Showing papers on "Services computing published in 2013"
TL;DR: Since 2004 the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) has provided access to a wide range of databases and analysis tools via Web Services interfaces, which allow their integration into other tools, applications, web sites, pipeline processes and analytical workflows.
Abstract: Since 2004 the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) has provided access to a wide range of databases and analysis tools via Web Services interfaces. This comprises services to search across the databases available from the EMBL-EBI and to explore the network of cross-references present in the data (e.g. EB-eye), services to retrieve entry data in various data formats and to access the data in specific fields (e.g. dbfetch), and analysis tool services, for example, sequence similarity search (e.g. FASTA and NCBI BLAST), multiple sequence alignment (e.g. Clustal Omega and MUSCLE), pairwise sequence alignment and protein functional analysis (e.g. InterProScan and Phobius). The REST/SOAP Web Services (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/Tools/webservices/) interfaces to these databases and tools allow their integration into other tools, applications, web sites, pipeline processes and analytical workflows. To get users started using the Web Services, sample clients are provided covering a range of programming languages and popular Web Service tool kits, and a brief guide to Web Services technologies, including a set of tutorials, is available for those wishing to learn more and develop their own clients. Users of the Web Services are informed of improvements and updates via a range of methods.
1,562 citations
TL;DR: This work proposes a framework and a mechanism that measure the quality and prioritize Cloud services and will create healthy competition among Cloud providers to satisfy their Service Level Agreement (SLA) and improve their QoS.
833 citations
TL;DR: This work identifies the main vulnerabilities in this kind of systems and the most important threats found in the literature related to Cloud Computing and its environment as well as to identify and relate vulnerabilities and threats with possible solutions.
Abstract: Cloud Computing is a flexible, cost-effective, and proven delivery platform for providing business or consumer IT services over the Internet. However, cloud Computing presents an added level of risk because essential services are often outsourced to a third party, which makes it harder to maintain data security and privacy, support data and service availability, and demonstrate compliance. Cloud Computing leverages many technologies (SOA, virtualization, Web 2.0); it also inherits their security issues, which we discuss here, identifying the main vulnerabilities in this kind of systems and the most important threats found in the literature related to Cloud Computing and its environment as well as to identify and relate vulnerabilities and threats with possible solutions.
665 citations
TL;DR: Contrary to conventional wisdom, this research encourages providers to emphasize the interpersonal elements of the service by providing control cues, raising social presence, and enhancing human trust mechanisms.
Abstract: Smart interactive services, in contrast with other technology-based services, require significant human-to-human interaction and collaboration in addition to the service provided by the embedded te...
304 citations
TL;DR: This work presents three Web services related with mass spectrometry, namely isotopic distribution simulation, peptide fragmentation simulation, and molecular formula determination, taking advantage of modern HTML5 and JavaScript libraries (ChemDoodle and jQuery).
Abstract: Web services, as an aspect of cloud computing, are becoming an important part of the general IT infrastructure, and scientific computing is no exception to this trend. We propose a simple approach to develop chemical Web services, through which servers could expose the essential data manipulation functionality that students and researchers need for chemical calculations. These services return their results as JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) objects, which facilitates their use for Web applications. The ChemCalc project http://www.chemcalc.org demonstrates this approach: we present three Web services related with mass spectrometry, namely isotopic distribution simulation, peptide fragmentation simulation, and molecular formula determination. We also developed a complete Web application based on these three Web services, taking advantage of modern HTML5 and JavaScript libraries (ChemDoodle and jQuery).
301 citations
TL;DR: The findings show that perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, trust, interactivity, external influence, interpersonal influence, self efficacy, and facilitating conditions are critical factors in improving user acceptance of m-government services.
282 citations
27 Jun 2013
TL;DR: First, three types of service-generated big data are exploited to enhance system performance and Big Data-as-a-Service is employed to provide common big data related services to users to enhance efficiency and reduce cost.
Abstract: With the prevalence of service computing and cloud computing, more and more services are emerging on the Internet, generating huge volume of data, such as trace logs, QoS information, service relationship, etc. The overwhelming service-generated data become too large and complex to be effectively processed by traditional approaches. How to store, manage, and create values from the service-oriented big data become an important research problem. On the other hand, with the increasingly large amount of data, a single infrastructure which provides common functionality for managing and analyzing different types of service-generated big data is urgently required. To address this challenge, this paper provides an overview of service-generated big data and Big Data-as-a-Service. First, three types of service-generated big data are exploited to enhance system performance. Then, Big Data-as-a-Service, including Big Data Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Big Data Platform-as-a-Service, and Big Data Analytics Software-as-a-Service, is employed to provide common big data related services (e.g., accessing service-generated big data and data analytics results) to users to enhance efficiency and reduce cost.
188 citations
TL;DR: This paper proposes a private cloud platform architecture which includes six layers according to the specific requirements of ubiquitous healthcare services, and each layer thereby achieves relative independence by this loosely coupled means of communications with publish/subscribe mechanism.
Abstract: Ubiquitous healthcare services are becoming more and more popular, especially under the urgent demand of the global aging issue. Cloud computing owns the pervasive and on-demand service-oriented natures, which can fit the characteristics of healthcare services very well. However, the abilities in dealing with multimodal, heterogeneous, and nonstationary physiological signals to provide persistent personalized services, meanwhile keeping high concurrent online analysis for public, are challenges to the general cloud. In this paper, we proposed a private cloud platform architecture which includes six layers according to the specific requirements. This platform utilizes message queue as a cloud engine, and each layer thereby achieves relative independence by this loosely coupled means of communications with publish/subscribe mechanism. Furthermore, a plug-in algorithm framework is also presented, and massive semistructure or unstructured medical data are accessed adaptively by this cloud architecture. As the testing results showing, this proposed cloud platform, with robust, stable, and efficient features, can satisfy high concurrent requests from ubiquitous healthcare services.
173 citations
TL;DR: A run-time platform is developed and a cross-computing environment process modelling technique is also developed to improve the feasibility of ISs under hybrid cloud computing environments.
Abstract: With the development of application services providers and cloud computing, more and more small-and medium-sized business enterprises use software services and even infrastructure services provided by professional information service companies to replace all or part of their information systems ISs. These information service companies provide applications, such as data storage, computing processes, document sharing and even management information system services as public resources to support the business process management of their customers. However, no cloud computing service vendor can satisfy the full functional IS requirements of an enterprise. As a result, enterprises often have to simultaneously use systems distributed in different clouds and their intra enterprise ISs. Thus, this article presents a framework to integrate applications deployed in public clouds and intra ISs. A run-time platform is developed and a cross-computing environment process modelling technique is also developed to improve the feasibility of ISs under hybrid cloud computing environments.
129 citations
TL;DR: Modeling results showed that user intentions and behaviors were largely influenced by the perceived features of cloud services, which were found to be the significant antecedents of cloud computing usefulness and ease of use.
122 citations
TL;DR: Empirical results obtained from an agent-based testbed show that agents in this work can successfully compose services to satisfy service requirements, autonomously select services based on dynamic fees, effectively cope with constantly changing consumers’ service needs that trigger updates, and compose services in multiple Clouds even with incomplete information about Cloud participants.
Abstract: Service composition in multi-Cloud environments must coordinate self-interested participants, automate service selection, (re)configure distributed services, and deal with incomplete information about Cloud providers and their services. This work proposes an agent-based approach to compose services in multi-Cloud environments for different types of Cloud services: one-time virtualized services, e.g., processing a rendering job, persistent virtualized services, e.g., infrastructure-as-a-service scenarios, vertical services, e.g., integrating homogenous services, and horizontal services, e.g., integrating heterogeneous services. Agents are endowed with a semi-recursive contract net protocol and service capability tables (information catalogs about Cloud participants) to compose services based on consumer requirements. Empirical results obtained from an agent-based testbed show that agents in this work can: successfully compose services to satisfy service requirements, autonomously select services based on dynamic fees, effectively cope with constantly changing consumers' service needs that trigger updates, and compose services in multiple Clouds even with incomplete information about Cloud participants.
TL;DR: This model considers an IT department that procures IT services from a cloud computing vendor and enhances these services for consuming units within the firm, and finds that when the cloud vendor faces intense competition, the cost-center organizational model is preferred over the profit-center model.
Abstract: How does the adoption of cloud computing by a firm affect the organizational structure of its information technology (IT) department? To analyze this question, we consider an IT department that procures IT services from a cloud computing vendor and enhances these services for consuming units within the firm. Our model incorporates the competitive environment faced by the cloud vendor, which affects the price of the cloud vendor. We find that when the cloud vendor faces intense competition, the cost-center organizational model is preferred over the profit-center model. Infrastructure services such as basic storage, e-mail, and raw computing face intense competition, and our results suggest that such services be offered as a free corporate resource under the cost-center organizational structure. When the cloud vendor has pricing power, a profit-center organizational structure is likely to be preferred. Our results suggest that highly differentiated services such as cloud-based enterprise-wide enterprise res...
TL;DR: A new similarity measure for web service similarity computation is presented and a novel collaborative filtering approach is proposed, called normal recovery collaborative filtering, for personalized web service recommendation that achieves better accuracy than other competing approaches.
Abstract: With the increasing amount of web services on the Internet, personalized web service selection and recommendation are becoming more and more important. In this paper, we present a new similarity measure for web service similarity computation and propose a novel collaborative filtering approach, called normal recovery collaborative filtering, for personalized web service recommendation. To evaluate the web service recommendation performance of our approach, we conduct large-scale real-world experiments, involving 5,825 real-world web services in 73 countries and 339 service users in 30 countries. To the best of our knowledge, our experiment is the largest scale experiment in the field of service computing, improving over the previous record by a factor of 100. The experimental results show that our approach achieves better accuracy than other competing approaches.
28 Jun 2013
TL;DR: This paper proposes a novel approach that dynamically recommends Web services that fit users' interests that combines collaborative filtering and content-based recommendation using a three-way aspect model.
Abstract: With increasing adoption and presence of Web services, designing novel approaches for efficient Web services recommendation has become steadily more important. Existing Web services discovery and recommendation approaches focus on either perishing UDDI registries, or keyword-dominant Web service search engines, which possess many limitations such as insufficient recommendation performance and heavy dependence on the input from users such as preparing complicated queries. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that dynamically recommends Web services that fit users' interests. Our approach is a hybrid one in the sense that it combines collaborative filtering and content-based recommendation. In particular, our approach considers simultaneously both rating data and content data of Web services using a three-way aspect model. Unobservable user preferences are represented by introducing a set of latent variables, which is statistically estimated. To verify the proposed approach, we conduct experiments using 3, 693 real-world Web services. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms the two conventional methods on recommendation performance.
02 Jul 2013
TL;DR: A performance comparison study of RESTful Web services and the AMQP Protocol considering exchanging messages between client and server concluded that, for large quantities of messages exchange, the best results comes from the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol.
Abstract: Web services appeared as a promising technology for Web environments independent of technologies, services, and applications. Currently, there are some issues related with this approach that should be studied. For instance, if massive quantities of data are sent to databases it can influence significantly the performance of the whole system. The Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMPQ) appears as a promising solution to address this problem. Then, in order to evaluate the performance of this approach, this paper presents a performance comparison study of RESTful Web services and the AMQP Protocol considering exchanging messages between client and server. The study is based on the averaged exchanged messages for a period of time. It was observed and concluded that, for large quantities of messages exchange, the best results comes from the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors extend and integrate elements from a conceptual knowledge value chain and business model frameworks to investigate how knowledge and technology transfer organizations (KTTOs) create and deliver value for clients.
TL;DR: A cube model is designed to explicitly describe the relationship among providers, consumers and Web services, and a Standard Deviation based Hybrid Collaborative Filtering (SD-HCF) for Web Service Recommendation (WSRec) and an Inverse consumer Frequency based User Collaborativefiltering (IF-UCF), which indicates the effectiveness of adding inverse consumer frequency to UCF.
Abstract: Web service recommendation has become a hot yet fundamental research topic in service computing. The most popular technique is the Collaborative Filtering (CF) based on a user-item matrix. However, it cannot well capture the relationship between Web services and providers. To address this issue, we first design a cube model to explicitly describe the relationship among providers, consumers and Web services. And then, we present a Standard Deviation based Hybrid Collaborative Filtering (SD-HCF) for Web Service Recommendation (WSRec) and an Inverse consumer Frequency based User Collaborative Filtering (IF-UCF) for Potential Consumers Recommendation (PCRec). Finally, the decision-making process of bidirectional recommendation is provided for both providers and consumers. Sets of experiments are conducted on real-world data provided by Planet-Lab. In the experiment phase, we show how the parameters of SD-HCF impact on the prediction quality as well as demonstrate that the SD-HCF is much better than extant methods on recommendation quality, including the CF based on user, the CF based on item and general HCF. Experimental comparison between IF-UCF and UCF indicates the effectiveness of adding inverse consumer frequency to UCF.
TL;DR: The approach involves three web services that cooperate to achieve production goals using the domain web services and maintains a semantic model of the current state of the system, which is automatically updated based on event notifications sent by the domain services.
Abstract: This paper presents an approach to using semantic web services in managing production processes. In particular, the devices in the production systems considered expose web service interfaces through which they can then be controlled, while semantic web service descriptions formulated in web ontology language for services (OWL-S) make it possible to determine the conditions and effects of invoking the web services. The approach involves three web services that cooperate to achieve production goals using the domain web services. In particular, one of the three services maintains a semantic model of the current state of the system, while another uses the model to compose the domain web services so that they jointly achieve the desired goals. The semantic model of the system is automatically updated based on event notifications sent by the domain services.
TL;DR: The key insight of this paper is that it modified the computing method of evidence information, which has been considered the reliability, time-efficiency, and relativity of service context, and the advantage of the new service-aware computing method has been proved successfully.
Patent•
01 Mar 2013
TL;DR: In this article, techniques for simplifying and/or automating many of the tasks associated with configuration, deployment, and management of network resources to support cloud-based services are described.
Abstract: Techniques are described which simplify and/or automate many of the tasks associated with the configuration, deployment, and management of network resources to support cloud-based services.
TL;DR: With this tool, decision makers are able to decide whether outsourcing into the cloud is monetarily attractive; to be more specific, whether the costs associated with cloud computing services are lower than with a pre-existing infrastructure.
Abstract: Purpose – Start‐up companies in particular can benefit from cloud computing services, since frequently they do not operate an internal IT infrastructure. The purpose of this paper is to present a total cost of ownership (TCO) approach for cloud computing services.Design/methodology/approach – The authors applied a multi‐method approach (systematic literature review, analysis of real cloud computing services, expert interviews, case study) for the development and evaluation of a formal mathematical TCO model.Findings – It was found that decision processes in cloud computing are conducted ad hoc and lack systematic methods. The presented method raises the awareness of indirect and hidden costs in cloud computing.Research limitations/implications – Some restrictive assumptions were made. For instance, cost types that focus on an existing internal IT infrastructure were hidden. Future research can combine risk and security aspects by means of a TCO approach. Additionally, benefits management in cloud computin...
TL;DR: It is apparent that educational institutions are likely to seize those services offered in the cloud in these difficult times due to its pay-as-you-go cost structure, but does the cloud have the answers to all the challenges in technical education?
Abstract: Cloud computing - a relatively recent term - builds on decades of research in virtualization, distributed computing, utility computing, and, more recently, networking, and Web and software services. It implies a service-oriented architecture, reduced information technology overhead for the end-user, great flexibility, reduced total cost of ownership, on-demand services, and many other things. It is apparent that educational institutions are likely to seize those services offered in the cloud in these difficult times due to its pay-as-you-go cost structure. However, does the cloud have the answers to all the challenges in technical education?
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors identify the conscious integration of products and services, i.e., product service systems, as a valuable strategy to radically innovate product-focused business models and uncover five distinct kinds of services that specifically help firms to innovate their business model.
Abstract: Firms increasingly rely on business model innovation as a means to face challenges of a world in transition. We identify the conscious integration of products and services, i.e., product service systems, as a valuable strategy to radically innovate product-focused business models. Applying an exploratory multiple case study approach, we uncover five distinct kinds of services that specifically help firms to innovate their business model. These are (1) business consulting, (2) comprehensive services, (3) educational services, (4) financing services, and (5) information management services. The influence of these services on three components of business model innovation (value propositions, value chain architectures, and revenue streams) is discussed. In total, our study emphasizes that integrating specific services with products is an important driver for business model innovations.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on the opportunities and challenges for service mining, i.e., applying process mining techniques to services, and highlight challenges specific for service-oriented systems.
Abstract: Web services are an emerging technology to implement and integrate business processes within and across enterprises. Service orientation can be used to decompose complex systems into loosely coupled software components that may run remotely. However, the distributed nature of services complicates the design and analysis of service-oriented systems that support end-to-end business processes. Fortunately, services leave trails in so-called event logs and recent breakthroughs in process mining research make it possible to discover, analyze, and improve business processes based on such logs. Recently, the task force on process mining released the process mining manifesto. This manifesto is supported by 53 organizations and 77 process mining experts contributed to it. The active participation from end-users, tool vendors, consultants, analysts, and researchers illustrate the growing significance of process mining as a bridge between data mining and business process modeling. In this paper, we focus on the opportunities and challenges for service mining, i.e., applying process mining techniques to services. We discuss the guiding principles and challenges listed in the process mining manifesto and also highlight challenges specific for service-orientated systems.
13 May 2013
TL;DR: This paper presents an architecture which provides a set of abstractions for the different types of sensors and services, enabling them to take advantage of Big Data and cloud technologies and which is termed holistic as it caters for the data flow from sensors through to services.
Abstract: Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) increasingly enable the interaction of the physical world with services, which may be located across the Internet from the sensing network. Cloud services and big data approaches may be used to store and analyse this data to improve scalability and availability, which will be required for the billions of devices envisaged in the Internet of Things (IoT). This potential of WSNs is limited by the relatively low number deployed and the difficulties imposed by their heterogeneous nature and limited (or proprietary) development environments and interfaces. This paper proposes a set of requirements for achieving a pervasive, integrated information system of WSNs and associated services. It also presents an architecture which provides a set of abstractions for the different types of sensors and services, enabling them to take advantage of Big Data and cloud technologies and which is termed holistic as it caters for the data flow from sensors through to services. The architecture has been designed for implementation on a resource constrained node and to be extensible to server environments, shown in this paper where we present a 'C' implementation of the core architecture, including services on Linux and Contiki (using the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP)) and a Linux service to integrate with the Hadoop HBase data store.
TL;DR: This paper has used REST based Web services as an interoperable application layer that can be directly integrated into other application domains for remote monitoring such as e-health care services, smart homes, or even vehicular area networks (VAN).
Abstract: Cloud computing provides great benefits for applications hosted on the Web that also have special computational and storage requirements. This paper proposes an extensible and flexible architecture for integrating Wireless Sensor Networks with the Cloud. We have used REST based Web services as an interoperable application layer that can be directly integrated into other application domains for remote monitoring such as e-health care services, smart homes, or even vehicular area networks (VAN). For proof of concept, we have implemented a REST based Web services on an IP based low power WSN test bed, which enables data access from anywhere. The alert feature has also been implemented to notify users via email or tweets for monitoring data when they exceed values and events of interest.
TL;DR: In this article, a systematic literature review (SLR) method was employed to collect relevant evidence to investigate the Cloud services evaluation step by step, and the overall data collected from these studies essentially depicts the current practical landscape of implementing cloud services evaluation, and in turn can be reused to facilitate future evaluation work.
TL;DR: The results indicate that individual constructs can be linked to service components and can potentially be instrumental in progress toward a deeper understanding of consumers’ adoption of information services and how this affects the development of such services and systems that support them.
01 Sep 2013
TL;DR: An information model to describe the resources and components of complex composite services, and a management system that maps such a description into a deployment model, based on OpenStack.
Abstract: Moving services to the cloud is a trend that has been going on for years now, with a constant increase in sophistication and complexity of such services. Today, even critical infrastructure operators are considering moving their services and data to the cloud; most prominently are telecommunication operators, who are calling for running their service as so-called virtual network services. These services are usually composed from a set of components, each with individual resilience and scalability requirements. Hence, the problem of describing the blueprint of how to build a service from its components, including the components' requirements, and how to derive an actual deployment from such a blueprint needs to be solved. In this paper, we present a first step in this direction. We have developed an information model to describe the resources and components of complex composite services, and a management system that maps such a description into a deployment model. We have based our prototype on OpenStack and have identified some shortcomings of it that need to be overcome to make an automated resilience-aware deployment and operation system reality.
28 Jun 2013
TL;DR: A probabilistic model is applied to characterize the latten topics between services and queries, and then a matching method is proposed based on the topic relevance to help web service users to retrieve related services and to improve the search performance.
Abstract: Web service discovery is a vital problem in service computing with the increasing number of services. Existing service discovery approaches merely focus on WSDL-based keyword search, semantic matching based on domain knowledge or ontologies, or QoS-based recommendations. The keyword search omits the underlying correlations and semantic knowledge or QoS information is not always available. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic service discovery approach to help web service users to retrieve related services and to improve the search performance. Specifically, we apply a probabilistic model to characterize the latten topics between services and queries, and then propose a matching method based on the topic relevance. Experiments on services from a real service repository confirm the feasibility and efficiency of this proposed method.