The paper discusses a framework for managing and evaluating ICT-enabled service portfolios along the service design phase. The framework adopts a service reuse perspective and it is made up of i) a model for the representation of a repository of services, ii) a model for the definition of a service portfolio representing current production lines of a service provider organization, iii) a set of metrics for service portfolio evaluation, and iv) a tool supporting managers in decision making for the achievement of design objectives. The proposed metrics and the tool are supposed to allow decision makers to get an improved view of the service design process. Furthermore, the framework supports managers in decision making for the achievement of production objectives as well as operational strategies, resulting in potential reuse initiatives, likewise. To provide evidence of the impacts of the proposed framework, experimental activities are discussed focusing on a real life case study, referring to an Italian small size service provider. (C) 2015 Published by Elsevier Inc.

At the state of art, service ecosystems are seldom considered under a holistic perspective, whereas silos oriented perspectives prevail (the organizational level, the ICT level, and so on). Due to this separation of concerns, it is difficult to provide comprehensive solutions to plan service oriented initiatives combining models and solution developed at different levels. A significant problem in this scenario comes from the multi-faceted relationship between real services, which impact on the information system as a whole, and Service Oriented Computing (SOC), which is a paradigm to support ICT-based service automation and management. In this paper, we discuss an interpretative approach aiming at bridging the gap between services and SOC. The approach is based on a conceptual model called eGora*. The discussion is supported by a real life scenario based on previous on the field experimentations.

We present a Heterogenous Data Quality Methodology (HDQM) for Data Quality (DQ) assessment and improvement that considers all types of data managed in an organization, namely structured data represented in databases, semistructured data usually represented in XML, and unstructured data represented in documents. We also define a meta-model in order to describe the relevant knowledge managed in the methodology. The different types of data are translated in a common conceptual representation. We consider two dimensions widely analyzed in the specialist literature and used in practice: Accuracy and Currency. The methodology provides stakeholders involved in DQ management with a complete set of phases for data quality assessment and improvement. A non trivial case study from the business domain is used to illustrate and validate the methodology.

In medium-big enterprise it is quite typical that the database architecture is defined through a sequence of projects and realizations that result a number of different and sometime overlapping data sources. This trend is worsened by merger and acquisition activities that add in existing data architecture new data sources from external organizations. Data fragmentation reduces significantly the possibility to exploit organizational information assets and it needs the building of a data integration architecture. This architecture allows the organization to access to data stored by heterogeneous data sources and to manage updates through a unified view of this data. In this paper we present an original framework able to support the evolution of data architecture by identifying the optimal solution that maximize the quality of the overall architecture within a given cost threshold. In particular, we focus on Publish and Subscribe as solution for data architecture.

In order to achieve higher data quality targets, organizations need to identify the data quality dimensions that are affected by poor quality, assess them, and evaluate which improvement techniques are suitable to apply. Data quality literature provides methodologies that support complete data quality management by providing guidelines that organizations should contextualize and apply to their scenario. Only a few methodologies use the cost-benefit analysis as a tool to evaluate the feasibility of a data quality improvement project. In this paper, we present an ontological description of the cost-benefit analysis including the most important contributes already proposed in literature. The use of ontologies allows the knowledge improvement by means of the identification of the interdependencies between costs and benefits and enables different complex evaluations. The feasibility and usefulness of the proposed ontology-based tool has been tested by means of a real case study.

In this paper, we outline the HDQ meta-model and exemplify its application to a realistic organizational scenario within a methodology for assessing and improving corporate data quality. The main aim of the HDQ meta-model is to support the modeling of the information resources used within an organization towards the application of comprehensive but yet lean methodologies of data quality improvement. The approach allowed by HDQ meta-model is aimed at addressing the scalable and incremental management of the quality of data represented in either structured, semi- structure or unstructured information sources.

Ontology visualization and exploration is not a trivial task as many issues can affect the effectiveness of interactions. As ontologies are, in the general case, quite connected graphs where concepts are the nodes and semantic relationships the edges, the problems include space allocation, edge superposition, scene over-crowding, etc. In this paper we propose a solution for the visualization and the exploration of ontologies using a 3-dimensional space, where information is represented on a 3D view-port enriched by visual cues. Our visualization tool aims at tackling representation issues of ontology models (as space allocation or the completeness and read-ability of displayed information) by adopting different views, at different granularities, in order to grant a constant navigability of the rendered model. Each provided view represents semantic information according to a different, task-based visualization paradigm, at a suitable level of detail. Besides being primarily implemented as a Protégé plug-in, the proposed solution (named OntoSphere3D) is designed to be a reusable visualization component within Semantic Web applications; in fact, every scene can be exploited as a standalone facility that provides access to ontological data through an intuitive and appealing 3D interface. A case-study, is presented, where re-usability is demonstrated by integrating the OntoSphere3D visualization inside an Eclipse-based tool for Web Service design (called Web Services Design Tool) developed by some of the authors in the context of another research project.

Web services are increasingly used as an effective means to create and streamline processes and collaborations among governments, businesses, and citizens. As the number of available Web services is steadily increasing, there is a growing interest in providing methodologies that address the design of Web services according to specific qualities of service (QoS) rather than functional descriptions only. In this paper, we present WSMoD (Web Services MOdeling Design), a methodology that explicitly addresses this issue. Furthermore, we exploit general knowledge available on services, expressed by ontologies describing services, their qualities, and the context of use, to help the designer in expressing service requirements. Ontologies are used to acquire knowledge among the entities involved in service design and to check the consistency of the Web service. The discussion of a QoS-based Web service design within a real case study bears evidence of the potentials of WSMoD.

Modern software components are asked to deliver their services over different communication channels and devices to support mobile and ubiquitous applications. Therefore, development processes that traditionally address only functional requirements must be revised by considering new aspects: quality of service (QoS), user profiles and technical characteristics of channels. Moreover, services obtained by the composition of simple services offered by different providers are getting growing importance. In this paper, we propose a hybrid technique to deal with quality evaluation in composite Web Service design. This work extends and integrates the single-service design process presented in previous papers.

Usually, the process of development of services available as web applications considers only functional requirements. Since, an evergrowing number of users take advantage of different kinds of communication channels and devices, this process must be revised by considering new aspects: quality of service (QoS), user profiles and technical characteristics of channels. In previous works, we proposed a methodology that provides a rational to formalize the redesign process of existing services to support multi-channel access. This paper extends our approach and highlights how the QoS dimensions can be considered quantitatively in the different phases of the methodology. Moreover, an hybrid approach that allows the QoS evaluation, during the development of a service, is

This paper presents a first attempt to realize a methodological framework supporting the most relevant phases of the design of a value-added service. A value-added service is defined as a functionality of an adaptive and multi-channel information system obtained by composing services offered by different providers. The framework has been developed as part of the MAIS project. The MAIS framework focuses on the following phases of service life cycle: requirements analysis, design, deployment, run time use and negotiation. In the first phase, the designer elicits, validates and negotiates service requirements according to social and business goals. The design phase is in charge of modelling services with an enhanced version of UML, augmented with new features developed within the MAIS project. The deployment phase considers the network infrastructure and, in particular, provides an approach to implement and coordinate the execution of services from different providers. In the run time use and negotiation phase, the MAIS methodology provides support to the optimal selection and quality renegotiation of services and to the dynamic evaluation of management costs. The paper describes the MAIS methodological tools available for different phases of service life cycle and discusses the main guidelines driving the implementation of a service management architecture, called reflective architecture, that complies with the MAIS methodological approach.

In questo documento sono presentate alcune tecniche per la defin izione di viste sui processi e tecniche per gestire automaticamente le variazioni della viste dovute a modifiche di conte sto