Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Business processes involve interactions among autonomous partners. We propose that these interactions be specified modularly as protocols. Protocols can be published, enabling implementors to independently develop components that respect published protocols and yet serve diverse interests. A variety of business protocols would be needed to capture subtle business needs. We propose that the same kinds of conceptual abstractions be developed for protocols as for information models. Specifically, we consider (1) : a subprotocol may satisfy the requirements of a superprotocol, but support additional properties; and (2) : a protocol may combine existing protocols. In support of the above, this paper develops a semantics of protocols and an operational characterization of them. This supports judgments about the potential subclass-superclass relations between protocols, which are a result of protocol refinement. It also enables protocol aggregation by splicing a protocol into another protocol.

Due to the problem of information overload, locating relevant Web portals precisely based on user requirements is quite an essential task. As the need for application-to-application communication and interoperability grows, providing Web portal services that satisfy human as well as machine requirements is becoming a new challenge for Web portals. However, a Web portal capability expressing mechanism, which enables the precise location of Web portals as well as the automated discovery and invocation of Web portal services, is lacking. In this paper, we investigate how to incorporate Semantic Web technology with Web service technologies to describe the capabilities of Web portals. We also discuss the possibilities of using these descriptions for discovering and using the distributed existing portal resources.

Researchers have recognized the need for more expressive descriptions of Web services. Most approaches have suggested using ontologies to either describe the Web services or to annotate syntactical descriptions of Web services. Earlier approaches are typically manual, and the capability to support automatic or semi-automatic annotation is needed. The METEOR-S Web Service Annotation Framework (MWSAF) created at the LSDIS Lab at the University of Georgia leverages schema matching techniques for semi-automatic annotation. In this paper, we present an improved version of MWSAF. Our preliminary investigation indicates that, by replacing the schema matching technique currently used for the categorization with a Naïve Bayesian Classifier, we can match web services with ontologies faster and with higher accuracy.