With the expansion of the Internet, the number of available Web services has increased. Web service clustering to identify functionally similar clusters has become a major approach to the efficient discovery of suitable Web services. In this study, we propose a Web service clustering approach that uses novel ontology learning and a similarity calculation method based on the specificity of an ontology in a domain with respect to information theory. Instead of using traditional methods, we generate the ontology using a novel method that considers the specificity and similarity of terms. The specificity of a term describes the amount of domain-specific information contained in that term. Although general terms contain little domain-specific information, specific terms may contain much more domain-related information. The generated ontology is used in the similarity calculations. New logic-based filters are introduced for the similarity-calculation procedure. If similarity calculations using the specified filters fail, then information-retrieval-based methods are applied to the similarity calculations. Finally, an agglomerative clustering algorithm, based on the calculated similarity values, is used for the clustering. We achieved highly efficient and accurate results with this clustering approach, as measured by improved average precision, recall, F-measure, purity and entropy values. According to the results, specificity of terms plays a major role when classifying domain information. Our novel ontology-based clustering approach outperforms comparable existing approaches that do not consider the specificity of terms.

One of the most important problems in web services application is the integration of different existing services into a new composite service. Existing work has the following disadvantages: (i) developers are often required to provide a composite service model first and perform formal verifications to check whether the model is correct. This makes the synthesis process of composite services semi-automatic, complex and inefficient; (ii) there is no assurance that composite services synthesized by using the fully-automatic approaches are correct; (iii) some approaches only handle simple composition problems where existing services are atomic. To address these problems, we propose a correct assurance approach for automatically synthesizing composite services based on finite state machine model. The syntax and semantics of the requirement model specifying composition requirements is also proposed. Given a set of abstract BPEL descriptions of existing services, and a composition requirement, our approach automatically generate the BPEL implementation of the composite service. Compared with existing approaches, the composite service generated by utilizing our proposed approach is guaranteed to be correct and does not require any formal verification. The correctness of our approach is proved. Moreover, the case analysis indicates that our approach is feasible and effective.

The globalization of commerce has increased the importance of retrieving and updating complex and distributed information efficiently. Web services currently show that the most promise for building distributed application systems and model-driven architecture is a new approach to developing such applications. The expanding scale and complexity of enterprise information systems (EISs) under distributed computing environments has made sharing and exchanging data particularly challenging. Data services are applications tailored specifically for information oriented tasks to deal with business service requirements, and are heavily dependent on the distributed architecture of consumer data processing. The implementation of a data service can eliminate inconsistency among various application systems in the exchange of data. This paper proposes a data-oriented model-driven developmental framework to deal with these issues, in which a platform independent model (PIM) is divided into a service model, a logic data model, and a service composition model. We also divide a platform specific model (PSM) into a physical data model and a data service model. In this development method, we define five meta-models and outline a set of rules governing the transformation from PIMs into PSMs. A code generator is also included to transform each PSM into the application code. We include a case study to demonstrate the feasibility and merits of the proposed development framework with a case study.

In recent years, there has been an increasing demand with regard to available elemental services provided by independent firms for compositing new services. Currently, however, whenever it is difficult to maintain the required level of quality of a new composite web service, assignment of the new computer's resources as provisioning at the data center is not always effective, especially in the area of performance for composite web service providers. Thus, a new approach might be required. This paper presents a new control method aiming to maintain the performance requirements for composite web services. There are three aspects of our method that are applied: first of all, the theory of constraints (TOC) proposed by E.M. Goldratt ; secondly, an evaluation process in the non-linear feed forward controlling method: and finally multiple trials in applying policies with verification. In particular, we will discuss the architectural and theoretical aspects of the method in detail, and will show the insufficiency of combining the feedback controlling approach with TOC as a result of our evaluation.

While the Secure Socket Layer or Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) is assumed to provide secure communications over the Internet, many web applications utilize basic or digest authentication of Hyper Text Transport Protocol (HTTP) over SSL/TLS. Namely, in the scheme, there are two different authentication schemes in a session. Since they are separated by a layer, these are not convenient for a web application. Moreover, the scheme may also cause problems in establishing secure communication. Then we provide a scheme of authentication binding between SSL/TLS and HTTP without modifying SSL/TLS protocols and its implementation, and we show the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.

Platforms of hosting services are expected to provide a virtual private computing infrastructure with guaranteed levels of performance to support each reservation request sent by a client. To enhance the performance of the computing infrastructure in responding to reservation requests, the platforms are required to reserve, coordinate, and control globally distributed computing and network resources across multiple domains. This paper proposes Grid Network Service -- Web Services Interface version 2 (GNS-WSI2). GNS-WSI2 is a resource-reservation messaging protocol that establishes a client-server relationship. A server is a kind of management system in the management plane, and it allocates available network resources within its own domain in response to each reservation request from a client. GNS-WSI2 has the ability to reserve network resources rapidly and reliably over multiple network domains. This paper also presents the results of feasibility tests on a transpacific testbed that validate GNS-WSI2 in terms of the scalable reservation of network resources over multiple network domains. In the tests, two computing infrastructures over multiple network domains are dynamically provided for scientific computing and remote-visualization applications. The applications are successfully executed on the provided infrastructures.

To develop a network management system (NMS) more easily, the authors developed an application programming interface (API) for configuring network devices. Because this API is used in a Java development environment, an NMS can be developed by utilizing the API and other commonly available Java libraries. It is thus possible to easily develop an NMS that is highly compatible with other IT systems. And operations that are generated from the API and that are exchanged between the NMS and network devices are based on NETCONF, which is standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as a next-generation network-configuration protocol. Adopting a standardized technology ensures that the NMS developed by using the API can manage network devices provided from multi-vendors in a unified manner. Furthermore, the configuration items exchanged over NETCONF are specified in an object-oriented design. They are therefore easier to manage than such items in the Management Information Base (MIB), which is defined as data to be managed by the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). We actually developed several NMSs by using the API. Evaluation of these NMSs showed that, in terms of configuration time and development time, the NMS developed by using the API performed as well as NMSs developed by using a command line interface (CLI) and SNMP. The NMS developed by using the API showed feasibility to achieve "autonomic network management" and "high interoperability with IT systems."

Current Web services testing techniques are unable to assure the desired level of trustworthiness, which presents a barrier to WS applications in mission and business critical environments. This paper presents a framework that assures the trustworthiness of Web services. New assurance techniques are developed within the framework, including specification verification via completeness and consistency checking, test case generation, and automated Web services testing. Traditional test case generation methods only generate positive test cases that verify the functionality of software. The proposed Swiss Cheese test case generation method is designed to generate both positive and negative test cases that also reveal the vulnerability of Web services. This integrated development process is implemented in a case study. The experimental evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of this approach. It also reveals that the Swiss Cheese negative testing detects even more faults than positive testing and thus significantly reduces the vulnerability of Web services.

The emergence of intelligent and sophisticated attack techniques makes web services more vulnerable than ever which are becoming an important business tool in e-commerce. Many techniques have been proposed to remove the security vulnerabilities, yet have limitations. This paper proposes an adaptive mechanism for a web-server intrusion-tolerant system (WITS) to prevent unknown patterns of attacks by adapting known attack patterns. SYN flooding attacks and their adaptive defense mechanisms are simulated as a case study to evaluate the performance of the proposed adaptation mechanism.

In the 1960's, the problems of distributed systems management did not exist. Systems were centralized and typically housed in one facility. Over time, however, the power, complexity and connectivity of the computer systems and networks evolved. Today, businesses are dependent on their compute and networking infrastructures to operate and survive. These infrastructures are geographically and functionally distributed, and their management is critical. This paper discusses how distributed systems management has evolved, and what the future may bring.

Web Services (WS) have received significant attention recently. Delivering Quality of Service (QoS) on the Internet is a critical and significant challenge for WS community. This article proposes a Web Services Testing Framework (WSTF) for WS participates to perform WS testing. WSTF provides three main distributed components: test master, test agents and test monitor. Test master manages scenarios and generates test scripts. It initiates WS testing by sending test scripts to test agents. Test agents dynamically bind and invoke the WS. Test monitors capture synchronous/asynchronous messages sent and received, attach timestamp, and trace state change information. The benefit to use WSTF is that the user only needs to specify system scenarios based on the system requirements without needing to write test code. To validate the proposed approach, this paper used the framework to test a supply-chain system implemented using WS.