Hua Xiao

Bio: Hua Xiao is an academic researcher from Queen's University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Web service & Service-oriented architecture. The author has an hindex of 7, co-authored 9 publications receiving 253 citations.

An Approach for Context-Aware Service Discovery and Recommendation

Abstract: Given the large amount of existing services and the diversified needs nowadays, it is time-consuming for end-users to find appropriate services. To help end-users obtain their desired services, context-aware systems provide a promising way to automatically search and recommend services using a user’s context. However, existing context-aware techniques have limited support for dynamic adaption to newly added context types (e.g., location, time and activity). Due to the diversity of user’s environment, the available context types may change over time. It is challenging to anticipate a complete set of context types while we design a context aware system. In this paper, we propose a context modeling approach which can dynamically handle various context types and values. More specifically, we use ontologies to enhance the meaning of a user’s context values and automatically indentify the relations among different context values. Based on the relations among context values, we capture the potential services which the user might need. A case study is conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach. The results show that our approach can use contexts to find users’ needs and recommend their desired services with high precision and recall.

Migration of SOAP-based services to RESTful services

Abstract: Web services are designed to provide rich functionality for organizations and support interoperable interactions over a network Web services are mainly realized in two ways: 1) SOAP-based services and 2) RESTful services For the service providers, RESTful services can improve system flexibility, scalability, and performance as compared to the SOAP-based Web services It is equally attractive to end users as it is consume less resources (ie, battery, processor speed, and memory) Additionally, REST-based services do not include complex standards and heterogeneous operations; and hence are easier to consume and compose as compared to SOAP-based Web services We provide an approach to migrate SOAP-based services to RESTful services We identify resources from a SOAP-based Web service by analyzing its service description and mapping the contained operations to resources and HTTP methods To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct a case study on a set of publicly available SOAP-based Web services The results of our case study show that our approach can achieve high accuracy of identifying RESTful services from the interfaces of SOAP-based services Our approach can improve the performance for invoking Web services after SOAP-based services are migrated to RESTful services

Supporting Change Impact Analysis for Service Oriented Business Applications

Abstract: Business applications encode various business processes within an organization. Business process specification languages such as BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) are commonly used to integrate various services in order to automate business processes within an organization. To remain competitive edge, managers frequently modify their processes. Determining the cost of modifying a business process is not trivial since the changes to the business process have to account for source code changes in various services. In this paper, we propose an approach to estimating the cost of a business process change in a service oriented business application. The approach applies change impact analysis techniques to business process specifications, and source code. The approach generates an initial change impact set from business process components. These components are then mapped to the corresponding source code entities. These code entities act as seeds for traditional source code impact analysis. Using code dependencies, such as call and inheritance relations, we derive a metric to capture the complexity of particular business process changes. Managers can then use this metric to gauge the cost and resources needed to implement changes in their business processes without having to study the code. We demonstrated the feasibility of our approach using an experiment on an open source service oriented business application.

A Framework for Verifying SLA Compliance in Composed Services

Abstract: Service level agreements (SLAs) impose many non-functional requirements on services. Business analysts specify and check these requirements in business process models using tools such as IBM WebSphere Business Modeler. System integrators on the other hand use service composition tools such as IBM WebSphere Integration Developer to create service composition models, which specify the integration of services. However, system integrators rarely verify SLA compliance in their proposed composition designs. Instead, SLA compliance is verified after the composed services are deployed in the field. To improve the quality of the composed services, we propose a framework to verify SLA compliance in composed services at design time. The framework re-uses information in business process models to simulate services and verify the non-functional requirements before the service deployment. To demonstrate our framework, we built a prototype using an industrial process simulation engine from IBM WebSphere Business Modeler and integrate it into an industrial service composition tool. Through a case study, we demonstrate that our framework and the prototype assist system integrators in composing services while considering the non-functional requirements.

An automatic approach for ontology-driven service composition

Abstract: Current service composition techniques and tools are mainly designed for use by Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) professionals to solve business problems. This focus on SOA professionals creates challenges for the non-expert users, with limited SOA knowledge, who try to integrate SOA solutions into their online experience. To shelter non-expert users from the complexity of service composition, we propose an approach which automatically composes a service on the fly to meet the situational needs of a user. We present a tag-based service description schema which allows non-expert users to easily understand the description of services and add their own descriptions using descriptive tags. Instead of specifying the detailed steps for composing a service, a non-expert user would specify the goal of their desired activities using a set of keywords then our approach can automatically identify the relevant services to achieve the goal at run-time. A prototype is developed as a proof of concept. We conduct a case study to compare the performance of our approach in automatic service composition with a baseline approach which consists of the manual process of searching for services using keywords. The case study shows that our approach can achieve higher precision and recall than the baseline approach.

Internet of Things (IoT): A review of enabling technologies, challenges, and open research issues

Abstract: IoT (Internet of Things) is a new paradigm which provides a set of new services for the next wave of technological innovations. IoT applications are nearly limitless while enabling seamless integration of the cyber-world with the physical world. However, despite the enormous efforts of standardization bodies, alliances, industries, researchers and others, there are still numerous problems to deal with in order to reach the full potential of IoT. These issues should be considered from various aspects such as enabling technologies, applications, business models, social and environmental impacts. In focus of this paper are open issues and challenges considered from the technological perspective. Just for clarification, we put in light different visions that stand behind this paradigm in order to facilitate a better understanding of the IoT's features. Furthermore, this exhaustive survey provides insights into the state-of-the-art of IoT enabling and emerging technologies. The most relevant among them are addressed with some details. The main scope is to deliver a comprehensive overview of open issues and challenges to be tackled by future research. We provide some insights into specific emerging ideas in order to facilitate future research. Also, this paper brings order in the existing literature by classifying contributions according to different research topics.

A Survey on Application Layer Protocols for the Internet of Things

Abstract: It has been more than fifteen years since the term Internet of Things (IoT) was introduced. However, despite the efforts of research groups and innovative corporations, still today it is not possible to say that the IoT is upon us. This is mainly due to the fact that a unified IoT architecture has not yet been clearly defined and there is no common agreement in defining communication protocols and standards for all the IoT parts. The framework that current IoT platforms use consists mostly in technologies that partially fulfill the IoT requirements. While developers employ existing technologies to build the IoT, research groups are working on adapting protocols to the IoT in order to optimize communications. In this paper, we present and compare existing IoT application layer protocols as well as protocols that are utilized to connect the “things” but also end-user applications to the Internet. We highlight IETF’s CoAP, IBM’s MQTT, HTML 5’s Websocket among others, and we argue their suitability for the IoT by considering reliability, security, and energy consumption aspects. Finally, we provide our conclusions for the IoT application layer communications based on the study that we have conducted.

Service-oriented computing - ICSOC 2008 : 6th international conference Sydney, Australia, December 1-5, 2008 proceedings

Abstract: Web Scale Computing: The Power of Infrastructure as a Service.- Services in the Long Tail World: Challenges and Opportunities.- Services for Science.- Managing and Internet Service Bus.- Quality-Driven Business Policy Specification and Refinement for Service-Oriented Systems.- Adaptation of Web Service Composition Based on Workflow Patterns.- Protocol-Based Web Service Composition.- Design and Implementation of a Fault Tolerant Job Flow Manager Using Job Flow Patterns and Recovery Policies.- Building Mashups for the Enterprise with SABRE.- Adaptation of Service Protocols Using Process Algebra and On-the-Fly Reduction Techniques.- Automatic Workflow Graph Refactoring and Completion.- Authorization and User Failure Resiliency for WS-BPEL Business Processes.- Reasoning on Semantically Annotated Processes.- Event-Driven Quality of Service Prediction.- Automatic Realization of SOA Deployment Patterns in Distributed Environments.- The LLAMA Middleware Support for Accountable Service-Oriented Architecture.- ubiSOAP: A Service Oriented Middleware for Seamless Networking.- Towards a Service-Oriented Approach for Managing Context in Mobile Environment.- An Autonomic Middleware Solution for Coordinating Multiple QoS Controls.- Transparent Runtime Adaptability for BPEL Processes.- Organizational Constraints to Realizing Business Value from Service Oriented Architectures: An Empirical Study of Financial Service Institutions.- E-Marketplace for Semantic Web Services.- Business Driven SOA Customization.- Sound Multi-party Business Protocols for Service Networks.- Automatic Mash Up of Composite Applications.- Non-desynchronizable Service Choreographies.- A Framework for Semantic Sensor Network Services.- Context-Driven Autonomic Adaptation of SLA.- Determining QoS of WS-BPEL Compositions.- An Initial Approach to Explaining SLA Inconsistencies.- Ontology-Based Compatibility Checking for Web Service Configuration Management.- SOAlive Service Catalog: A Simplified Approach to Describing, Discovering and Composing Situational Enterprise Services.- WorldTravel: A Testbed for Service-Oriented Applications.- TCP???Compose ??? - A TCP-Net Based Algorithm for Efficient Composition of Web Services Using Qualitative Preferences.- A Runtime Quality Architecture for Service-Oriented Systems.- QoS Policies for Business Processes in Service Oriented Architectures.- Deriving Business Service Interfaces in Windows Workflow from UMM Transactions.- From Business Process Models to Web Services Orchestration: The Case of UML 2.0 Activity Diagram to BPEL.- Batch Invocation of Web Services in BPEL Process.- Formation of Service Value Networks for Decentralized Service Provisioning.- Towards Automated WSDL-Based Testing of Web Services.- Automated Service Composition with Adaptive Planning.- A Planning-Based Approach for the Automated Configuration of the Enterprise Service Bus.- Verifying Interaction Protocol Compliance of Service Orchestrations.- Specify Once Test Everywhere: Analyzing Invariants to Augment Service Descriptions for Automated Test Generation.- A Model-Driven Approach to Dynamic and Adaptive Service Brokering Using Modes.- Integrated Security Context Management of Web Components and Services in Federated Identity Environments.- Predicting and Learning Executability of Composite Web Services.- Authorization Policy Based Business Collaboration Reliability Verification.- VGC: Generating Valid Global Communication Models of Composite Services Using Temporal Reasoning.- A Framework for Advanced Modularization and Data Flow in Workflow Systems.- Model Identification for Energy-Aware Management of Web Service Systems.- LASS - License Aware Service Selection: Methodology and Framework.- Integrated and Composable Supervision of BPEL Processes.- Optimised Semantic Reasoning for Pervasive Service Discovery.- COSMA - An Approach for Managing SLAs in Composite Services.- Resource Calculations with Constraints, and Placement of Tenants and Instances for Multi-tenant SaaS Applications.- SPIN: Service Performance Isolation Infrastructure in Multi-tenancy Environment.- Management as a Service for IT Service Management.- SMART: Application of a Method for Migration of Legacy Systems to SOA Environments.- Discovering and Deriving Service Variants from Business Process Specifications.- Market Overview of Enterprise Mashup Tools.- Siena: From PowerPoint to Web App in 5 Minutes.- Exploration of Discovered Process Views in Process Spaceship.- ROME4EU: A Web Service-Based Process-Aware System for Smart Devices.- WS-Engineer 2008.- MetaCDN: Harnessing Storage Clouds for High Performance Content Delivery.- Yowie: Information Extraction in a Service Enabled World.

A review of software change impact analysis

Abstract: Change impact analysis is required for constantly evolving systems to support the comprehension, implementation, and evaluation of changes. A lot of research effort has been spent on this subject over the last twenty years, and many approaches were published likewise. However, there has not been an extensive attempt made to summarize and review published approaches as a base for further research in the area. Therefore, we present the results of a comprehensive investigation of software change impact analysis, which is based on a literature review and a taxonomy for impact analysis. The contribution of this review is threefold. First, approaches proposed for impact analysis are explained regarding their motivation and methodology. They are further classified according to the criteria of the taxonomy to enable the comparison and evaluation of approaches proposed in literature. We perform an evaluation of our taxonomy regarding the coverage of its classification criteria in studied literature, which is the second contribution. Last, we address and discuss yet unsolved problems, research areas, and challenges of impact analysis, which were discovered by our review to illustrate possible directions for further research.

A systematic review of requirements change management

Abstract: ContextSoftware requirements are often not set in concrete at the start of a software development project; and requirements changes become necessary and sometimes inevitable due to changes in customer requirements and changes in business rules and operating environments; hence, requirements development, which includes requirements changes, is a part of a software process. Previous work has shown that failing to manage software requirements changes well is a main contributor to project failure. Given the importance of the subject, there's a plethora of research work that discuss the management of requirements change in various directions, ways and means. An examination of these works suggests that there's a room for improvement. ObjectiveIn this paper, we present a systematic review of research in Requirements Change Management (RCM) as reported in the literature. MethodWe use a systematic review method to answer four key research questions related to requirements change management. The questions are: (1) What are the causes of requirements changes? (2) What processes are used for requirements change management? (3) What techniques are used for requirements change management? and (4) How do organizations make decisions regarding requirements changes? These questions are aimed at studying the various directions in the field of requirements change management and at providing suggestions for future research work. ResultsThe four questions were answered; and the strengths and weaknesses of existing techniques for RCM were identified. ConclusionsThis paper has provided information about the current state-of-the-art techniques and practices for RCM and the research gaps in existing work. Benefits, risks and difficulties associated with RCM are also made available to software practitioners who will be in a position of making better decisions on activities related to RCM. Better decisions will lead to better planning which will increase the chance of project success.