Papers by Carlos Pedrinaci
… WEB APPLICATIONS AND …
The use of Semantic Web Services (SWS) for increasing agility and adaptability in process executi... more The use of Semantic Web Services (SWS) for increasing agility and adaptability in process execution is currently investigated in many settings. The common underlying idea is the dynamic selection, composition and mediationon the basis of available SWS descriptions -of the most adequate Web resource (services and data) to accomplish a specific process activity. In this paper we describe IRS-III, a framework for creating and executing semantic Web services, which takes a semantic broker based approach to mediating between service requesters and service providers. We describe the overall approach of IRS-III from an ontological perspective. We then illustrate our approach through three different applications to domains of Business Process Management, e-Learning and e-Science.
Towards a Service- …, Jan 1, 2010
Evolution in the telecommunications sector has led to companies within it providing APIs for thei... more Evolution in the telecommunications sector has led to companies within it providing APIs for their products and services, allowing others to build communication services into their own service offerings. In order to support mass adoption of this new approach, consumers of these APIs (many of which are RESTful) must be supported by a reduction in the complexity involved with describing, finding, composing and invoking them. Existing efforts to provide automation have, in general, focused on WSDL services rather than REST services. The paper explores the approach of the SOA4All project in supporting interaction with REST services which is being applied in a telecommunications focused case study.
RESTful services with lightweight machine-readable descriptions and semantic annotations
… FROM RESEARCH TO …, Jan 1, 2011
Abstract REST was originally developed as the architectural foundation for the human-oriented Web... more Abstract REST was originally developed as the architectural foundation for the human-oriented Web, but it has turned out to be a useful architectural style for machine-to-machine distributed systems as well. The most prominent wave of machine-oriented RESTful ...
SOA4All: towards a global service delivery platform
Establishing Web services as resources on the Web opens up productive, but challenging new possib... more Establishing Web services as resources on the Web opens up productive, but challenging new possibilities for open, highly dynamic and loosely-coupled service economies. In addition, lifting services to the semantic level provides a sophisticated means for automating the main service-related management processes and the composition of arbitrary functionalities into new services and businesses. In this article we present the SOA4All approach to a global service delivery platform. By means of semantic technologies, ...
The Semantic Web aims to extend the current Web with well-dened semantics, represented in a machi... more The Semantic Web aims to extend the current Web with well-dened semantics, represented in a machine interpretable form, to support better and greater automation of tasks over the Web. In this context, ontologies are regarded as a cornerstone, given that they are intended to be sharable formal conceptualisations of a domain of interest.
… of the 4th International Workshop on …, Jan 1, 2009
Business Process Management (BPM) aims to support the whole life-cycle necessary to deploy and ma... more Business Process Management (BPM) aims to support the whole life-cycle necessary to deploy and maintain business processes in organisations. Crucial within the BPM lifecycle is the analysis of deployed processes. Analysing business processes requires computing metrics that can help determining the health of business activities and thus the whole enterprise. However, the degree of automation currently achieved cannot support the level of reactivity and adaptation demanded by businesses. In this paper we argue and show how the use of Semantic Web technologies can increase to an important extent the level of automation for analysing business processes. We present a domain-independent ontological framework for Business Process Analysis (BPA) with support for automatically computing metrics. In particular, we define a set of ontologies for specifying metrics. We describe a domain-independent metrics computation engine that can interpret and compute them. Finally we illustrate and evaluate our approach with a set of general purpose metrics.
Proceedings of the …, Jan 1, 2004
The three main navigation paradigms for virtual worlds, i.e., free navigation, automatic tours, a... more The three main navigation paradigms for virtual worlds, i.e., free navigation, automatic tours, and multiuser navigation show important limitations when dealing with guided visits that involve interactive cooperation among several users in 3D virtual worlds over the Internet. In this paper, we present our research into this issue and some important results. We propose a new navigation paradigm denominated guided visit through a virtual world, where the capacity of a user guiding several remote users through the virtual world is enriched with the capacity to dynamically interchange the role of guiding between the connected users. The user that acts as a guide moves freely through the virtual world, and his/her movements are reproduced by the browsers of the other guided users. We also present the architecture and the system we developed that implements this paradigm, as well as its integration in a working realworld application that demonstrates its use.
SmartLink: a Web-based editor and search environment for Linked Services
The Semanic Web: …, Jan 1, 2011
Handbook of Semantic …, Jan 1, 2010
In recent years service-orientation has increasingly been adopted as one of the main approaches f... more In recent years service-orientation has increasingly been adopted as one of the main approaches for developing complex distributed systems out of reusable components called services. Realizing the potential benefits of this software engineering approach requires semi-automated and automated techniques and tools for searching or locating services, selecting the suitable ones, composing them into complex processes, resolving heterogeneity issues through process and data mediation, and reduce other tedious yet recurrent tasks with minimal manual effort. Just as semantics has brought significant benefits to search, integration and analysis of data, semantics is also seen as a key to achieving a greater level of automation to service orientation. This has lead to research and development, as well as standardization efforts on semantic Web services. Activities related to semantic Web services have involved developing conceptual models or ontologies, algorithms and engines that could support machines in semi-automatically or automatically discovering, selecting, composing, orchestrating, mediating and executing services. This chapter provides an overview of the area after nearly a decade of research. The main principles and conceptual models proposed thus far including OWL-S, WSMO, and SAWSDL/METEOR-S. The main approaches developed by the research community that are able to use these semantic descriptions of services to support some of the typical activities related to services and service-based applications are described. Next, the ideas and techniques described through two applications that integrate semantic Web services technologies within real-world application are illustrated. Finally, a set of key resources is provided that would allow the reader to reach a greater understanding of the field, and are the main issues that will drive the future of semantic Web services.
Service Engineering: …, Jan 1, 2010
Adaptive service selection is acknowledged to provide a certain number of advantages to optimize ... more Adaptive service selection is acknowledged to provide a certain number of advantages to optimize the service provisioning process or to cater for advanced service brokering. Semantic Web Services, that is services that have been enriched with semantic annotations have often been used for providing adaptive service selection by deferring the binding of services until runtime. Thus far, however, research on Semantic Web Services has mainly been dominated by rich conceptual frameworks such as WSMO and OWL-S which require a significant effort towards the annotation of services and rely on complex reasoning for which there are no efficient solutions that can scale to the Web yet. In this chapter, inline with current trends on the Semantic Web that sacrifice expressivity in favour of performance, we present a novel approach to providing adaptive service selection that relies on simple conceptual models for services and less expressive formalisms for which there currently exist mature and performant implementations. In particular, we present a set of concep-
… New Forms of Reasoning for the …, Jan 1, 2007
Despite the efforts devoted so far, the Semantic Web vision appears to be an eluding target. We p... more Despite the efforts devoted so far, the Semantic Web vision appears to be an eluding target. We propose a paradigm shift for the Semantic Web centred around the pragmatics of developing Semantic Web applications in order to overcome the bootstrapping problem it suffers from. This paradigm is based on the vision of the Semantic Web as the result emerging from the integration and collaboration of a plethora of Semantic Web applications, rather that as a global entity. On the basis of this assumption we describe and propose Opportunistic Reasoning as a general purpose reasoning model suitable for the development of reasonably scalable Semantic Web applications.
The two fundamental aims of managing educational resources are to enable resources to be reusable... more The two fundamental aims of managing educational resources are to enable resources to be reusable and interoperable and to enable Web-scale sharing of resources across learning communities. Currently, a variety of approaches have been proposed to expose and manage educational resources and their metadata on the Web. These are usually based on heterogeneous metadata standards and schemas, such as IEEE LOM or ADL SCORM, and diverse repository interfaces such as OAI-PMH or SQI. Also, there is still a lack of usage of controlled vocabularies and available data sets that could replace the widespread use of unstructured text for describing resources. On the other hand, the Linked Data approach has proven that it offers a set of successful principles that have the potential to alleviate the aforementioned issues. In this paper, we introduce an architecture and prototype which is fundamentally based on (a) Linked Data principles and (b) Service-orientation to resolve the integration issues for sharing educational resources.
Proceedings of the 4th …, Jan 1, 2009
Efforts are being made to enable business process monitoring and analysis through processing cont... more Efforts are being made to enable business process monitoring and analysis through processing continuously generated events. Several ontologies and tools have been defined and implemented to allow applying general-purpose Business Process Analysis techniques to specific domains. On this basis, a Semantic Enabled Monitoring Event Language (SEMEL) is proposed to facilitate defining complex queries over monitoring data so as to interleave temporal and ontological reasoning. In this paper, the formal semantics of SEMEL is discussed, and the implementation approach of SEMEL interpreter is also briefly described, which encompasses translation into an operational language.
1 2 Context-Aware Web Services: Methods, Architectures, and Technologies achieving a widespread a... more 1 2 Context-Aware Web Services: Methods, Architectures, and Technologies achieving a widespread application of service technologies over the Web. One aspect that is increasingly seen as a condicio sine qua non for achieving this is the capacity to dynamically adapt services based on contextual factors (17). These factors range from immediate concerns of location and language to legal issues and financial regulations. Swiftly accommodating to the context at hand will become increasingly important as the diversity of services expands with the global reach of the future Web of services.
The Semantic Web …, Jan 1, 2010
Web services provide means for the development of open distributed systems, based on decoupled co... more Web services provide means for the development of open distributed systems, based on decoupled components, by overcoming heterogeneity and enabling the publishing and consuming of functionalities of existing pieces of software. Recently the world around services on the Web, thus far limited to "classical" Web services based on SOAP and WSDL, has been enriched by the proliferation of Web applications and APIs, also referred to as RESTful services [1], when conforming to the REST architectural principles. Web APIs are characterised by their relative simplicity and their natural suitability for the Web, relying directly on the use of URIs, for both resource identification and interaction, and HTTP for message transmission. Many popular Web 2.0 applications like Facebook, Google, Flickr and Twitter offer easy-to-use, publicly available APIs, which not
Towards the Future …, Jan 1, 2009
The image on the cover is a partial map of the Internet based on the OPTE project started by Barr... more The image on the cover is a partial map of the Internet based on the OPTE project started by Barrett Lyon (www.blyon.com) who kindly let us use it for the front cover of this book. In this graph the lines connect nodes representing IP addresses of some indicative Class C networks color-coded according to their corresponding allocation. For more information see
SWAP: Semantic Web Applications …, Jan 1, 2005
The Semantic Web aims to extend the current Web with formal semantics in order to improve how use... more The Semantic Web aims to extend the current Web with formal semantics in order to improve how users experience the Web, by ameliorating current activities and supporting the automation of some others. So far, current Semantic Web prototypes mostly aim at collecting and exposing information. Still, a semantic layer can support applying Knowledge-Based Systems techniques to the development of brand-new fully-fledged Knowledge-Based Services for the Web. In this paper, we present the technical issues that have to be faced in the development of such a kind of application by presenting the Online Design of Events Application: a Semantic Web-based design support system that assists event organisers in the process of preparing events such as workshops and conferences, by effectively reasoning over an inter-organisational process accross the Web.
… Conference on Web …, Jan 1, 2010
Nowadays, more and more distributed digital TV and TV-related resources are published on the Web,... more Nowadays, more and more distributed digital TV and TV-related resources are published on the Web, such as Electronic Personal TV Guide (EPG) data. To enable applications to access these resources easily, the TV resource data is commonly provided by Web service technologies. The huge variety of data related to the TV domain and the wide range of services that provide it, raises the need to have a broker to discover, select and orchestrate services to satisfy the runtime requirements of applications that invoke these services. The variety of data and heterogeneous nature of the service capabilities makes it a challenging domain for automated web-service discovery and composition.
Business Information …, Jan 1, 2009
Business Process Analysis (BPA) aims to verify, validate, and identify potential improvements for... more Business Process Analysis (BPA) aims to verify, validate, and identify potential improvements for business processes. Despite the wide range of technologies developed so far, the large amount of information that needs to be integrated and processed, as well as the quantity of data that has to be produced and presented still poses important challenges both from a processing and presentation perspectives. We argue that to enhance BPA, semantics have to be the core backbone in order to better support the application of analysis techniques on the first hand, and to guide the computation and presentation of the results on the other hand. We propose a knowledge-based approach to supporting strategydriven BPA by making use of a comprehensive and extensible ontological framework capturing from high-level strategic concerns down to lowerlevel monitoring information. We describe how corporate strategies can be operationalized into concrete analysis that can guide the evaluation of organisational processes, structure the presentation of results obtained and better help assess the well-being of corporate business processes.
E-Commerce and Web …, Jan 1, 2005
Semantic Web Services can be seen as remote Problem Solving Methods offered via the Web through p... more Semantic Web Services can be seen as remote Problem Solving Methods offered via the Web through platform and language independent interfaces. They can be seamlessly integrated to achieve more complex functionality by composing pre-existing software components. Despite technical advantages surrounding Semantic Web Services technologies, their perspective overlooks the commercial aspects of services in the real -non-IT -world, and is therefore incomplete and limiting. Real-world services -business activities such as insurances, medical services, ADSL etc -have nowadays an increasing social and economic importance. Important trends are the bundling of services and a growing customer-need orientation. Thus, there is a need for a computational background for describing real-world services and applying knowledgebased technologies for reasoning about them: configuring composite services and analysing them from a business perspective. We have developed ontologies and software tools to fill this gap, and applied them to industrial case studies. We present here a case study from the music industry, going from the analysis of a new business scenario to the development of an application called Xena that coordinates IT infrastructures in order to provide a profitable service that reflects major business principles. As opposed to currently proposed solutions in the Semantic Web Services community, our system is an automated implementation of a real-world service where important business decisions can be traced back.
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Papers by Carlos Pedrinaci