Service-Oriented Computing: Agents, Semantics, and Engineering

Electronic contracting, based on explicit representation of different parties’ commitments, is a promising way to specifying and regulating behaviour in distributed business applications. A key part of contract-based system is a process through which the actual behaviour of individual parties is checked for conformance with contracts set to govern such behaviour. Such checking requires that relevant information on the behaviour of the parties, both with respect to the application processes they execute and to managing their contractual relationships, is captured. The process of collecting all such information, termed contract observation, is the subject of this paper. First, we describe general properties and requirements of such an observation process; afterwards, we discuss specifics of realising contract observation in web services environments. Finally, we show how contract observation has been implemented as part of the IST-CONTRACT web services framework for contract-based systems.

[1]  Andy Hopper,et al.  The active badge location system , 1992, TOIS.

[2]  Thomas R. Gruber,et al.  A translation approach to portable ontology specifications , 1993, Knowl. Acquis..

[3]  Bill N. Schilit,et al.  An overview of the PARCTAB ubiquitous computing experiment , 1995, IEEE Wirel. Commun..

[4]  Sue Long,et al.  Cyberguide: prototyping context-aware mobile applications , 1996, CHI 1996.

[5]  Michael H. Coen.  Building Brains for Rooms: Designing Distributed Software Agents , 1997, AAAI/IAAI.

[6]  Andy Hopper,et al.  The Anatomy of a Context-Aware Application , 1999, Wirel. Networks.

[7]  Gregory D. Abowd,et al.  Providing architectural support for building context-aware applications , 2000 .

[8]  Gregory D. Abowd,et al.  Living laboratories: the future computing environments group at the Georgia Institute of Technology , 2000, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[9]  Mel Siegel,et al.  Sensor fusion for context understanding , 2002, IMTC/2002. Proceedings of the 19th IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference (IEEE Cat. No.00CH37276).

[10]  Stephen S. Intille,et al.  Designing a Home of the Future , 2002, IEEE Pervasive Comput..

[11]  Harry Chen,et al.  An ontology for context-aware pervasive computing environments , 2003, The Knowledge Engineering Review.

[12]  Ernest Friedman Hill,et al.  Jess in Action: Java Rule-Based Systems , 2003 .

[13]  Cecilia Mascolo,et al.  CARISMA: Context-Aware Reflective mIddleware System for Mobile Applications , 2003, IEEE Trans. Software Eng..

[14]  Fabien L. Gandon,et al.  A Semantic E-Wallet to Reconcile Privacy and Context Awareness , 2003, SEMWEB.

[15]  Francesco M. Donini,et al.  A system for principled matchmaking in an electronic marketplace , 2003, WWW '03.

[16]  Claudia Linnhoff-Popien,et al.  A Context Modeling Survey , 2004 .

[17]  Harry Chen,et al.  Intelligent Agents Meet the Semantic Web in Smart Spaces , 2004, IEEE Internet Comput..

[18]  Roy H. Campbell,et al.  Reasoning about Uncertain Contexts in Pervasive Computing Environments , 2004, IEEE Pervasive Comput..

[19]  Jerry R. Hobbs,et al.  An ontology of time for the semantic web , 2004, TALIP.

[20]  Harry Chen,et al.  SOUPA: standard ontology for ubiquitous and pervasive applications , 2004, The First Annual International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Networking and Services, 2004. MOBIQUITOUS 2004..

[21]  Fabien L. Gandon,et al.  Semantic web technologies to reconcile privacy and context awareness , 2003, Journal of Web Semantics.

[22]  Harry Chen,et al.  An Intelligent Broker Architecture for Pervasive Context-Aware Systems , 2004 .

[23]  Howard E. Shrobe,et al.  A plan-based mission control center for autonomous vehicles , 2004, IUI '04.

[24]  Tao Gu,et al.  Ontology based context modeling and reasoning using OWL , 2004, IEEE Annual Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops, 2004. Proceedings of the Second.

[25]  Ning Wang,et al.  Provisioning for interdomain quality of service: the MESCAL approach , 2005, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[26]  S. Rudkin,et al.  Commercial models for IP quality of service interconnect , 2005 .

[27]  Jordi Domingo-Pascual,et al.  The EuQoS system: a solution for QoS routing in heterogeneous networks [Quality of Service based Routing Algorithms for Heterogeneous Networks] , 2007, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[28]  Lea Skorin-Kapov,et al.  Application-Level QoS Negotiation and Signaling for Advanced Multimedia Services in the IMS , 2007, IEEE Communications Magazine.

[29]  Stathes Hadjiefthymiades,et al.  Context Awareness in Mobile Computing Environments , 2007, Wirel. Pers. Commun..

[30]  Vedran Podobnik,et al.  Towards New Generation of Mobile Communications: Discovery of Ubiquitous Resources , 2008 .