Search

The last engineering application presented here deals with secure communication, for which only the theoretical foundations are presented based on non-autonomous compound remodulating scheme. In this chapter, we show that the SD oscillator might be used to satisfy the requirements of security of communications using its chaotic characteristics. In the proposed scheme, the driving signal is generated by the combination of multiple state variables.

Web service composition enhanced by semantic technologies is currently one of the most hyped and addressed issues in Service Oriented Computing. This work focuses on both i) conditional composition, i.e., how to automate the composition of services that produces non-deterministic outcomes, and ii) consistent connections between web services (also known as data flows) in the composition. To this end, we suggest the joint use of semantic links and causal laws, respectively, in the area of Description Logics and AI planning. In more detail, an augmented and adapted version of the logic programming language Golog, i.e., sslGolog, is presented as a natural formalism not only for reasoning about the latter semantic links and causal laws, but also for automatically composing non-deterministic services. sslGolog operates as an offline interpreter that supports not only binary but also n-ary sensing services (i.e., services conditioned on their possible output parameters) to achieve conditional compositions of services. Lastly, sslGolog has been implemented and tested in the context of Telecommunication scenarios.

Most of the work on automated web service composition has focused so far on composition of stateful web services. This level of composition so-called "Process Level" considers web services with their internal and complex behaviors. At process level formal models such as State Transition Systems (STS from now) or Interface Automata are the most appropriate models to represent the internal behavior of stateful web services. However such models focus only on semantics of their behaviors and unfortunately not on semantics of actions and their parameters. In this paper, we suggest to extend the STS model, by following the WSMO based annotation for Abstract State Machine. This semantic enhancement of STS so called S2 TS will enable to model semantics of internal behaviors and semantics of their actions together with their input and output parameters. Secondly, we will focus on automated generation of data flow (or the process to perform automated assignments between parameter of services involved in a composition). Thus we do not restrict to assignments of exact parameters (which is practically never used in industrial scenario) but extend assignments to semantically close parameters (e.g., through a subsumption matching) in the same ontology. Our system is implemented and interacting with web services dedicated to Telecommunication scenarios. The preliminary evaluation results showed high efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed approach.

International audience; Automated composition of Web services or the process of forming new value-added Web services is one of the most promising challenges facing the Semantic Web today. Semantics enables Web service to describe capabilities together with their processes, hence one of the key elements for the automated composition of Web services. In this paper, we focus on the functional level of Web services i.e. services are described according to some input, output parameters semantically enhanced by concepts in a domain ontology. Web service composition is then viewed as a composition of semantic links wherein the latter links refer to semantic matchmaking between Web service parameters (i.e. outputs and inputs) in order to model their connection and interaction. The key idea is that the matchmaking enables, at run time, finding semantic compatibilities among independently defined Web service descriptions. By considering such a level of composition, a formal model to perform the automated composition of Web services i.e. Semantic Link Matrix, is introduced. The latter model is required as a starting point to apply problem-solving techniques such as regression (or progression)-based search for Web service composition. The model supports a semantic context in order to find correct, complete, consistent and robust plans as solutions. In this paper, an innovative and formal model for an AI (Artificial Intelligence) planning-oriented composition is presented. Our system is implemented and interacting with Web services which are dedicated to Telecom scenarios. The preliminary evaluation results showed high efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed approach. Read More: http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0218843009001975

Recent advances in networks, information and computation grids, and WWW have resulted in the proliferation of a multitude of physically distributed and autonomously developed Web services. This second part presents two key scenarios in B2B and B2C, the central function of services composition and orchestration, the languages and prominent technologies and lastly an industry and research roadmap.

Les avancees recentes des technologies « NTIC » (Nouvelles Technologies de l’Information et des Telecommunications) ont (re)-ouvert la voie a de nouvelles solutions pour le developpement d’architectures de traitement distribue dont l’impact industriel et commercial semble cette fois tres prometteur. En effet, la conjonction de la maturite des architectures logicielles a composants distribues, la tres forte penetration des technologies du Web et enfin la forte pression de l’economie mondiale ont conduit a une irresistible proliferation de composants physiques ou logiciels autonomes disponibles et distribues sur le web. Le W3C les definit comme des « services web » : « le service web est un systeme logiciel concu pour rendre interoperable la communication de Machine a Machine connectees en reseaux. Il est decrit par une interface (WSDL) et peut interagir avec d’autres systemes par l’envoi de messages (SOAP) typiquement vehicules par un protocole HTTP et une representation syntaxique XML conjointement a d’autres standards du Web ». Une tres importante fonctionnalite de ces systemes a base de services web est leur capacite a offrir des services composites construits a partir de ces composants physiques ou logiciels autonomes et reutilisables, formant une nouvelle infrastructure de traitement informatique distribue sur le Web. Profitant de l’infrastructure du web semantique, les services web dits « semantiques » ouvrent des perspectives d’avancees cles dans le traitement d’information couvrant un large spectre d’applications comme les services commerciaux (e-Enterprise, e-Business), la recherche scientifique (ex. grille de calcul « e-Science »), l’education (e-Learning) et enfin les services aux citoyens (e-Government, e-Democracy). Nous presentons dans ce tutoriel (en deux parties) un etat de l’art synthetique des langages et technologies associes aux services web semantiques, un panorama detaille des raisonnements de decouverte existants et des solutions majeures pour la composition de services web, pour terminer sur des exemples d’applications et une feuille de route.

Most of the work on automated Web service composition has focused so far on composition of stateful Web services. This level of composition so called “Process Level” considers Web services with their internal and complex behaviours. At process level formal models such as State Transition Systems (STS from now) or Interface Automata are the most appropriate models to represent the internal behaviour of stateful Web services. However such models focus only on semantics of their behaviours and unfortunately not on semantics of actions and their parameters. In this paper, we suggest to extending the STS model in the latter direction w.r.t the semantic Web. This semantic enhancement of STS so called S2TS will enable to model semantics of internal behaviours and semantics of their actions together with their input and output parameters. Secondly, we will focus on automated generation of data flow (or the process to perform automated assignments between services of a composition). Thus we do not restrict to assignments of exact parameters (which is practically never used in industrial scenario) but extend assignments to semantically close parameters (e.g., through a subsumption matching). Our system is implemented and interacting with Web services dedicated on Telecom scenarios. The preliminary evaluation results showed high efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Semantic Web technology is being increasingly applied in a large spectrum of applications in which domain knowledge is conceptualized and formalized (e.g., by means of an ontology) in order to support diversified and automated knowledge processing (e.g., reasoning) performed by a machine. Moreover, through an optimal combination of (cognitive) human reasoning and (automated) machine processing (mimicking reasoning); it becomes possible for humans and machines to share more and more complementary tasks. The spectrum of applications is extremely large and to name a few: corporate portals and knowledge management, e-commerce, e-work, e-business, healthcare, e-government, natural language understanding and automated translation, information search, data and services integration, social networks and collaborative filtering, knowledge mining, business intelligence and so on. From a social and economic perspective, this emerging technology should contribute to growth in economic wealth, but it must also show clear cut value for everyday activities through technological transparency and efficiency. The penetration of Semantic Web technology in industry and in services is progressing slowly but accelerating as new success stories are reported. In this chapter we present ongoing work in the cross-fertilization between industry and academia. In particular, we present a collection of application fields and use cases from enterprises which are interested in the promises of Semantic Web technology. The use cases are focused on the key knowledge processing components that will unlock the deployment of the technology in industry. The chapter ends with the presentation of the current state of the technology and future trends as seen by prominent actors in the field.

Most of the work on automated semantic Web service composition has focused so far on two main levels of composition i.e., functional level and process level composition (respectively FLC and PLC from now). The former level of composition considered Web services as atomic components that can be executed in a single request-response step whereas the latter level studies in more details the protocol and the behavioural features of Web services. Since PLC i.e., a time and particularly space consuming level of composition makes difficult the scalability of composition-based applications, it seems interesting to restrict the composition of stateful but (only) independent Web services. Such a restriction make possible the composition of a large number of Web services in industrial scenarios, the whole with convincing results. In this paper we suggest to study the advantages to apply FLC together with β-composition in order to perform an automated end to end composition of stateful and independent services. In particular we focus on computational complexity results concerning the two models of composition i.e., the well-known PLC vs. the newest FLC+β-composition. Moreover we prove that FLC is an interesting and necessary level of composition to significantly reduce computational complexity not only in space but also in time.

We claim that a key feature for correct and effective web service composition, and one that has largely been ignored,is the joint consideration of (semantic) causal links and causal laws, respectively in area of description logics (DL) and AI planning. In this paper we propose a means of specifying both causal links and laws into Web service composition by integrating DL reasoning and situation calculus. To this end an augmented and adapted version of the logic programming language Golog i.e., sclGolog is presented as a natural formalism not only for reasoning about the latter links and laws, but also for automatically composing services. sclGolog operates as an offline interpreter that supports n-ary sensing actions to retrieve conditional compositions of services. Lastly sclGolog has been implemented and tested in the context of telecommunication scenarios.

Recent advances in networks, information and computation grids, and the Web have resulted in the proliferation of a multitude of physically distributed and autonomously developed component Web services. The W3C Web Services Architecture defines "Web service as a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. It has an interface described in a machine processible format (specifically WSDL) and other systems can interact with it in a manner prescribed by its description using SOAP messages, typically conveyed using HTTP with an XML serialization in conjunction with other Web-related standards". So, web-services constitute a distributed computing infrastructure made up of many different systems trying to communicate over the Internet to virtually form a single logical system. Web-services are an effective means for linking loosely coupled systems together using a technology that does not bind to a particular component model, programming language or platform. Used according to the semantic web principles, semantic web services offer key integration capabilities in businesses as well as in scientific research over the Internet and corporate intranets, and so are applicable to a broad variety of applications including e-Enterprise, e-Business, e-Government, and e-Science. Correspondingly, the construction and deployment of composite services by combining and reusing independently developed component services is an important capability in the emerging Web-based computing infrastructure. In this presentation we will focus on a detailed analysis of existing discovery reasoning mechanisms and the current key solutions for composition of component services. We will conclude with current roadblocks and pilot applications.

The semantic web promises to bring automation to the areas of web service selection, discovery, composition, invocation. In this paper we introduce a means of facilitating automation of web service composition by exploiting semantic matchmaking between web service parameters (i.e., outputs and inputs) to enable their connections and interactions. The idea is that matchmaking functions are key components to find semantic compatibilities among independently web service descriptions. To this end, our approach extends existing methods (exact, plug-in, subsume, intersection and fail) with concept abduction to provide explanations of misconnections between web services. From this we generate web service compositions that realize the goal, discovering and satisfying semantic connections between Web services. Moreover a process of relaxing the hard constraints is introduced in case the composition process failed. Our system is implemented and interacting with web services dedicated on a France Telecom scenario.

Automated composition of Web services or the process of forming new value added Web services is one of the most promising challenges in the semantic Web service research area. Semantics is one of the key elements for the automated composition of Web services because such a process requires rich machine-understandable descriptions of services that can be shared. Semantics enables Web service to describe their capabilities and processes, nevertheless there is still some work to be done. Indeed Web services described at functional level need a formal context to perform the automated composition of Web services. The suggested model (i.e., Causal link matrix) is a necessary starting point to apply problem-solving techniques such as regression-based search for Web service composition. The model supports a semantic context in order to find a correct, complete, consistent and optimal plan as a solution. In this paper an innovative and formal model for an AI planning-oriented composition is presented.

Automation of Web service composition i.e., the process of forming new value added Web services is one of the most promising challenges in Web service research area. Such an automation does not involve only a richer semantic for Web service description but also reasoning processes about those descriptions. Semantics is supposed to be one of the key elements for the automation of Web service composition. Indeed semantic Web services enable a rich machine-understandable descriptions of their capabilities and processes in order to ease automation of processes such as discovery, selection and composition. In this paper one studies the functional level description of Web services and its impact on Web service composition hence the presentation of a formal model CLM (causal link matrix). The model supports a semantic context in order to find a correct, complete and consistent plan as an AI planning-based composition. The innovative and formal model follows a forward chaining-oriented composition. Moreover two methods of optimization (i.e., local-oriented and a global-oriented) of Web service composition are introduced to discover the best plan according to a semantic criterion i.e., the causal link between Web services

The automated composition of Web services is one of the most promising ideas and at the same time one of the most challenging research area for the taking off of service-oriented applications. It is widely recognised that one of the key elements for the automated composition of Web services is semantics, i.e. unambiguous descriptions of Web services capabilities and processes. However Web services described at capability level need a formal context to perform the automated composition of Web services. In this paper a TLB architecture (three levels based architecture) is presented to perform Web service composition. Moreover we introduce the composition process as a matchmaking of domains and solve the latter problem according to a formal model, i.e. the xCLM (eXtended causal link matrix) and a knowledge base of the domain

Semantic Web technology is being increasingly applied in a large spectrum of applications in which domain knowledge is conceptualized and formalized (e.g., by means of an ontology) in order to support diversified and automated knowledge processing (e.g., reasoning) performed by a machine. Moreover, through an optimal combination of (cognitive) human reasoning and (automated) machine reasoning and processing, it is possible for humans and machines to share complementary tasks. The spectrum of applications is extremely large and to name a few: corporate portals and knowledge manage-ment, e-commerce, e-work, e-business, healthcare, e-government, natural language understanding and automated translation, information search, data and services integration, social networks and collaborative filtering, knowledge mining, business intelligence and so on. From a social and economic perspective, this emerging technology should contribute to growth in economic wealth, but it must also show clear cut value for everyday activities through technological transparency and efficiency. The penetration of Semantic Web technology in industry and in services is progressing slowly but accelerating as new success stories are reported. In this paper and lecture we present ongoing work in the cross-fertilization between industry and academia. In particular, we present a collection of application fields and use cases from enterprises which are interested in the promises of Semantic Web technology. The use cases are detailed and focused on the key knowledge processing components that will unlock the deployment of the technology in the selected application field. The paper ends with the presentation of the current technology roadmap designed by a team of Academic and Industry researchers.

International audience; One of the challenging problems that Web service technology faces is the ability to effectively discover services based on their capabilities. We present an approach to tackling this problem in the context of description logics (DLs). We formalize service discovery as a new instance of the problem of rewriting concepts using terminologies. We call this new instance the best covering problem. We provide a formalization of the best covering problem in the framework of DL-based ontologies and propose a hypergraph-based algorithm to effectively compute best covers of a given request. We propose a novel matchmaking algorithm that takes as input a service request (or query) Q and an ontology T of services and finds a set of services called a “best cover” of Q whose descriptions contain as much common information with Q as possible and as little extra information with respect to Q as possible. We have implemented the proposed discovery technique and used the developed prototype in the context of the Multilingual Knowledge Based European Electronic Marketplace (MKBEEM) project.

Wavefront cleaning by single-mode fibers has proved to be efficient in optical-infrared interferometry to improve calibration quality. For instance, the FLUOR instrument has demonstrated the capability of fluoride glass single-mode fibers in this respect in the K and L bands. New interferometric instruments developped for the mid-infrared require the same capability for the 8-12 um range. We have initiated a program to develop single-mode fibers in the prospect of the VLTI mid-infrared instrument MIDI and of the ESA/DARWIN and NASA/TPF missions that require excellent wavefront quality. In order to characterize the performances of chalcogenide fibers we are developping, we have set up an experiment to measure the far-field pattern radiated at 10 um. In this paper, we report the first and promising results obtained with this new component., Comment: Conference "Interferometry for Optical Astronomy II", SPIE 2002

Electronic Commerce is based on the exchange of information between involved stakeholders, using the underlying telecommunication infrastructure. Business-to-Consumer applications enable providers to propagate their offers, and customers to find an offer, which matches their demand. A huge collection of frequently updated offers and customers, the electronic marketplace, reveals the task of matching the demand and supply processes in a commercial mediation environment. The aim of the Abrose project (Agent based BROkerage SErvices for electronic commerce) launched by ACTS Domain V is to design a brokerage system based on adaptive multi-agent architecture. The first part of this paper explains the reasons of using this technology and gives a brief survey of related works. The second part describes the broker architecture and examines the underlying basic self-organization and learning mechanisms used. The third part concerns a description of the main tasks the global system has to perform. Then how it provides advanced electronic brokerage services in three business domains (tourism, trading and teleworking) is described. The paper ends on the current state of the Abrose system development.

The concept of Electronic Service Brokerage is based on the use of new information technologies so as to provide a service capable of facilitating and organizing the relationship between customers and offer providers. It covers the following main features: collaborative agents for self-organizing multi-agent systems, multi-agent system for knowledge representation of the market place domain, dynamic knowledge capture for domain knowledge evolution, ACL from Fipa. In the first part we present the requirements for Abrose in using a Multi-Agent system for Brokerage. The second part presents briefly some agent tools in electronic commerce. The following three parts develop the architectural and functional choices in order to have the learning capabilities in Abrose.

The scope of this research is the use of an infrared sensor image, projected on a HUD, to land an A/C in 200 m RVR (CATIII) when the airfield is equipped only for CATI. The corresponding operational scenario requires that the pilot perform a second decision on direct visual cues at 50 ft (CATIII DH). This second decision is the core of the concept and appears as one of the most acute problems against the EVS concept. To initiate the reflection, we conducted an experiment to test the ability of pilots to take a correct decision in abnormal situations, using SXT part task simulator. Results show an overall correct behavior of the pilots despite a workload much higher than it would be in real operations. Their comments during and after each trial demonstrate a correct awareness of their situation with respect to the real runway at 50 ft (direct visual cues). However a few instances of incorrect decision occurred and are discussed. The conclusion is that it seems possible to propose a 2 decisions procedure, but further experiments are required. Lessons learned to set up these experiments are presented.