confidential 2009-2010 sanpad research capacity initiative (rci) presentation - choreography of...

confidential

2009-2010 SANPAD Research Capacity Initiative (RCI) Presentation - Choreography of Intelligent e-Services

Wonga L. Ntshinga

Date: 7 – 12 September 2009

Supervisor: Prof. S. Ojo (Tshwane University of Technology, Faculty of ICT)

Co-Supervisor: Dr. E. Ngassam (SAP Research CEC Pretoria/SAP Meraka UTD)

Wonga’s Contact details: [email protected] 999 9113Doctor Technologiae: Computer Science and Data ProcessingSoftware DevelopmentTshwane University of Technology (TUT)

© SAP 2008 / confidential

Presentation Structure

Introduction

Dynamic Business Networks

Challenge of Enterprise

SOA

Web Services and Ontologies

Composition

Orchestration and Choreography

Choreography

Proposed IeSs

The Study

Problem Statement

Objectives

Research Questions

Research Roadmap: Choreography of IeSs

Benefits of research

Main outcome of the study

Importance of this study: Theoretically and Practically

Implementation planning

Literature review

Conclusion

Ethical considerations

References


Introduction: Increasing competitive pressures

The market has imposed a strain upon many companies in finding innovative ways to cope with the increasing competitive pressures (i.e. to reduce costs, increase sales, and improve the quality of products and services).

Moreover, companies must deliver on time and deliver good quality products!


Introduction: Dynamic Business Networks

It was not long time ago that these markets were controlled by a few traditional enterprises (i.e. interaction amongst participants was manual and awkward), but these traditional enterprises are being replaced by dynamic business networks, where each participant offers to other participants specialised products and services (Dos Santos and Madeira, 2006:57; Metzer, 2007:7).

The interaction amongst these enterprises is

known as interoperability; hence it must be

convenient.

interoperability between enterprises advances

innovation, competition and value co-creation between participants which leads to

mass market diffusion


Introduction: Challenge of Enterprises

The challenge, however, on many enterprises is how do they (enterprises) efficiently and effectively select and integrate heterogeneous services.

These systems are often diverse, extent multiple organizational boundaries and must network and operate effectively while still maintaining their individual autonomy.

Corporate entities are often not prepared to hand over control of their business processes to their integration partners. Thus, there is a need to define and agree to, jointly, the rules of participation within collaborations.


Introduction: SOA

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is considered as the most affordable solution to promote interoperability (Fluegge et al., 2006:40). SOA is the computing prototype that makes use of services as essential elements for developing applications.


Introduction: Web Services and Ontologies

The realisation of SOA for implementation purposes necessitates a variety of components such as Web Services, Ontologies, and even the basic components/applications necessary for the deployment and implementation of interoperable applications.

Web Services OntologiesThey can be very large and complex. Hence building and maintaining them is costly and time-consuming

Web Services and Ontologies are some of the methods to achieve this interoperability. Web services and Ontology are suitable influential tools for the accomplishment of distributed applications over the Internet (Meng and Arbab, 2007:352; Moodley and Chuntharpursat, 2007).


Introduction: Composition

The method of Web Services has a barrier of performance and trust. Web Services are also static, since the process model is created manually and the services are bound at design time. The composition of Web Services still lingers as a complex task, and the automatic composition of Web Services is a key problem.


Introduction: Orchestration and Choreography

There are two forms of service composition which describe two facets of creating business processes. They are orchestration and choreography. (Dos Santos and Madeira, 2006; Fluegge et al., 2006; Meng and Arbab, 2007).

Orchestration Choreography

All interactions that are part of a business process

must be described.

Deals with the interaction between all the participants.

More collaborative and addresses the interactions that implement the collaboration among services.

Tracks the message sequences among multiple enterprises rather than a specific business process that a single enterprise executes.


Introduction: Choreography

Choreography, as a form of service composition, offers a means by which these rules of participation can thus be defined and agreed to by entities.


Introduction: Proposed Intelligent e-Service (IeS)

The proposed intelligent e-Service (IeS) will be a secured electronic enterprise service that is autonomous, deployable, discoverable, pro-active, re-active, interoperable, context-aware, re-usable, extensible and modifiable.

IeS

This intelligent e-Service will operate and interact in an enterprise in order to equip each enterprise with the necessary intelligence and ability to

comprehend other enterprises/e-Services.


Presentation Structure

Introduction

Dynamic Business Networks

Challenge of Enterprises

SOA

Web Services and Ontologies

Composition

Orchestration and Choreography

Choreography

Proposed IeSs

The Study

Problem Statement

Objectives

Research Questions

Research Roadmap: Choreography of IeSs

Benefits of research

Main outcome of the study

Importance of this study: Theoretically and Practically

Implementation planning

Literature review

Conclusion

Ethical considerations

References


The study: Problem Statement

The research problem identified for this study is that the methods being employed to promote interoperability amongst multiple enterprises do not equip each enterprise/service with the necessary intelligence and ability to comprehend other enterprises.

The study will thus propose the composition of intelligent e-Services in a manner which promotes the interoperability of autonomous enterprises. It is anticipated that a framework that defines and supports the composition of intelligent e-Services will be formed.


The study: Objectives

The four primary objectives of the study are to:

investigate the state of the art in the characterisation of e-Services, Web Services, and Semantic Web Services characterisation;

provide an appropriate definition and characterisation of an intelligent e-Service (IeS);

design and develop a framework that will facilitate the choreography of IeSs; and

model and evaluate a real-life business scenario using IeSs.


The study: Research Questions

In order to address this research problem, the study will attempt to answer the following research questions.

What is an intelligent e-Service (IeS), and what are the fundamental

attributes/properties that make up an IeS?

What is the appropriate approach for modeling the choreography of IeSs?

What is an appropriate technical environment for facilitating the choreography of IeSs?

How can a real-life business scenario be modelled and applied using the choreography of IeSs?


The Research Roadmap: Choreography of IeS

Web Servicese-Services Semantic Web Services

Intelligent e-Service (IeS)

IeS

IeSIeS

IeS

IeS

IeS IeS

IeS

Framework for the Choreography of Intelligent e-Services

Implementation of the framework using existing tools (ebXML, WSMX, WSMO, OWL, etc...)

Real-life Application: e-Mentoring

Representation of e-Mentoring as components

(eS, WS, SWS, IeS)

Modeling e-Mentoring as a choreographed set of IeSs

Implementation of an IeS-based e-Mentoring

scenario

Evaluation of the implemented IeS-based e-

Mentoring scenario

Choreography of Intelligent e-Services

Papazoglou and Georgakopoulos (2003:26) define services[1] as self-describing, open components that support the rapid, low-cost composition of distributed applications (i.e. applications deployed onto several computers). [1] This refers to ICT-based services.

According to Meng and Arbab (2007:346), Web Services are deemed to be “self-contained, self-describing, modular applications that can be published, located, and invoked across the web”.

The aim of the Semantic Web is to solve the general problem of how to locate/discover and integrate information without human intervention (referred to as automatic Web Service composition and interoperation) (Horrocks, 2008; Mcllraith et al., 2001)


Main outcomes of this study

The study will have the following outcomes:

a model for the characterisation of intelligent e-services; a framework that supports the composition of an intelligent e-Service; a prototype implementation of the framework as a proof of concept; and an application of the prototype using e-mentoring as a reference

scenario.


Importance of this study: Theoretically

Sound and complete study on the choreography of intelligent e-Services that will enable the interactions among enterprises/services to realise their goal.

Build upon ideas developed by others with regards to interoperability among multiple enterprises, namely the composition of Web Services and the Semantic Web Services.

IeS


Importance of the study: Practically

Contribute towards the formation of a Dynamic Virtual Enterprise (DVE) which makes use of information and communication technologies to take full advantage of the open, worldwide opportunities offered by the Internet and the global economy.

Contribution concerning ICT application/components that could be employed by South African companies to achieve dynamic business networks. The emphasis will be on Small Medium and Micro Enterprises (SMMEs) in South Africa, and more precisely amongst small contractors in the construction industry who are usually in critical need of mentoring services for the growth and sustainability of their businesses.

It is foreseen that the prototype using e-mentoring will enhance access to resources for small contractors in the South African construction industry, leading to an application that could offer asynchronous communication and interoperability between enterprises.

VE represents a set of entities that are geographically distributed and linked by Information Technology (IT) mechanisms to achieve a business goal (Dos Santos and Madeira, 2006:60). DVEs are enterprises that offer dynamic business partners a relationship that is flexible and autonomous; however the relationship is usually short lived (Dos Santos and Madeira, 2006:60).


Implementation Planning

Prepare and get approval for research proposal May 2009 (done)

Chapter One: Introduction July 2009 (ongoing)

Submit to SAICSIT (D Symposium) August 2009

Write paper September 2009

Chapter Two: Literature Review September 2009 (ongoing)

Student Research Symposium (SAICSIT)? October 2009

Chapter Three: IeS Composition October/November 2009

Chapter Four: Framework for the choreography of IeSJanuary-March 2010

Submit and present at a conference April-May 2010

Chapter Five: Application to e-Mentoring April-May 2010

Chapter Six: Evaluation/Empirical Analysis June-July 2010

Chapter Seven: Summary, Conclusion and recommendation August-September 2010

Write journal papers September 2010

Corrections and editing October 2010

Submission End November 2010


Literature Review

According to Paolucci, Kawamura, Payne, and Sycara (2002), the first step towards interoperability is the location of other services that can help concerning the solution of a problem.

The second stage is the composition of a complex service (Paolucci et al., 2002)

Sirin et al. (2003), citing Benatallah et al., claim that a more challenging problem is to compose services dynamically on demand, and this dynamic composition of services needs the location of services based on their capabilities, and the recognition of those services that can be matched together to create a composition.


Literature Review: Web Services

Papazoglou and Georgakopoulos (2003:27) define a Web Service as a particular type of service that is identified by a uniform resource locator (URL), whose services description and transport uses open internet standards.

There are several kinds and functionalities of Web Services, for example information services[1] and e-commerce services[2]; but not all of them have to be advertised (Gekas and Fasli, 2005; Paolucci et al., 2002) [1] Such as financial news

[2] Such as Amazon transactions

According to Sirin et al (2003) the platform and language independent interface of the Web Service allow for the easy mixing of heterogeneous systems.


Literature Review: Web Services

Web languages such as Web Services Description Language (WSDL), Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI), and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP[1]) define standards for service discovery, description and messaging protocols (Papazoglou and Georgakopoulos, 2003; Sirin et al., 2003)

[1] Which is suited for interface-driven application (Foster, Parastatidis, Watson, and McKeown, 2009)

Thus UDDI enables Web Service clients to find candidate services and discover their details (Papazoglou and Georgakopoulos, 2003:27). However, Paolucci et al. (2002), point out that UDDI provides weak search facilities since it only allows a keyword based search of business.

Sirin et al. (2003) argue that there are quite a few different industry efforts to create standards for Web Service composition tasks and that these Web Service standards do not deal with the dynamic composition of existing services.


Literature Review: Ontologies

Horrocks (2008:61) defines ontology as “an engineering artifact, usually a model of (some aspect of) the world; it introduces vocabulary describing various aspects of the domain being modeled and provides an explicit specification of the intended meaning of that vocabulary”. Moodley and Chuntharpursat (2007) define ontology as a recognised specification of concepts and the relationship between concepts in a particular field.


Literature Review: Ontologies

Ontologies, touted as a solution for addressing interoperability (Moodley and Chuntharpursat, 2007), are used in the Semantic Web, an extension of the current web, as an approach to providing extensible vocabularies of terms, each with a well-defined meaning (Horrocks, 2008:61; Sirin et al., 2003).

The aim of the Semantic Web is to solve the general problem of how to locate/discover and integrate information without human intervention (referred to as automatic Web Service composition and interoperation) (Horrocks, 2008; Mcllraith et al., 2001).

Horrocks (2008:59), however, argues that the vision of a Semantic Web is very “ambitious” and that it would have to solve “long-standing research problems in knowledge representation and reasoning, databases, computational linguistics, computer vision, and agent systems”.

While extensive progress has been made in the infrastructure needed to support the Semantic Web, the challenges faced by ontologies is that they can be very large and complex. Hence building and maintaining them is costly and time-consuming (Horrocks, 2008:63).


Conclusion

Services are platform and network independent operations that clients/enterprises or other services invoke.

Services must clearly define their properties in a standard, machine-readable format.

Since services are offered by different enterprises, they must be visible to other enterprises to conduct business.

The presentation has further motivated why choreography should be considered for a study over orchestration as a service composition, indentifying the challenges that enterprises are faced with, for example, heterogeneous services.

This leads onto the proposed study of choreography of an intelligent e-Service to promote interoperability amongst different enterprises/e-Services.

The study will consequently be an empirical research where a formal framework for the interaction and compositional construction of intelligent e-Services will be proposed.

It is expected that the study, which will be a qualitative research, will play an important role in contributing to the formation of Dynamic Virtual Enterprises and/or Virtual Enterprises as an application business scenario.


Ethical Considerations

The researcher will report the findings in a complete and honest fashion, without misrepresenting or intentionally misleading others as to the nature of the findings.


References

DOS SANTOS, I. J. E. G., & MADEIRA, E. R. M. 2006. Applying orchestration and choreography of web services on dynamic virtual marketplaces. International Journal of cooperative information systems, 15(1), 57-85.

FLUEGGE, M., DOS SANTOS, I. J. G., TIZZO, N. P., & MADEIRA, E. R. M. 2006. Challenges and techniques on the road to dynamically compose web services. Acm, 40-47.

FOSTER, I., PARASTATIDIS, S., WATSON, P., & MCKEOWN, M. 2009. How do I model state? Let me count the ways [Electronic Version]. ACM Queue, 7, 54-64. Retrieved 21 April.

GEKAS, J., & FASLI, M. 2005. Automatic web service composition using web connectivity analysis techniques [Electronic Version]. Tech Republic, 1-4. Retrieved 27 January 2009 from http://whitepapers.techrepublic.com.com/abstract.aspx?docid=285816.

HORROCKS, I. 2008. Ontologies and the semantic Web. Communications of the ACM, 51(12), 58-67.

MCLLRAITH, S. A., SON, T. C., & ZENG, H. 2001, 1 May. Mobilizing the semantic web with DAML-enabled Web Services. Paper presented at the Second International Workshop on the Semantic Web, Hongkong, China.

MENG, S., & ARBAB, F. 2007. Web services choreography and orchestration in reo and constraint automata. Acm, 1(14), 346-353.

MOODLEY, D., & CHUNTHARPURSAT, A. 2007. Using ontologies to manage ecological data. [Online]. Available from: Accessed: 6 March 2009.

PAOLUCCI, M., KAWAMURA, T., PAYNE, T. R., & SYCARA, K. 2002. Semantic Matching of Web Services Capabilities. Paper presented at the First International Semantic Web Conference. Retrieved

PAPAZOGLOU, M. P., & GEORGAKOPOULOS, D. 2003. Service-oriented computing. Communications of the ACM, 46(10), 24-28.

SIRIN, E., HENDLER, J., & PARSIA, B. 2003. Semi-automatic composition of web services using semantic descriptions. Mindswap.


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