Showing papers on "Web standards published in 2010"
Book•
01 Jan 2010
TL;DR: This paper presents a meta-answering of the principles of Service-Oriented Computing with a focus on how to model and manage engagement in the context of web services.
Abstract: About the Authors.Preface.Note to the Reader.Acknowledgments.Figures.Tables.Listings.I Basics.1. Computing with Services.2. Basic Standards for Web Services.3. Programming Web Services.4. Enterprise Architectures.5. Principles of Service-Oriented Computing.II Description.6. Modeling and Representation.7. Resource Description Framework.8. Web Ontology Language.9. Ontology Management.III Engagement.10. Execution Models.11. Transaction Concepts.12. Coordination Frameworks for Web Services.13. Process Specifications.14. Formal Specification and Enactment.IV Collaboration.15. Agents.16. Multiagent Systems.17. Organizations.18. Communication.V Solutions.19. Semantic Service Solutions.20. Social Service Selection.21. Economic Service Selection.VI Engineering.22. Building SOC Applications.23. Service Management.24. Security.VII Directions.25. Challenge and Extensions.VIII Appendices.Appendix A: XML and XML Schema.Appendix B: URI, URN, URL and UUID.Appendix C: XML Namespace Abbreviations.Glossary.About the Authors.Bibliography.Index.
630 citations
30 Dec 2010
TL;DR: This paper describes the Web of Things architecture and best-practices based on the RESTful principles that have already contributed to the popular success, scalability, and modularity of the traditional Web, and discusses several prototypes designed in accordance with these principles.
Abstract: Many efforts are centered around creating large-scale networks of “smart things” found in the physical world (e.g., wireless sensor and actuator networks, embedded devices, tagged objects). Rather than exposing real-world data and functionality through proprietary and tightly-coupled systems, we propose to make them an integral part of the Web. As a result, smart things become easier to build upon. Popular Web languages (e.g., HTML, Python, JavaScript, PHP) can be used to easily build applications involving smart things and users can leverage well-known Web mechanisms (e.g., browsing, searching, bookmarking, caching, linking) to interact and share these devices. In this paper, we begin by describing the Web of Things architecture and best-practices based on the RESTful principles that have already contributed to the popular success, scalability, and modularity of the traditional Web. We then discuss several prototypes designed in accordance with these principles to connect environmental sensor nodes and an energy monitoring system to the World Wide Web. We finally show how Web-enabled smart things can be used in lightweight ad-hoc applications called “physical mashups”.
492 citations
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TL;DR: This paper attempts to organize the status, uses, and issues of social Web sites into a comprehensive framework for discussing, understanding, using, building, and forecasting the future of social web sites.
462 citations
01 Sep 2010
TL;DR: This paper proposes new machine learning techniques to annotate table cells with entities that they likely mention, table columns with types from which entities are drawn for cells in the column, and relations that pairs of table columns seek to express, and a new graphical model for making all these labeling decisions for each table simultaneously.
Abstract: Tables are a universal idiom to present relational data. Billions of tables on Web pages express entity references, attributes and relationships. This representation of relational world knowledge is usually considerably better than completely unstructured, free-format text. At the same time, unlike manually-created knowledge bases, relational information mined from "organic" Web tables need not be constrained by availability of precious editorial time. Unfortunately, in the absence of any formal, uniform schema imposed on Web tables, Web search cannot take advantage of these high-quality sources of relational information. In this paper we propose new machine learning techniques to annotate table cells with entities that they likely mention, table columns with types from which entities are drawn for cells in the column, and relations that pairs of table columns seek to express. We propose a new graphical model for making all these labeling decisions for each table simultaneously, rather than make separate local decisions for entities, types and relations. Experiments using the YAGO catalog, DB-Pedia, tables from Wikipedia, and over 25 million HTML tables from a 500 million page Web crawl uniformly show the superiority of our approach. We also evaluate the impact of better annotations on a prototype relational Web search tool. We demonstrate clear benefits of our annotations beyond indexing tables in a purely textual manner.
425 citations
05 Jul 2010
TL;DR: This work conducts several large-scale evaluations on real-world Web services of quality-of-Service (QoS) performance and provides reusable research datasets for promoting the research of QoS-driven Web services.
Abstract: Quality-of-Service (QoS) is widely employed for describing non-functional characteristics of Web services. Although QoS of Web services has been investigated in a lot of previous works, there is a lack of real-world Web service QoS datasets for validating new QoS based techniques and models of Web services. To study the performance of real-world Web services as well as provide reusable research datasets for promoting the research of QoS-driven Web services, we conduct several large-scale evaluations on real-world Web services. Firstly, addresses of 21,358 Web services are obtained from the Internet. Then, invocation failure probability performance of 150 Web services is assessed by 100 distributed service users. After that, response time and throughput performance of 5,825 Web services are evaluated by 339 distributed service users. Detailed experimental results are presented in this paper and comprehensive Web service QoS datasets are publicly released for future research.
350 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore renewed concerns about the reliability of online health information in light of the increasing popularity of web applications that enable more end-user-generated content ("web 2.0").
251 citations
TL;DR: An overview of the web architecture, its core REST concepts, and the current state of the art in web services is given and a fresh approach to a web application transfer protocol and efficient payload encoding are introduced.
Abstract: The Internet of Things is the next big possibility and challenge for the Internet. Extending the web architecture to this new domain of constrained wireless networks and devices will be key to achieving the flexibility and scalability needed to make it a success. Web services have proven to be indispensable in creating interoperable communications between machines on today?s Internet, but at the same time the overhead and complexity of web service technology such as SOAP, XML, and HTTP are too high for use in the constrained environments often found in machine-to-machine applications (e.g., energy monitoring, building automation, and asset management). This article first gives an overview of the web architecture, its core REST concepts, and the current state of the art in web services. Two key activities required in order to achieve efficient embedded web services are introduced: a fresh approach to a web application transfer protocol and efficient payload encoding. The article analyzes the most promising payload encoding techniques and introduces the new IETF Constrained RESTful Environments (CoRE) standardization activity.
246 citations
05 Jul 2010
TL;DR: This paper proposes a novel technique to mine Web Service Description Language (WSDL) documents and cluster them into functionally similar Web service groups, as a predecessor step to retrieving the relevant Web services for a user request by search engines.
Abstract: The increasing use of the Web for everyday tasks is making Web services an essential part of the Internet customer's daily life. Users query the Internet for a required Web service and get back a set of Web services that may or may not satisfy their request. To get the most relevant Web services that fulfill the user's request, the user has to construct the request using the keywords that best describe the user's objective and match correctly with the Web Service name or location. Clustering Web services based on function similarities would greatly boost the ability of Web services search engines to retrieve the most relevant Web services. This paper proposes a novel technique to mine Web Service Description Language (WSDL) documents and cluster them into functionally similar Web service groups. The application of our approach to real Web services description files has shown good performance for clustering Web services based on function similarity, as a predecessor step to retrieving the relevant Web services for a user request by search engines.
240 citations
TL;DR: It is shown how the growing Semantic Web provides necessary support for these technologies, the challenges in bringing the technology to the next level, and some starting places for the research are proposed.
239 citations
17 Jul 2010
TL;DR: A formal model of web security based on an abstraction of the web platform is proposed and this model is used to analyze the security of several sample web mechanisms and applications and identifies three distinct threat models.
Abstract: We propose a formal model of web security based on an abstraction of the web platform and use this model to analyze the security of several sample web mechanisms and applications. We identify three distinct threat models that can be used to analyze web applications, ranging from a web attacker who controls malicious web sites and clients, to stronger attackers who can control the network and/or leverage sites designed to display user-supplied content. We propose two broadly applicable security goals and study five security mechanisms. In our case studies, which include HTML5 forms, Referer validation, and a single sign-on solution, we use a SAT-based model-checking tool to find two previously known vulnerabilities and three new vulnerabilities. Our case study of a Kerberos-based single sign-on system illustrates the differences between a secure network protocol using custom client software and a similar but vulnerable web protocol that uses cookies, redirects, and embedded links instead.
229 citations
26 Apr 2010
TL;DR: This work proposes a formal model of one specific semantic search task: ad-hoc object retrieval and shows that this task provides a solid framework to study some of the semantic search problems currently tackled by commercial Web search engines.
Abstract: Semantic Search refers to a loose set of concepts, challenges and techniques having to do with harnessing the information of the growing Web of Data (WoD) for Web search. Here we propose a formal model of one specific semantic search task: ad-hoc object retrieval. We show that this task provides a solid framework to study some of the semantic search problems currently tackled by commercial Web search engines. We connect this task to the traditional ad-hoc document retrieval and discuss appropriate evaluation metrics. Finally, we carry out a realistic evaluation of this task in the context of a Web search application.
TL;DR: The use of Web Services to enable programmatic access to on-line bioinformatics is becoming increasingly important in the Life Sciences, but their number, distribution and the variable quality of their documentation can make their discovery and subsequent use difficult.
Abstract: The use of Web Services to enable programmatic access to on-line bioinformatics is becoming increasingly important in the Life Sciences. However, their number, distribution and the variable quality of their documentation can make their discovery and subsequent use difficult. A Web Services registry with information on available services will help to bring together service providers and their users. The BioCatalogue (http://www.biocatalogue.org/) provides a common interface for registering, browsing and annotating Web Services to the Life Science community. Services in the BioCatalogue can be described and searched in multiple ways based upon their technical types, bioinformatics categories, user tags, service providers or data inputs and outputs. They are also subject to constant monitoring, allowing the identification of service problems and changes and the filtering-out of unavailable or unreliable resources. The system is accessible via a human-readable 'Web 2.0'-style interface and a programmatic Web Service interface. The BioCatalogue follows a community approach in which all services can be registered, browsed and incrementally documented with annotations by any member of the scientific community.
26 Apr 2010
TL;DR: This work presents content restrictions, and a content restrictions enforcement scheme called Content Security Policy (CSP), which intends to be one such layer of real world security in layers, and shows how a system such as CSP can be effective to lock down sites and provide an early alert system for vulnerabilities on a web site.
Abstract: The last three years have seen a dramatic increase in both awareness and exploitation of Web Application Vulnerabilities. 2008 and 2009 saw dozens of high-profile attacks against websites using Cross Site Scripting (XSS) and Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) for the purposes of information stealing, website defacement, malware planting, clickjacking, etc. While an ideal solution may be to develop web applications free from any exploitable vulnerabilities, real world security is usually provided in layers.We present content restrictions, and a content restrictions enforcement scheme called Content Security Policy (CSP), which intends to be one such layer. Content restrictions allow site designers or server administrators to specify how content interacts on their web sites-a security mechanism desperately needed by the untamed Web. These content restrictions rules are activated and enforced by supporting web browsers when a policy is provided for a site via HTTP, and we show how a system such as CSP can be effective to lock down sites and provide an early alert system for vulnerabilities on a web site. Our scheme is also easily deployed, which is made evident by our prototype implementation in Firefox and on the Mozilla Add-Ons web site.
01 Jan 2010
TL;DR: Dependability of Web services Electronic services Hypermedia Hypertext to construct Web pages Information architecture Intelligent applications of the Internet Interactive online environments Mobile Web applications Multimedia interfaces Online information sharing Rich Internet applications Search engines Security of Web applications Semantic Web User-centric applications user-centric technologies.
Abstract: Dependability of Web services Electronic services Hypermedia Hypertext to construct Web pages Information architecture Intelligent applications of the Internet Interactive online environments Mobile Web applications Multimedia interfaces Online information sharing Rich Internet applications Search engines Security of Web applications Semantic Web User-centric applications User-centric technologies Utilization of mobile devices Web accessibility Web application adaptation Web application personalization Web engineering Web enhancement Web intelligence Web mining Web ontologies Web portals Web technologies in support of commerce
TL;DR: This work presents Sig.ma, both a service and an end user application to access the Web of Data as an integrated information space in which large scale semantic Web indexing, logic reasoning, data aggregation heuristics, ad-hoc ontology consolidation, external services and responsive user interaction all play together to create rich entity descriptions.
Proceedings Article•
23 Mar 2010TL;DR: It is argued that the Linked Open Data (LoD) Cloud, in its current form, is only of limited value for furthering the Semantic Web vision and directions for research to remedy the situation are given.
Abstract: In this position paper, we argue that the Linked Open Data (LoD) Cloud, in its current form, is only of limited value for furthering the Semantic Web vision. Being merely a weakly linked triple collection, it will only be of very limited benefit for the AI or Semantic Web communities. We describe the corresponding problems with the LoD Cloud and give directions for research to remedy the situation.
TL;DR: A review of the area of Web-based simulation, exploring the advantages and disadvantages of WBS over classical simulation systems, a classification of different sub- and related-areas of W BS, an exploration of technologies that enable WBS, and the evolution of the Web in terms of its relationship to WBS are given.
TL;DR: The findings suggest that the order of popularity of Web 2.0 applications implemented in libraries is: blogs, RSS, instant messaging, social networking services, wikis, and social tagging applications.
TL;DR: This paper provides a theoretical understanding of these notions by outlining a model of the Web as a techno-social system that enhances human cognition towards communication and co-operation.
Abstract: Currently, there is much talk of Web 2.0 and Social Software. A common understanding of these notions is not yet in existence. The question of what makes Social Software social has thus far also remained unacknowledged. In this paper we provide a theoretical understanding of these notions by outlining a model of the Web as a techno-social system that enhances human cognition towards communication and co-operation. According to this understanding, we identify three qualities of the Web, namely Web 1.0 as a Web of cognition, Web 2.0 as a Web of human communication, and Web 3.0 as a Web of co-operation. We use the terms Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0 not in a technical sense, but for describing and characterizing the social dynamics and information processes that are part of the Internet.
Journal Article•
TL;DR: It is argued that the recent evolution provides the missing ingredients that will lead to a new wave of services - Linked Services - that will ultimately witness a significant uptake on a Web scale.
Abstract: It has often been argued that Web services would have a tremendous impact on the Web, as a core enabling technology supporting a highly efficient service-based economy at a global scale. However, despite the outstanding progress in the area we are still to witness the application of Web services in any significant numbers on the Web. In this paper, we analyse the state of the art highlighting the main reasons we believe have hampered their uptake. Based on this analysis, we further discuss about current trends and development within other fields such as the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 and argue that the recent evolution provides the missing ingredients that will lead to a new wave of services - Linked Services - that will ultimately witness a significant uptake on a Web scale. Throughout the presentation of this vision we outline the main principles that shall be underpinning the development of Linked Services and we illustrate how they can be implemented using a number of technologies and tools we have developed and are in the process of extending.
TL;DR: A collection of WHAT IF-based protein structure bioinformatics web services related to structure quality, the use of symmetry in crystal structures, structure correction and optimization, adding hydrogens and optimizing hydrogen bonds and a series of geometric calculations are reported here.
Abstract: The WHAT IF molecular-modelling and drug design program is widely distributed in the world of protein structure bioinformatics. Although originally designed as an interactive application, its highly modular design and inbuilt control language have recently enabled its deployment as a collection of programmatically accessible web services. We report here a collection of WHAT IF-based protein structure bioinformatics web services: these relate to structure quality, the use of symmetry in crystal structures, structure correction and optimization, adding hydrogens and optimizing hydrogen bonds and a series of geometric calculations. The freely accessible web services are based on the industry standard WS-I profile and the EMBRACE technical guidelines, and are available via both REST and SOAP paradigms. The web services run on a dedicated computational cluster; their function and availability is monitored daily.
Proceedings Article•
23 Jun 2010TL;DR: This paper evaluates the behavior of JavaScript web applications from commercial web sites and compares this behavior with the benchmarks, finding that the benchmarks are not representative of many real web Sites and that conclusions reached from measuring the benchmarks may be misleading.
Abstract: JavaScript is widely used in web-based applications and is increasingly popular with developers. So-called browser wars in recent years have focused on JavaScript performance, specifically claiming comparative results based on benchmark suites such as SunSpider and V8. In this paper we evaluate the behavior of JavaScript web applications from commercial web sites and compare this behavior with the benchmarks.
We measure two specific areas of JavaScript runtime behavior: 1) functions and code and 2) events and handlers. We find that the benchmarks are not representative of many real web sites and that conclusions reached from measuring the benchmarks may be misleading. Specific common behaviors of real web sites that are underem-phasized in the benchmarks include event-driven execution, instruction mix similarity, cold-code dominance, and the prevalence of short functions. We hope our results will convince the JavaScript community to develop and adopt benchmarks that are more representative of real web applications.
05 Jul 2010
TL;DR: WSExpress (Web Service Express), a novel Web service search engine to expressively find expected Web services, which ranks the publicly available Web services not only by functional similarities to users’ queries, but also by nonfunctional QoS characteristics of Web services.
Abstract: Web services are becoming prevalent nowadays. Finding desired Web services is becoming an emergent and challenging research problem. In this paper, we present WSExpress (Web Service Express), a novel Web service search engine to expressively find expected Web services. WSExpress ranks the publicly available Web services not only by functional similarities to users’ queries, but also by nonfunctional QoS characteristics of Web services. WSExpress provides three searching styles, which can adapt to the scenario of finding an appropriate Web service and the scenario of automatically replacing a failed Web service with a suitable one. WSExpress is implemented by Java language and large-scale experiments employing real-world Web services are conducted. Totally 3,738 Web services (15,811 operations) from 69 countries are involved in our experiments. The experimental results show that our search engine can find Web services with the desired functional and non-functional requirements. Extensive experimental studies are also conducted on a well known benchmark dataset consisting of 1,000 Web service operations to show the recall and precision performance of our search engine.
TL;DR: Results reveal that 37 university libraries use RSS feeds for dissemination of library news, events and announcements and 15 university libraries provide blog space for users.
Abstract: Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore recent trends in the application of Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 features as exemplified through university library web sites around the world.Design/methodology/approach – The top 100 universities from the ranked list of 200 provided on the Times Higher Education web site were considered for collection of data and from this list a selection was made of 57 of these universities. This selection was based on whether the site was in English and whether it had at least one Web 2.0 feature. For each of these universities their web sites were visited and data on their Web 2.0 features (such as Blogs, RSS, Instant Messaging, Wikis and the like) were collected and analyzed.Findings – Results reveal that 37 university libraries use RSS feeds for dissemination of library news, events and announcements and 15 university libraries provide blog space for users. Whereas wiki is the least applied Web 2.0 technology, with only one university using it, Instant Messaging is anot...
01 Dec 2010
TL;DR: This paper presents a thorough analysis of the current landscape of Web API forms and descriptions, which has up-to-date remained unexplored and can be used as a basis for devising common standards and guidelines for Web API development.
Abstract: The world of services on the Web, thus far limited to "classical" Web services based on WSDL and SOAP, has been increasingly marked by the domination of Web APIs, characterised by their relative simplicity and their natural suitability for the Web. Currently, the development of Web APIs is rather autonomous, guided by no established standards or rules, and Web API documentation is commonly not based on an interface description language such as WSDL, but is rather given directly in HTML as part of a web page. As a result, the use of Web APIs requires extensive manual effort and the wealth of existing work on supporting common service tasks, including discovery, composition and invocation, can hardly be reused or adapted to APIs. Before we can achieve a higher level of automation and can make any significant improvement to current practices and technologies, we need to reach a deeper understanding of these. Therefore, in this paper we present a thorough analysis of the current landscape of Web API forms and descriptions, which has up-to-date remained unexplored. We base our findings on manually examining a body of publicly available APIs and, as a result, provide conclusions about common description forms, output types, usage of API parameters, invocation support, level of reusability, API granularity and authentication details. The collected data provides a solid basis for identifying deficiencies and realising how we can overcome existing limitations. More importantly, our analysis can be used as a basis for devising common standards and guidelines for Web API development.
26 Apr 2010
TL;DR: Sig.ma uses an holistic approach in which large scale semantic web indexing, logic reasoning, data aggregation heuristics, ad hoc ontology consolidation, external services and responsive user interaction all play together to create rich entity descriptions.
Abstract: We demonstrate Sig.ma, both a service and an end user application to access the Web of Data as an integrated information space.Sig.ma uses an holistic approach in which large scale semantic web indexing, logic reasoning, data aggregation heuristics, ad hoc ontology consolidation, external services and responsive user interaction all play together to create rich entity descriptions. These consolidated entity descriptions then form the base for embeddable data mashups, machine oriented services as well as data browsing services. Finally, we discuss Sig.ma's peculiar characteristics and report on lessions learned and ideas it inspires.
15 Jun 2010
TL;DR: A vocabulary to describe provenance of Web data as metadata is introduced and possibilities to make such provenance metadata accessible as part of the Web of Data are discussed, which can be queried and consumed to identify outdated information.
Abstract: The World Wide Web evolves into a Web of Data, a huge, globally distributed dataspace that contains a rich body of machine-processable information from a virtually unbound set of providers covering a wide range of topics. However, due to the openness of the Web little is known about who created the data and how. The fact that a large amount of the data on the Web is derived by replication, query processing, modification, or merging raises concerns of information quality. Poor quality data may propagate quickly and contaminate the Web of Data. Provenance information about who created and published the data and how, provides the means for quality assessment. This paper takes a first step towards creating a quality-aware Web of Data: we present approaches to integrate provenance information into the Web of Data and we illustrate how this information can be consumed. In particular, we introduce a vocabulary to describe provenance of Web data as metadata and we discuss possibilities to make such provenance metadata accessible as part of the Web of Data. Furthermore, we describe how this metadata can be queried and consumed to identify outdated information.
Proceedings Article•
02 Jun 2010TL;DR: The properties and some applications of the Microsoft Web N-gram corpus are described and the usages of the corpus are demonstrated here in two NLP tasks: phrase segmentation and word breaking.
Abstract: This document describes the properties and some applications of the Microsoft Web N-gram corpus. The corpus is designed to have the following characteristics. First, in contrast to static data distribution of previous corpus releases, this N-gram corpus is made publicly available as an XML Web Service so that it can be updated as deemed necessary by the user community to include new words and phrases constantly being added to the Web. Secondly, the corpus makes available various sections of a Web document, specifically, the body, title, and anchor text, as separates models as text contents in these sections are found to possess significantly different statistical properties and therefore are treated as distinct languages from the language modeling point of view. The usages of the corpus are demonstrated here in two NLP tasks: phrase segmentation and word breaking.
TL;DR: The Web service matchmaking algorithm extends object-based matching techniques used in structural case-based reasoning, allowing 1) the retrieval of Web services not only based on subsumption relationships, but exploiting also the structural information of OWL ontologies, performing domain-dependent discovery.
Abstract: In this paper, we describe and evaluate a Web service discovery framework using OWL-S advertisements, combined with the distinction between service and Web service of the WSMO discovery framework. More specifically, we follow the Web service discovery model, which is based on abstract and lightweight semantic Web service descriptions, using the service profile ontology of OWL-S. Our goal is to determine fast an initial set of candidate Web services for a specific request. This set can then be used in more fine-grained discovery approaches, based on richer Web service descriptions. Our Web service matchmaking algorithm extends object-based matching techniques used in structural case-based reasoning, allowing 1) the retrieval of Web services not only based on subsumption relationships, but exploiting also the structural information of OWL ontologies and 2) the exploitation of Web services classification in profile taxonomies, performing domain-dependent discovery. Furthermore, we describe how the typical paradigm of profile input/output annotation with ontology concepts can be extended, allowing ontology roles to be considered as well. We have implemented our framework in the OWLS-SLR system, which we extensively evaluate and compare to the OWLS-MX matchmaker.
TL;DR: The downside to template-driven design is explored, tracing the decline of homepage web authoring alongside the rise of social networking sites and calling for a renewed attention to the rhetoric of design.