The paper presents a software framework that was designed and implemented within the FP6 IST EU project Access-eGov to integrate governmental services of various types, i.e. on-line (electronic and web services), as well as off-line (i.e. traditional, face-toface) services by means of enhancing the service description with semantic information. The user-centric approach of life events is employ...

We perform trace validation of LTL formulæ by exclusively using readily-available XML technologies. We first provide a translation between LTL and a subset of the XML Query Language XQuery, and show that an efficient validation of LTL formulæ can be achieved through the evaluation of XQuery expressions. Moreover, since LTL maps to a small fragment of XQuery, we show that that extending it to LT...

A Web Service can represent a unit of business logic that an organization exposes to other organizations on the World Wide Web. The recent efforts of the industry to agree on a common definition for Web Services resulted in the Web Services (WS) standard that governs how one defines, advertises and uses Web Services. Composition of primitive Web Services into complex ones presents the next chal...

Evaluating the reliability of loosely coupled Software as a Service through the paradigm of a cluster-based and non-cluster-based web server is considered to be an important attribute for the service delivery and execution. We proposed a novel method for measuring the reliability of Software as a Service execution through load testing. The fault count of the model against the stresses of users ...

With increased sophistication and standardization of modeling languages and execution platforms supporting business process management (BPM) across traditional boundaries, has come the need for consolidated insights into their exploitation from a business perspective. Key technology developments in BPM bear this out, with several web services-related initiatives investing significant effort in ...

We propose the use of structured natural language (English) in specifying service choreographies, focusing on the what rather than the how of the required coordination of participant services in realising a business application scenario. The declarative approach we propose uses the OMG standard Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Rules (SBVR) as a modelling language. The service choreography a...

Choreography conformance and contract compliance have been widely studied in the context of synchronous communication. In this paper we approach a more realistic scenario in which the messages containing the invocations are queued in the called service. More precisely, we study the foundational aspects of contract compliance in a language independent way by just taking contracts to be finite la...

The Lightweight Coordination Calculus (LCC) is a compact choreography language based on process calculus. LCC is a directly executable specification and can therefore be dynamically distributed to a group of peers for enactment at run-time; this offers flexibility and allows peers to coordinate in open systems without prior knowledge of an interaction. This paper contributes to the body of chor...

Although stemming from very different research areas, MultiAgent Systems (MAS) and Service Oriented Computing (SOC) share common topics, problems and settings. A common problem is the need to formally verify the conformance of individuals (Agents or Web Services) to common rules and specifications (resp. Protocols/Choreographies), in order to provide a coherent behaviour and to reach the user’s...

In the context of Service Oriented Computing, contracts are descriptions of the externally observable behaviour of services. Given a group of collaborating services, their contracts can be used to verify whether their composition is sound, i.e., the services are compliant. In this paper, we relate the theory of contracts with the notion of choreography conformance, used to check whether an aggr...