Seminar: Trends in Service Oriented Computing - Service Ecosystems by Cloud Supp

58316305
4
Hajautetut järjestelmät ja tietoliikenne
Syventävät opinnot
Vuosi Lukukausi Päivämäärä Periodi Kieli Vastuuhenkilö
2016 syksy 06.09-13.12. 1-2 Englanti Lea Kutvonen

Luennot

Aika Huone Luennoija Päivämäärä
Ti 14-16 C220 Lea Kutvonen 06.09.2016-18.10.2016
Ti 14-16 C220 Lea Kutvonen 01.11.2016-13.12.2016

Yleistä

News


  • Due to overlapping responsibilities, we need to postpone the start of the seminar by a week. Thus, the first meeting (getting organised and selecting topics) will be on Tue 13.9 instead. Some reading assignment will be given to be completed by Tue 13.9, so please come back to this page around 6-9.9 for further details.

 

Trends in Service oriented computing

Service oriented architecture (SOA) refers to a commonly known architecture pattern where clients and servers are loosely coupled and find each other at runtime based on the service type required, instead of the server identity. Service oriented computing (SOC) is an extension of that paradigm and brings in business process management to specify how the clients and servers actually communicate with each other.

Current trends in SOC include advanced methods of business process management (such as declarative processes) and adaptive case management, as well as interoperability and integration of services. 

The terms service integration and  service interoperability are more or less synonyms in research literature. In both cases, the aim is to create a temporary or long-term composition or collaboration of services that potentially are provided by different organisations (governmental organisations, private companies, groups). Integration refers to the need of enforcing that composite service to perform a long-term activity with a clear goal, just as if it were a single system. Interoperability term is used when the autonomy of the involved organsations is emphasised. Dependind on the literature, one or the other is used. Other related terms include enterprise interoperability, refering to the need of organisations to get work done together, mostly with the same technical solutions as in service interoperability.

Basically, the aims fall into a few simple goals:

 

  • interoperability (or integration) refers to the state of affairs under which the partners (services) are able to meaningfully conduct collaborative work together; this involves capability of exchanging messages for knowledge exchange, for proposals and commitments, establishing trust, for example. 
  • interoperability is layered into technical, semantic and pragmatic interoperability;
    • technical interoperability covers physical means to transport messages,
    • semantic interoperability covers similar interpretation capabilities for the data exchanged in messages, operation names, and service type related details, while
    • pragmatic interoperability covers similar enough understanding of joint business process and private decisions on willingness to participate such processes inlucing trust and privacy needs.

Service ecosystems

Beyond the advancements of SOC alone, the alignment of SOC-based computing platform to  business needs, organisational evolution and strategical governance must be addressed, in order to create meaningful and efficient interoperability between organisations.

A service ecosystem is a socio-technical environment that supports the creation of new networked business models,  contracting facilities for collaboration cases, trust and privacy management, breach detection and recovery facilities and means of governing the ecosystem processes (both on individual collaboration case level and on holistic ecosystem property level).  A service ecosystem consists of the member organisations, the services they provide for each others use, the collaboration cases they run, and the models and the collaboration management processes and plataforms involved.

There are several types of concepts that can be considered as service ecosystems, like business networks, virtual organisation breeding environments, open service ecosystems, closed software ecosystems. The typical differencies include the methods of becoming a member in the ecosystem, and the requirements on using certain computing platforms, or exploitation of model driven engineering and integration (MDE, MDI) practices.

The evolution of SOC facilities and web service provision towards service ecosystem is a slowly advancing process that carries a significant role in the long run.

Cloud services

Cloud service is a modern buzzword. Clouds providers offer flexible leasing of hardware capacity, data storaging, or running particular application level services for cllient organisations. 

Beyond the basic SaaS facilities of common cloud services an extending facility layer of SOC can be built: it can include the key facilities for SOC and service ecosystems, while the basic cloud platform would provide an extensible ESB (enterprise service bus) and shared location for larger databases or knowledge bases to support artificial intelligence needed for business decisions.

Seminar scope: how cloud and service ecosystems meet?

This seminar studies how the cloud services can be used as a platform for establishing service ecosystems and how different cloud environments can interoperate with each other. We remove the myths of cloud services being sufficient for ecosystem support as such, and review some common protocols as case studies of the more generic service ecosystem framework.

The work in the seminar requires good knowledge on either SOC / service ecosystems or cloud services, so that each student has only one of this large aspects to learn, so we get in depth understanding of the differences and potential for combinations of the concepts.  The good knowledge can be achieved by taking the relevant courses offered at the department (or elsewhere). 

Relevant case studies for seminar papers may be found for example at the area of Internet of Things.

Literature

Compulsory papers to be read before the opening lecture of the seminar will be posted here in August (at latest). At the same time, potential seminar topics will be posted.