AutoWebS: um Ambiente para Modelagem e Geração Automática de ServiçosWeb Semânticos

Typically Web services contain only syntactic information that describes their interfaces. Due to the lack of semantic descriptions of the Web services, service composition becomes a difficult task. To solve this problem, Web services can exploit the use of ontologies for the semantic definition of service s interface, thus facilitating the automation of discovering, publication, mediation, invocation, and composition of services. However, ontology languages, such as OWL-S, have constructs that are not easy to understand, even for Web developers, and the existing tools that support their use contains many details that make them difficult to manipulate. This paper presents a MDD tool called AutoWebS (Automatic Generation of Semantic Web Services) to develop OWL-S semantic Web services. AutoWebS uses an approach based on UML profiles and model transformations for automatic generation of Web services and their semantic description. AutoWebS offers an environment that provides many features required to model, implement, compile, and deploy semantic Web services

Visual IMML: um perfil UML para a modelagem de interfaces de usuário

The software development processes proposed by the most recent approaches in Software Engineering make use old models. UML was proposed as the standard language for modeling. The user interface is an important part of the software and has a fundamental importance to improve its usability. Unfortunately the standard UML does not offer appropriate resources to model user interfaces. Some proposals have already been proposed to solve this problem: some authors have been using models in the development of interfaces (Model Based Development) and some proposals to extend UML have been elaborated. But none of them considers the theoretical perspective presented by the semiotic engineering, that considers that, through the system, the designer should be able to communicate to the user what he can do, and how to use the system itself. This work presents Visual IMML, an UML Profile that emphasizes the aspects of the semiotic engineering. This Profile is based on IMML, that is a declarative textual language. The Visual IMML is a proposal that aims to improve the specification process by using a visual modeling (using diagrams) language. It proposes a new set of modeling elements (stereotypes) specifically designed to the specification and documentation of user interfaces, considering the aspects of communication, interaction and functionality in an integrated manner

Influência dos intermediários de distribuição de produtos turísticos no processo de decisão do meio de hospedagem pelo consumidor

This study examines the complex hotel buyer decision process in front of the tourism distribution channels. Its objective is to describe the influence level of the tourism marketing intermediaries, mainly the travel agents and tour operators, over the hotel decision process by the buyer-tourist. The data collection process was done trough a survey with three hundred brazilian tourists hosted in nineteen hotels of Natal, capital of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil. The data analysis was done using some multivariate statistic techniques as correlation analysis, multiple regression analysis, factor analysis and multiple discriminant analysis. The research characterizes the hotel services consumers profile and his trip, and identifying the distribution channels used by them. Furthermore, the research verifies the intermediaries influence exercised over hotel buyer decision process, looking for identify causality relations between the influence level and the buyer profile. Verifies that information about hotels available on internet reduces the probability that this influence can be practiced; however it was possible identifying those consumers considers this information complementary and non-substitutes than the information from intermediaries. The characteristics of the data do not allow indentifying the factors that constraint the intermediaries influence neither identifying discriminant functions of the specific distribution channel choice by consumers. The study concludes that consumers don t agree in have been influenced by intermediaries or don t know if they have, still considering important to consult them and internet doesn t substitute their function as information source

Cartografia da percepção de mês e profissionais sobre a atenção a saúde de crianças/adolescentes soropositivos no município de Natal

This study had as objective to identify to the perception of mothers and professionals of health on the attention to the health of HIV-Positive children/adolescents in the city of Natal-RN. It is a descriptive-exploratory study with quantitative and qualitative approach, carried through in the Giselda Trigueiro Hospital and in the State and Municipal Health Councils in Natal - RN, from march to december of 2005. The sample was composed by 56 participants, 33 mothers of children who use specialized assistance and 23 professionals. Data collection occurred with the application of a half-structuralized interview. Quantitative data were analyzed through descriptive statistics and qualitative data were submitted to content analysis. Prevailing categories in relation to the cartography of the attention to seropositive children and adolescents in Natal were: Organization and dynamics of the attention; Institutional management and human development; Control and prevention; other contexts of attention; relationship/communication team-patient and organization and functioning of the services. The profile epidemiologist of the children, adolescents and of the people/mothers, who take care of them with HIV/Aids, followed the evolution of the epidemic in the country and the world. It was verified that mothers need care and information; however they make a positive evaluation of the attendance they receive. It was also observed many gaps in the services of assistance, in which the researched group was attended, beyond imperfections in the communication between health professionals and users. The professionals recognize the advances that the politics represent for the assistance of people with Aids; however feel themselves limited by the precariousness of the system and the partner-economic conditions of the people. According to these data, it can be verified great challenges to go through in the context of integrality of the assistance to HIV positive children and adolescents in the city of Natal and in the improvement of the communication in the institution of reference

Influência dos intermediários de distribuição de produtos turísticos no processo de decisão do meio de hospedagem pelo consumidor

This study examines the complex hotel buyer decision process in front of the tourism distribution channels. Its objective is to describe the influence level of the tourism marketing intermediaries, mainly the travel agents and tour operators, over the hotel decision process by the buyer-tourist. The data collection process was done trough a survey with three hundred brazilian tourists hosted in nineteen hotels of Natal, capital of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil. The data analysis was done using some multivariate statistic techniques as correlation analysis, multiple regression analysis, factor analysis and multiple discriminant analysis. The research characterizes the hotel services consumers profile and his trip, and identifying the distribution channels used by them. Furthermore, the research verifies the intermediaries influence exercised over hotel buyer decision process, looking for identify causality relations between the influence level and the buyer profile. Verifies that information about hotels available on internet reduces the probability that this influence can be practiced; however it was possible identifying those consumers considers this information complementary and non-substitutes than the information from intermediaries. The characteristics of the data do not allow indentifying the factors that constraint the intermediaries influence neither identifying discriminant functions of the specific distribution channel choice by consumers. The study concludes that consumers don t agree in have been influenced by intermediaries or don t know if they have, still considering important to consult them and internet doesn t substitute their function as information source

Um ambiente para especificação e execução AD-HOC de processos de negócio baseados em serviços Web

Recently the focus given to Web Services and Semantic Web technologies has provided the development of several research projects in different ways to addressing the Web services composition issue. Meanwhile, the challenge of creating an environment that provides the specification of an abstract business process and that it is automatically implemented by a composite service in a dynamic way is considered a currently open problem. WSDL and BPEL provided by industry support only manual service composition because they lack needed semantics so that Web services are discovered, selected and combined by software agents. Services ontology provided by Semantic Web enriches the syntactic descriptions of Web services to facilitate the automation of tasks, such as discovery and composition. This work presents an environment for specifying and ad-hoc executing Web services-based business processes, named WebFlowAH. The WebFlowAH employs common domain ontology to describe both Web services and business processes. It allows processes specification in terms of users goals or desires that are expressed based on the concepts of such common domain ontology. This approach allows processes to be specified in an abstract high level way, unburdening the user from the underline details needed to effectively run the process workflow

Desenvolvimento de um middleware para comunicação via web services e sua aplicação em sistemas de aquisição de dados industriais

The control of industrial processes has become increasingly complex due to variety of factory devices, quality requirement and market competition. Such complexity requires a large amount of data to be treated by the three levels of process control: field devices, control systems and management softwares. To use data effectively in each one of these levels is extremely important to industry. Many of today s industrial computer systems consist of distributed software systems written in a wide variety of programming languages and developed for specific platforms, so, even more companies apply a significant investment to maintain or even re-write their systems for different platforms. Furthermore, it is rare that a software system works in complete isolation. In industrial automation is common that, software had to interact with other systems on different machines and even written in different languages. Thus, interoperability is not just a long-term challenge, but also a current context requirement of industrial software production. This work aims to propose a middleware solution for communication over web service and presents an user case applying the solution developed to an integrated system for industrial data capture , allowing such data to be available simplified and platformindependent across the network

Um framework de agentes de recomendação para sistemas Web

The World Wide Web has been consolidated over the last years as a standard platform to provide software systems in the Internet. Nowadays, a great variety of user applications are available on the Web, varying from corporate applications to the banking domain, or from electronic commerce to the governmental domain. Given the quantity of information available and the quantity of users dealing with their services, many Web systems have sought to present recommendations of use as part of their functionalities, in order to let the users to have a better usage of the services available, based on their profile, history navigation and system use. In this context, this dissertation proposes the development of an agent-based framework that offers recommendations for users of Web systems. It involves the conception, design and implementation of an object-oriented framework. The framework agents can be plugged or unplugged in a non-invasive way in existing Web applications using aspect-oriented techniques. The framework is evaluated through its instantiation to three different Web systems

Certificação de composições de serviços web semânticos

This thesis presents a certification method for semantic web services compositions which aims to statically ensure its functional correctness. Certification method encompasses two dimensions of verification, termed base and functional dimensions. Base dimension concerns with the verification of application correctness of the semantic web service in the composition, i.e., to ensure that each service invocation given in the composition comply with its respective service definition. The certification of this dimension exploits the semantic compatibility between the invocation arguments and formal parameters of the semantic web service. Functional dimension aims to ensure that the composition satisfies a given specification expressed in the form of preconditions and postconditions. This dimension is formalized by a Hoare logic based calculus. Partial correctness specifications involving compositions of semantic web services can be derived from the deductive system proposed. Our work is also characterized by exploiting the use of a fragment of description logic, i.e., ALC, to express the partial correctness specifications. In order to operationalize the proposed certification method, we developed a supporting environment for defining the semantic web services compositions as well as to conduct the certification process. The certification method were experimentally evaluated by applying it in three different proof concepts. These proof concepts enabled to broadly evaluate the method certification

Cloud query manager: uso de web semântica para evitar o problema de aprisionamento em IaaS

Cloud computing can be defined as a distributed computational model by through resources (hardware, storage, development platforms and communication) are shared, as paid services accessible with minimal management effort and interaction. A great benefit of this model is to enable the use of various providers (e.g a multi-cloud architecture) to compose a set of services in order to obtain an optimal configuration for performance and cost. However, the multi-cloud use is precluded by the problem of cloud lock-in. The cloud lock-in is the dependency between an application and a cloud platform. It is commonly addressed by three strategies: (i) use of intermediate layer that stands to consumers of cloud services and the provider, (ii) use of standardized interfaces to access the cloud, or (iii) use of models with open specifications. This paper outlines an approach to evaluate these strategies. This approach was performed and it was found that despite the advances made by these strategies, none of them actually solves the problem of lock-in cloud. In this sense, this work proposes the use of Semantic Web to avoid cloud lock-in, where RDF models are used to specify the features of a cloud, which are managed by SPARQL queries. In this direction, this work: (i) presents an evaluation model that quantifies the problem of cloud lock-in, (ii) evaluates the cloud lock-in from three multi-cloud solutions and three cloud platforms, (iii) proposes using RDF and SPARQL on management of cloud resources, (iv) presents the cloud Query Manager (CQM), an SPARQL server that implements the proposal, and (v) comparing three multi-cloud solutions in relation to CQM on the response time and the effectiveness in the resolution of cloud lock-in.

Qualidade do serviço de informação digital :um estudo exploratório em web sites de Programas de Pós-Graduação

This dissertation of Mestrado investigated the performance and quality of web sites. The target of the research is the proposal of an integrated model of evaluation of services of digital information in web educational sites. The universe of the research was constituted by eighteen Brazilian Universities that offer after-graduation courses, in the levels of mestrado and doutorado in the area of Engineering of Production. The adopted methodology was a descriptive and exploratory research, using the technique of systematic comment and focus group, for the collection of the data, using itself changeable independent dependents and, through the application of two instruments of research. The analysis protocol was the instrument adopted for evaluation and attainment of qualitative results. E the analysis grating was applied for evaluation and attainment of the quantitative results. The qualitative results had identified to the lack of standardization of web sites, under the attributes of content, hierarchy of information, design of the colors and letters. It of accessibility for carriers of auditory and visual special necessities was observed inexistence, as well as the lack of convergence of medias and assistivas technologies. The language of the sites also was evaluated and all present Portuguese only language. The general result demonstrated in grafico and tables with classification of the Universities, predominating the Good note As for the quantitative results, analysis method ed was estatistico, in order to get the descriptive and inferencial result between the dependent and independent variaveis. How much a category of analysis of the services of the evaluated sites, was found it props up and the index generality weighed. These results had served of base for ranking of existence or inexistence the Universities, how much of the information of services in its web sites. In analysis inferencial the result of the test of correlation or association of the independent variaveis (level, concept of the CAPES and period of existence of the program) with the caracteristicas, called was gotten categories of services. For this analysis the estatisticos methods had been used: coefficient of Spearman and the Test of Fisher. But the category you discipline of the Program of Mestrado presented significance with variavel independent and concept of the CAPES. Main conclusion of this study it was ausencia of satandardization o how much to the subjective aspects, design, hierarchy of information navigability and content precision and the accessibility inexistence and convergence. How much to the quantitative aspects, the information services offered by web sites of the evaluated Universities, still they do not present a satisfactory and including quality. Absence of strategies, adoption of tools web, techniques of institucional marketing and services that become them more interactive, navigable is perceived and with aggregate value

Uma plataforma de integração de middleware para computação ubíqua

One of the current challenges of Ubiquitous Computing is the development of complex applications, those are more than simple alarms triggered by sensors or simple systems to configure the environment according to user preferences. Those applications are hard to develop since they are composed by services provided by different middleware and it is needed to know the peculiarities of each of them, mainly the communication and context models. This thesis presents OpenCOPI, a platform which integrates various services providers, including context provision middleware. It provides an unified ontology-based context model, as well as an environment that enable easy development of ubiquitous applications via the definition of semantic workflows that contains the abstract description of the application. Those semantic workflows are converted into concrete workflows, called execution plans. An execution plan consists of a workflow instance containing activities that are automated by a set of Web services. OpenCOPI supports the automatic Web service selection and composition, enabling the use of services provided by distinct middleware in an independent and transparent way. Moreover, this platform also supports execution adaptation in case of service failures, user mobility and degradation of services quality. The validation of OpenCOPI is performed through the development of case studies, specifically applications of the oil industry. In addition, this work evaluates the overhead introduced by OpenCOPI and compares it with the provided benefits, and the efficiency of OpenCOPI s selection and adaptation mechanism

Uma estratégia dirigida a modelos e baseada em linguagem de descrição arquitetural para linhas de produtos de software

Model-oriented strategies have been used to facilitate products customization in the software products lines (SPL) context and to generate the source code of these derived products through variability management. Most of these strategies use an UML (Unified Modeling Language)-based model specification. Despite its wide application, the UML-based model specification has some limitations such as the fact that it is essentially graphic, presents deficiencies regarding the precise description of the system architecture semantic representation, and generates a large model, thus hampering the visualization and comprehension of the system elements. In contrast, architecture description languages (ADLs) provide graphic and textual support for the structural representation of architectural elements, their constraints and interactions. This thesis introduces ArchSPL-MDD, a model-driven strategy in which models are specified and configured by using the LightPL-ACME ADL. Such strategy is associated to a generic process with systematic activities that enable to automatically generate customized source code from the product model. ArchSPLMDD strategy integrates aspect-oriented software development (AOSD), modeldriven development (MDD) and SPL, thus enabling the explicit modeling as well as the modularization of variabilities and crosscutting concerns. The process is instantiated by the ArchSPL-MDD tool, which supports the specification of domain models (the focus of the development) in LightPL-ACME. The ArchSPL-MDD uses the Ginga Digital TV middleware as case study. In order to evaluate the efficiency, applicability, expressiveness, and complexity of the ArchSPL-MDD strategy, a controlled experiment was carried out in order to evaluate and compare the ArchSPL-MDD tool with the GingaForAll tool, which instantiates the process that is part of the GingaForAll UML-based strategy. Both tools were used for configuring the products of Ginga SPL and generating the product source code

Cloud Integrator: uma plataforma para composição de serviços em ambientes de computação em nuvem

With the advance of the Cloud Computing paradigm, a single service offered by a cloud platform may not be enough to meet all the application requirements. To fulfill such requirements, it may be necessary, instead of a single service, a composition of services that aggregates services provided by different cloud platforms. In order to generate aggregated value for the user, this composition of services provided by several Cloud Computing platforms requires a solution in terms of platforms integration, which encompasses the manipulation of a wide number of noninteroperable APIs and protocols from different platform vendors. In this scenario, this work presents Cloud Integrator, a middleware platform for composing services provided by different Cloud Computing platforms. Besides providing an environment that facilitates the development and execution of applications that use such services, Cloud Integrator works as a mediator by providing mechanisms for building applications through composition and selection of semantic Web services that take into account metadata about the services, such as QoS (Quality of Service), prices, etc. Moreover, the proposed middleware platform provides an adaptation mechanism that can be triggered in case of failure or quality degradation of one or more services used by the running application in order to ensure its quality and availability. In this work, through a case study that consists of an application that use services provided by different cloud platforms, Cloud Integrator is evaluated in terms of the efficiency of the performed service composition, selection and adaptation processes, as well as the potential of using this middleware in heterogeneous computational clouds scenarios

Uma máquina de redução de grafos para serviços web

Web services are software accessible via the Internet that provide functionality to be used by applications. Today, it is natural to reuse third-party services to compose new services. This process of composition can occur in two styles, called orchestration and choreography. A choreography represents a collaboration between services which know their partners in the composition, to achieve the service s desired functionality. On the other hand, an orchestration have a central process (the orchestrator) that coordinates all application operations. Our work is placed in this latter context, by proposing an abstract model for running service orchestrations. For this purpose, a graph reduction machine will be defined for the implementation of service orchestrations specified in a variant of the PEWS composition language. Moreover, a prototype of this machine (in Java) is built as a proof of concept