Web service

About: Web service is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 57677 publications have been published within this topic receiving 989088 citations. The topic is also known as: web services & Web Service.

Tracking User Behavior with Google Analytics Events on an Academic Library Website

Abstract: The primary purpose of an academic library Web site is to serve as a portal to library-acquired content. Navigational design of a library Web site affects the user's ability to find and access content. At Albertsons Library, the goal of the navigational design of the Web site is to mimic user behavior on the Web site to help them access information and articles from over 300 different library vendors. Coordinating with different vendors makes tracking the navigational flow of user behavior difficult with the tool Google Analytics. Using the events feature in Google Analytics, the team responsible for Web design was able to track user flow, and was able to quantify how many users were actual “drop-offs” versus those that were clicks into library resources. Decisions made after acquiring these data resulted in a Web site with a 10 percent or less bounce rate, and decreased the number of clicks required for users accessing the library's content.

Adaptive Parallelization of Queries over Dependent Web Service Calls

Abstract: We have developed a system to process database queries over composed data providing web services. The queries are transformed into execution plans containing an operator that invokes any web service for given arguments. A common pattern in these query execution plans is that the output of one web service call is the input for another, etc. The challenge addressed in this paper is to develop methods to speed up such dependent calls in queries by parallelization. Since web service calls incur high-latency and message set-up costs, a naive approach making the calls sequentially is time consuming and parallel invocations of the web service calls should improve the speed. Our approach automatically parallelizes the web service calls by starting separate query processes, each managing a parameterized sub-query, a plan function, for different parameter tuples. For a given query, the query processes are automatically arranged in a multi-level process tree where plan functions are called in parallel. The parallel plan is defined in terms of an algebra operator, FF_APPLYP, to ship in parallel to other query processes the same plan function for different parameters. By using FF_APPLYP we first investigated ways to set up different process trees manually. We concluded from our experiments that the best performing query execution plan is an almost balanced bushy tree. To automatically achieve the optimal process tree we modified FF_APPLYP to an operator AFF_APPLYP that adapts a parallel plan locally in each query process until an optimized performance is achieved. AFF_APPLYP starts with a binary process tree. During execution each query process in the tree makes local decisions to expand or shrink its process sub-tree by comparing the average time to process each incoming tuple. The query execution time obtained with AFF_APPLYP is shown to be close to the best time achieved by manually built query process trees.

An architecture and a method for web services design: towards the realisation of service-oriented computing

Abstract: Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is the computing paradigm that utilises services as fundamental building blocks. Currently, web services provide a standard-based realisation of SOC due to: (a) the machine-readable format (XML) of their specifications and (b) their messaging protocols built on top of the internet. However, their deployment is still hindered by some technical, semantic and methodological issues. This paper concerns an architecture that guides a methodology to identify, specify, design, organise, deploy and manage a sound and complete set of web services. First, the paper highlights what existing approaches, from both IT and business perspectives, have provided to web services with respect to the following: (1) architecture, (2) design process, (3) building blocks, (4) wrapping legacy (5) usage and reuse, (6) semantics, (7) quality factors and (8) organisation and management. Then a multiple abstraction level architecture is defined, composed of high layers to deal with business orientations and low layers to deal with IT. Finally, the architecture is used as a web services design methodology with respect to SOC.

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.

A hike through post-EJB J2EE Web application architecture

Abstract: Since the mid-nineties, server-based Web applications have emerged as a convenient way to provide functionality to a user audience without any specific software or system requirements except the need for a reasonably up-to-date Web browser. The tricky integration, installation, and configuration tasks are under the control of an expert on the server side. These advantages apply to both the general public and small research teams. Typical Web applications have browser-based user interfaces for one or more user roles and might keep some information in persistent storage, such as a relational database. Since the early days of common gateway interface (CGI) scripting, technologies for developing Web applications have evolved by leaps and bounds to address growing expectations with respect to reliability, maintainability, extensibility, performance, scalability, and other goals. In this article - the first in a planned series about Web application development - we take an exploratory hike through the architectural layers of a Web application built with state-of-the-art, widely used technologies. The paper focus on the upper layers that provide the application's user interface. By no means intended as a complete treatise on Web application development, this article is an overview meant to spark your interest and provide a starting Doint for further exploration.