its integrated support environment (MaramaEML) supplement and integrate with existing solutions. Complex business architectures are represented as service trees and business processes are modelled as process overlay sequences on the service trees. Results: MaramaEML integrates EML and BPMN to provide complementary, high-level business service modelling and supports automatic BPEL code generation from the graphical representations to realise web services implementing the specified processes. It facilitates generated service validation using an integrated LTSA checker and provides a distortion-based fisheye and zooming function to enhance complex diagram navigation. Evaluations of EML show its effectiveness. Conclusions: We have successfully developed and evaluated a novel tree-based metaphor for business process modelling and enterprise service generation. Practice implications: a more user-friendly modelling approach and support tool for business end users.

Interoperable and transparent dynamic deployment of web services for service oriented grids

Dynamic deployment of Web services is a term used frequently when describing the selection and deployment of a service to a grid host. Although current grid systems (such as Globus) provide dynamic deployment, the requirements of the service being deployed are not considered. Therefore truly dynamic deployment cannot be achieved as the services deployed are restricted to the grid system used. We present a dynamic deployment mechanism as part of self configuration in a service oriented grid environment. The dynamic deployment mechanism takes the requirements of the service into consideration, including parameters such as the operating system required to execute the service, the required software libraries, any additional required software packages, price and Quality of Service (QoS) parameters.