Titulo Estágio
Semantic Mashups of Linked-USDL Services
Área Tecnológica
Sistemas de Informação
Local do Estágio
Departamento de Engenharia Informática
Enquadramento
Competitive markets constantly pressure companies to become more agile, forcing them to leverage their legacy systems in novel ways: new business processes need to be quickly designed and deployed to support new products or services; existing ones need to be reengineered or frequently tuned to keep up with best practices in the industry. The need to cope with these constant reconfigurations of existing and new functionality is one of the main drivers for the evolution towards Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) [1, 2]. However, as required pieces of business logic become exposed as business web services for reuse, the number of such services also increases sharply, to the point where it becomes virtually impossible for the business analyst to find the ones she or he needs to assemble a new business process. A traditional Google-like syntactic search in a catalogue of available business services does not solve the problem, since there are multiple synonyms for the name of any given service operation. For instance, the analyst may look for a service called “issue client invoice” without success because the developer may have named it “bill customer”.
More than just list the services and how to invoke them, we need information about their meaning in the business context. Recently, a new language to describe services from a business perspective, called USDL (Unified Service Description Language) [3, 4], was proposed by a W3C Unified Service Description Language Incubator Group [5] and is being supported by companies such as SAP AG and Siemens. This language was created having in mind that its use would benefit end-users in searching and understanding the business value of a Web service (and any other service). In fact, USDL is a more powerful service description language than WSDL (Web Services Description Language) in the sense it can capture and represent the business value of the services which include legal constraints, availability indicators, business goals, and industry domains and not only their technical aspects. As so, USDL is more suited to describe services to be used by Internet consumers.
Linked-USDL (http://www.linked-usdl.org/) which intends to associate semantics to business services described with USDL is gaining momentum [6]. Linked-USDL promoters want this semantics-oriented USDL version to be built upon the Linked Data (LD) principles, which enable to create typed links between data from different Web sources resulting in a web of things in the world, described by data on the Web. Since Linked-USDL will provide a business perspective description of services combined with semantics, end-users will achieve a higher precision and recall during their search for services.
Thus, Business Web Services need to be semantically described, using Semantic Web technologies such as ontologies, and then to be published in a Semantic Service Registry, hence, enabling a semantic search engine to query them. Then, these services need to be combined/composed or mashed up, hence to provide new services and create added value business processes. Mashup of services [7, 8] means a creative way to design new applications by combining existing (Web) resources utilizing data, services and Application Programming Interfaces. Service mashups are meant to aggregate information from several sources in order to create new web applications tuned to user needs. Companies start turning to service mashups, which combine information and capabilities from more than one source to deliver new functions [9]. The work of this MSc thesis proposal relies on service descriptions and business use cases provided by our industrial partner, SAPO – PT Comunicações, S.A [10].
[1] http://www-01.ibm.com/software/solutions/soa/
[2] http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-06-2005/jw-0613-soa.html
[3] What is USDL and why do we need it, http://www.internet-of-services.com/index.php?id=288&L=0
[4] Jorge Cardoso, Alistair Barros, Norman May, and Uwe Kylau. Towards a unified service description language for the internet of services: Requirements and first developments. In IEEE International Conference on Services Computing, Florida, USA, 2010. IEEE Computer Society Press, http://eden.dei.uc.pt/~jcardoso/Research/Papers/IEEE-SCC-2010-USDL.pdf
[5] W3C Unified Service Description Language Incubator Group, http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/usdl/
[6] C. Pedrinaci and J. Domingue, Toward the Next Wave of Services: Linked Services for the Web of Data. In Journal of Universal Computer Science, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 1694 -1719, 2010, http://oro.open.ac.uk/23073/1/services-for-the-web-of-data.pdf
[7] M. B. Blake and M. F. Nowlan, “Predicting Service Mashup Candidates Using Enhanced Syntactical Message Management,” in 2008 IEEE International Conference on Services Computing, IEEE, 2008, pp. 229-236; http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=4578468
[8] D. Benslimane, S. Dustdar, and A. Sheth, “Services Mashups: The New Generation of Web Applications,” IEEE Internet Computing, vol. 12, no. 5, pp. 13-15, Sep. 2008; http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=4620089
[9] N. Carrier, T. Deutsch, C. Gruber, M. Heid, and L. L. Jarret, “The business case for enterprise mashups,” IBM White Paper, 2008; ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/ftp/lotusweb/mashup/EPW14002-USEN-00.pdf
[10] SAPO services marketplace http://sdbmarketplace.cloudapp.net/en/
Objetivo
The main objective of this MSc thesis work is to design and develop a software prototype of semantic mashup of services to take a step forward in integrating semantic mechanisms with mashups of services, hence to facilitate to semi-automatically create them. We intend to use USDL Business Services descriptions combined with Semantic Web technologies. For this, the work plan has the four main following sub-objectives:
1. Requirements analysis phase: meetings will be conducted with PT/SAPO staff with the objectives of identifying the functions the services mashup prototype must perform and of selecting the set of business services to model;
2. Design phase: specification of the software architecture, as well as components, interfaces, and data storage of the prototype of Semantic Mashup of Services to satisfy the specified requirements;
3. Implementation phase: Programming will be used to develop and implement the prototype of Semantic Mashup of Services designed in the previous phase;
4. Validation phase: test cases will be defined to evaluate whether the prototype of Semantic Mashup of Services fully or partially satisfies the requirements outlined in the first phase. After testing the prototype, defects, if found, will be logged and will enable to correct the implementation. A prototype user manual will also be prepared.
The work of this MSc thesis will be performed in parallel with the complementary SUnSET project (On the suitability of USDL for service description-A case study of a telecom operator) which aims to describe telecommunication services and to develop a services repository. As so, during this MSc thesis work the master student is expected to contribute to the related Linked-USDL initiative and to participate in the Service Community that is being created involving the Open University (UK), the SAP and the Siemens companies (Germany).
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 1
According to the objectives explained in the previous section, this MSc thesis divides into the following tasks, each one with concrete outputs (deliverables):
Task T1: Analysis of the SAPO services, of the Linked-USDL language and of suitable semantic web technologies that will be selected for services semantic enrichment
- When: September-October-November 2012.
- Description: Familiarization with the SAPO services portfolio and with the Linked-USDL language. Identification of the adequate ontologies to reuse to semantically describe the business services and of the suitable SPARQL-based querying mechanisms.
- Deliverables: Report indicating the main characteristics of the SAPO services, of the Linked-USDL language and of suitable semantic web technologies. A set of business services from SAPO services portfolio will be selected and modeled with the Linked-USDL language.
Task T2: System requirements, architecture and design.
- When: November-December 2012.
- Description: Requirements analysis. Architecture and design of the prototype of Semantic Mashup of Services to develop.
- Deliverables: Report of requirements analysis and of architecture of the prototype.
Task T3: Mid-term report writing.
- When: December-January 2012-2013.
- Description: Write the report for the mid-term MSc evaluation.
- Deliverables: Mid-term MSc thesis report.
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 2
According to what is explained in the objectives section, the following tasks are planned for the 2nd semester:
Task T4: Implementation of prototype of the Semantic Mashup of Services.
- When: February-May 2013.
- Description: Implementation of the prototype, including SPARQL-based querying mechanisms.
- Deliverables: Prototype of the Semantic Mashup of Services.
Task T5: Tests and evaluation of the prototype.
- When: May - June 2013.
- Description: Test cases will be defined and conducted to evaluate the prototype of Semantic Mashup of Services. The prototype will be corrected if defects are found.
- Deliverables: A prototype evaluation report and a prototype user manual.
Task T6: Final MSc thesis report writing.
- When: May-July 2013.
- Description: Write final MSc thesis.
- Deliverable: MSc thesis.
Condições
The workplace is the C6.3 DEI laboratory and a scholarship will be provided. The amount of this grant will vary according to the available time of the student.
Observações
This MSc thesis work will be jointly supervised by the PhD researcher Catarina Ferreira da Silva (CISUC, cferr@dei.uc.pt, 239790092) and the Professor Jorge Cardoso (DEI, jcardoso@dei.uc.pt, 239790051).
Orientador
Catarina Ferreira da Silva (CISUC) / Jorge Cardoso (DEI)
cferr@dei.uc.pt 📩