Dr. Liang-Jie Zhang is a research staff member and the chair of the Services Computing Professional Interest Community (PIC) at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. He has been leading Service-Oriented Architecture and Web Services Research for industry solutions and services since 2001. He has 20 issued patents and additional 30 patent applications in the areas of e-business, Web services, rich media, data management, and information appliances, and has published more than 80 technical papers in journals, book chapters and conference proceedings. Dr. Zhang chairs IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Services Computing and serves as Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Web Services Research (JWSR), which has been included in EI Compendex since 2005. He was the general co-chair of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS 2005) and the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC 2005).

Don't Miss The Top Academic Conference on Services: the 2007 IEEE Congress on Services (SERVICES 2007)

SERVICES 2007 is going to celebrate the third gathering of IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS 2007) and IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC 2007) along with other events to explore the science and technology of Services in the field of Services Computing, which was promoted by IEEE Computer Society in 2003.  You can find more information about IEEE SERVICES 2007 from this link (http://conferences.computer.org/services). It is sponsored by IEEE Computer Society, which is an educational, non-profit organization, and is the world’s largest and oldest professional association of computer scientists and engineers. 

SERVICES 2007 will be held on July 9-13, 2007, Slat Lake City, Utah, USA. The conference hotel is Salt Lake City Marriott Downtown. Don't miss this great opportunity to meet the worldwide leaders and colleagues in the field. Sign up today.

In addition to keynotes, panels, tutorials, SERVICES 2007 includes the following key events:

-IEEE Services Computing Contest 2007
The 2007 IEEE International Services Computing \Contest (SCContest 2007, http://iscc.servicescomputing.org/2007/) will focus on using the SOA methodologies and tools to better solve business issues facing today and bringing together world-wide talented students for the industry wave. The top six winners of the contest will be announced at SERVICES 2007. In addition, the technical papers of the winners will be published in the proceedings of IEEE SCC 2007.

-2007 IEEE SOA Industry Summit
The 2007 IEEE SOA Industry Summit encourages industry people to submit presentations and two-page papers instead of 8-page research reports. The accepted papers will be published in the SCC 2007 Proceedings. The theme of IEEE SOA Industry Summit is Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). 

-IEEE Services Computing Workshops (SCW 2007)
SERVICES 2007 will include a set of workshops focusing on various themes of Services Computing and Web services. Most of the accepted workshops will be held on September 12-13, 2007 at SERVICES 2007. All the accepted workshop papers will be published in the proceedings of IEEE Services Computing Workshops.

-IEEE Ph.D. Symposium on Services Computing
SERVICES 2007 will provide the IEEE Ph.D. Symposium on Services Computing as a forum encouraging Ph.D. students and holders to report on-going or completed work. All the accepted papers and demos will be published in the proceedings of IEEE Services Computing Workshops (SCW 2007) as a special section.

-IEEE Symposium on SOA Standards
SERVICES 2007 will favor the 2007 IEEE Symposium on SOA Standards as a forum for international researchers and practitioners to discuss and establish standards around SOA. All the accepted papers will be published in the proceedings of IEEE Services Computing Workshops as a special section for IEEE SOA standards.

-The two flagship conferences, ICWS & SCC 2007, are strategically part of SERVICES 2007. ICWS 2007 and SCC 2007 will continue to focus on the high-quality research and industry paper sessions.         

Services Computing: Foundational Discipline of the Modern Services Science!

"What's the relationship between Services Computing discipline and SSME at IBM Research?" I have been asked this type of question by lots of professors and students. I just wanted to share with you some facts I know. It is my personal consumption report about this topic. It may not represent IBM's view:-). IEEE Computer Society officailly lanunched "Services Computing" technical committee and community in 2003. In 2004, IBM Research officially adopted Services Computing as a research discipline (in Computer Science and Engineering, and Mathmatical Science) and created the Services Computing Professional Interest Community (PIC), which is the first dedicated research community to support Services Innovation Research at IBM.

Services Sciences, Management and Engineering (SSME) was an acadmic initiative led by IBM Almaden Research Center in 2006. "In May 2004, this group suggested that an entirely new academic discipline may be called for - first roughly described as services science at a summit held at IBM. Subsequent meetings have caused the discipline to evolve into the more appropriate Services Sciences, Management and Engineering title now used. " (Source: SSME Web Site)

In late 2006, IBM Research published its latest brochure "Innovation Matters @ IBM Research" (Source: http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research.nsf/pages/r.ai.brochure2006.html). Services Computing research and academic activitities include Services Technologies, Services Solutions, Services in Organizations, and SSME (download Services Computing section in IBM Reserach brochure). SSME was one of the academic activities under IBM’s Services Computing discipline.

From scope perspective, SSME is more focused on Services in Organizations that deal with people and organization aspects in a services business. Services Computing maily covers the science and technology on how to create and leverage computing and software technology to build, operate, and manage services business in an effective and efficient way. You can find more information about collaborating with IBM Research from University Collaboration page. IBM Research is looking for collaboration with you to roll out Services Computing from courses delivery and research perspectives. IBM Faculty Awards and IBM Fellowship awards are given in the field of Services Computing.

In academia, Services University has been launched to cover the whole spectrum of science and technology on how to create and leverage computing and software technology to build, operate, and manage services business in an effective and efficient way. In summary, Services Computing has become the foundational discipline that focuses on fundamental theories, algorithms, technologies, and methodologies used for modernizing services industry.

Trend 1: Business Centric SOA

Business Value: SOA starts with business!
Componentization: An SOA is a component model that inter-relates services (the different functional units of an application or an enterprise) through well-defined interfaces and protocols between these services.
Flexibility and Simplification: The interface is defined in a neutral manner that should be independent of the hardware platform, the operating system, and the programming language the service is implemented in.
Loose Coupling: Service-oriented architectures are not new, but an alternative model to the more traditionally tightly-coupled object-oriented models that have emerged in the past decades.
End-to-End Solution View: Business process, security, trust, and reliable messaging should play a significant role in any SOA.
Various Realizations: Web services is just one technology to realize an SOA. An SOA may not use Web services.
Expanding Web Services: from simple client-server model to any service-to-service (S2S) interaction model.

The following picture illustrates how SOA is used to bridge the gap between business and IT architecture at enterprise level, process level and infrastructure level.

The following figure is a modified Enterprise Architecture (EA) method which is based on open group & enhanced Telecom Operations Map (eTOM). This EA method is represented in a two-dimension chart. The horizontal dimension represents EA design phases with a governance model supervising all phases. The vertical dimension represents important areas in the business of an enterprise which are customer facing, e.g., Service Fulfillment, Service Assurance, and Service Billing. Within each step of the EA process, multiple iterations may be needed, taking various areas into consideration. You will find more information about this from my book "Services Computing" in the coming months.

Trend 2: Multi-Dimensional Services Modeling

Challenges of Web Services Modeling
Both WSDL and BPEL4WS only focus on describing static information about a Web service. WSDL describes the basic static information about a Web service, such as its abstract interface, bindings to particular message formats and protocols, as well as the location of the service. BPEL4WS describes the invocation relationships between Web service components within a business process. However, Web services inherently contain other information that should be covered, such as their dynamic information and relationships with each other.

Three-Dimensional Web Services Modeling

In this figure, Static information describes the descriptions of a Web service. Dynamic information describes dynamic behaviors of a Web service, including invocation history of a Web service and some Quality of Services (QoS) measurement, (e.g., its reliability in a specific time frame or its successful access rate). Relationship information describes relationships among Web services and their corresponding service providers.

Trend 3: Federated Services Discovery Framework

Web services with business functions have been gradually exposed on the Internet. A few typical example services include Amazon's Web services, Google's Search and Maps Web services, and eBay's PayPal services. So exploring Web services based on business needs from different registries is becoming a nice research and development topic. The federated framework shown in the following figure  provides a uniform interface for both UDDI-based and WSIL-based service discovery.  

It hides the complexity and differences between UDDI and WSIL programming models. Search over UDDI registries and WSIL chains becomes transparent to application developers. An application developer can use the same interface for any service searching and write all search queries in one document. It is noted that the example UDDI registries or WSIL documents could be replaced by any Web services or business services registries.

Again, how to build a scaleable "Google" type of search portal for Web services is a value creation challenge. I had this idea in 2001:-). A starting point you can look at is the IBM Business Explorer for Web Services (BE4WS).

Trend 4: Open Standards Moving from Infrastructure to Business Services and Solutions

The current treand in terms of standards is that open standards are moving from infrastructure level (current Web Services stack) to SOA-based Business Services and Solutions level shown in the following figure. It is time for the industry to create SOA standards to support reusable, reconfigurable, and extensible business integration and industry-specific solutions!

(The current stack was quoted from a public presentation given by Danny Sabbah in early 2003. I added the emerging stack when I was the chief architect of industrial standards at IBM Sofwatre Group.)

SOA Reference Architecture (SOA-RA) shown below partitions an SOA-based system into a reusable architecture components. Standards organizations OASIS has created SOA Reference Model, which only address the semantic representation of services layer in the following stack. As the first dedicated SOA standards team, IEEE Standards Association SOA Working Group has been working on SOA Solution Reference Architecture based on the following IBM's SOA Solution Stack (S3). Once the specification is released, I will add a link in this blog. On Sept. 22, 2006, the IEEE SOA Standards Workshop (Open to all ICWS/SCC participants) was held in conjunction with IEEE ICWS 2006 and SCC 2006.

IEEE SERVICES 2007 will favor the 2007 IEEE Symposium on SOA Standards as a forum for international researchers and practitioners to discuss and establish standards around SOA. All the accepted papers will be published in the proceedings of IEEE Services Computing Workshops (SCW 2007) as a special section for IEEE SOA standards.

Trend 5: Adaptive Services Invocation

In the conceptual SOA framework shown below, invocation is one of the three major operations. In the realization of an SOA, invocation is the direct way of getting the capabilities of a Web service. So adptive services invocation has become a major topic in today's services discovery, and composite application areas. However, in the common service invocation scenario, there are challenges for automatic invocation because what the number actually represent in a Web service. In addition, the unit of the measurement for the input/output parameters are not captrured in the current WSDL specification.

In order to address adaptive method signature construction, I would like to share with an example approach: MetaWSDL (SCI 2002, my paper "Automatic Method Signature Adaptation Framework for Dynamic Web Service Invocation"). I sumarize some of its idea as follows:

• MetaWSDL formally define the semantic information of Web service interfaces and enable automatic parameter adaptation
• MetaWSDL is introduced as a superset of WSDL and is complementary to the current WSDL by enriching the semantic definitions of Web services.
• As a complement of WSDL, MetaWSDL documents should be published to the Internet and be associated with the original WSDL documents. (e.g. WSIL as a tool)

It is noted that MetaObject is responsible for transformations between current units and target units. It could be very useful if we standardnize a library of MetaObjects in various scenarios.

Trend 6: Services Relationship Modeling

In order to represent comprehensive SOA-oriented business relationships, the following layered model is introduced. The raltionaships are defined at Business Entity level, Business Services level, Web Services level (interface description), and Operation level (implementation). This model is an extension to the Web Services Relationship Language (WSRL) I introduced in 2002.

The reason of Services Relationship Modeling is moving to become a hotspot is that it intends to build a dynamic and extensible solution context by defining a richer and broader range of relationships at various levels oriented for dynamic business service integration.

Trend 7: Composite Business Services and Composite Applications on Demand

Aggregating services into a business process or application based on requirements (including businesss goals) has become an industry trend these days. The biggest challenge of enabling composite business services or composite applications on Demand is to figure out a right way to represente business requirements that SHOULD be used to facilitate the discovery and composition of services.

From business requirements modeling perspective, the following aspects should be covered.

• Finance consideration
• Environment (User Interface, Data, Function/Service Composition, Event and Messages)
• Asset lifecycle governance
• Project management consideration

A initial version of this type of business requirements modeling has been introduced in "Business Process Outsourcing Language (BPOL)" since 2002. A framework of requirements driven business services composition framework,Web Services Outsourcing Manager (WSOM),was delivered on IBM alphaWorks. The following figure illustrates an on demand composite business services creation framework.

I am quoting the description of WSOM to explain the high-level ideas of this picture. "Web Services Outsourcing Manager (WSOM) is a framework that enables dynamic composition of Web service flow based on customer requirements. The customer requirements are analyzed and optimized to generate an annotation document for business process outsourcing. This service-oriented architecture allows effective searching for appropriate Web services and integration of them into one composite Web service for performing a specific task. Meanwhile, it provides a seamless, integrated framework for composition of template-based business processes and event-driven business processes."

"A two-level mechanism for selection of services is used to configure a new business process that consists of a set of Web services. In order to narrow down the available service list, first-level services are selected by WSOM's advanced Web services discovery engine, whose search criteria are created automatically by the requirement annotation document. In order to match the capability and construct the best business process for the customer, second-level services are selected in accordance with a global optimization algorithm. As a result, the business process constructed by WSOM could be adapted to different Web service flow languages, such as WSFL, BPEL4WS, and so forth. "

However, bringing this type of innovation into "manufacturing services" model is still a challenging topic for all of us. As we know, full automation of this composite services creation process is extremly hard. I always suggest that we should start with people assisted automation mechanism to create values in the composite applications space.

Trend 8: Integration of Web 2.0 and SOA (Data Aggregation Based Collaboration)

The integration of Web 2.0 with SOA is another great opportunity. The common thought in this space is that Web 2.0 is treated as a global SOA over Internet. Web 2.0 a nice way of implementing user interactions (e.g. using Ajax) with SOA-based systems. The other major trend I would like to introduce here is the data aggregation and exchange among services in SOA environment shown in the following figure. 

A RSS module in SOA is used for syndicating business resources (site, organization, project, process, people, events, task or activity, documents, annotations) in RSS feeds. Business RSS enables independent modules (Web services) to create self-published, syndicated “capability shows," and gives business message exchange a new distribution method. Receivers may subscribe to feeds using “BRIEF" software (a type of aggregator), which periodically checks for and downloads new content automatically. Some BRIEF software is also able to synchronize (copy) bizcasts to any devices such as browser, handheld devices, wireless phones, as well as any applications. The BizCasting framework shown in the figure is to support communications absed on events and activities for continuously improving  business operations.

For example, using Web 2.0 in value chain collaboration scenario can enable an enterprise to collaborate with its value chain of suppliers, partners, and customers for a common goal. In this case, some traditional B2B message exchange mechanism could be replaced with BizRSS. If you are interested in this type of idea, you can take a look at my paper "Service-Oriented Order-to-Cash Solution with Business RSS Information Exchange Framework" published in the proceedings of ICWS 2006.

Trend 9. Killer Applications through Modernizing Services

Services Modernization through new business models and IT solutions is the way to build the net-generation value chain for different services industries. The following figure is the linked service value chain based on the categories of services provided on http://www.census.gov/svsd/www/services/sas/sas_summary/summaryhome.htm.  

Killer applications in various industries will be the key to generating huge business impact. Some innovative ideas should be created to reflect what the next big things are. For example, Google Search Services move to Web Services discovery? Skype's VOIP services move to Interactive TV channel? Shopping move to the integrated 3G, digital TV, VOIP, and Internet environment? Here is a picture I tried to put together to trigger your thinking:-).

Well, the cell phone is my mobile VOIP phone (CISCO WIRELESS IP PHONE 7920 (Wi-Fi)). So when I was traveling to China, India, and any other IBM sites, I could use it to pick up calls and make calls just like I was in my office:-). Skype is a voice over IP software that allows you to make phone calls more convenient over Internet. What I would like to share with you is the two web pages in this figure. The upper one is the IBM HotVideo technology I was leading in 1996. It provides a novel system and methods of embedding hyperlinks into the moving objects in digital video stream over Internet. The HotVideo service provides a non-intrusive way to indicate hyperlinks in the video stream/frame. The lower one is the live digital TV commerce studio that enables the operators to embed propmotion opportunities or other contents into the live digital TV program in real-time. This was called HotMedia TV service I created in early 2000. Guess what? Using SOA as the architecture, we can create a business process (model) to orchestrate the illustrated VOIP services, HotVideo service, and HotMedia TV service to deliver a new business service: "Interactive Media Everywhere".   

Trend 10: A New Science: Services Computing

Service Computing, as an emerging cross-discipline promoted by IEEE and IEEE Computer Society since 2003 , covers the science and technology of leveraging computing and information technology to model, create, operate, and manage business services. The mission of Services Computing is to bridge the gap between Business Services and IT Services and to have business services performed more effectively and efficiently.

The core technology suite includes Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web services,   business process integration  and business performance management, and services innovation research. When I was launching the Services Computing despline at IBM Research in 2004, I created the following picture to illustrate the scope of Services Computing.

From the technology perspective, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web Services, and Service-Oriented Business Process Integration and Managementare the key enabling technology compoents. From business perspective, Service-Oriented (Asset-based) Services, and Service-Oriented (Asset-based) Business Solutions are the two key drivers to deliver business value of Services Computing.

Top Ten Trends of Services Computing

Happy New Year! From 12/12 to 12/13, I attended the 2006 IEEE Asia-Pacific Services Computing Conference (APSCC 2006), which was hosted by South China University of Technology.  I summarized a few top trends in the field of Services Computing.

1. Business-Centric SOA
2. Multi-Dimensional Services Modeling
3. Federated Services Publishing and Discovery
4. Open Standards Moving from Infrastructure to Business Services and Solutions
5. Adaptive Services Invocation
6. Services Relationship Modeling
7. Composite Business Services and Composite Applications on Demand
8. Integration of Web 2.0 and SOA (Data Aggregation Based Collaboration)
9. Killer Applications through Modernizing Services
10. A New Science: Services Computing
    

I will find time to post the details of each trend in the coming weeks. Thanks.

SOA and Web Services Tutorial at IEEE ICWS/SCC 2006 (9/18-9/22)

I will present a tutorial on SOA and Web Services at the 2006 IEEE International Conference on Web Services ( ICWS 2006) and 2006 IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC 2006), which are celebrating the 60th Anniversary of IEEE Computer Society! ICWS/SCC 2006 will be held on September 18-22, 2006, Hyatt Regency at O'Hare Airport, Chicago, USA. I would like to share with you a few great talks.

5 Shared Keynotes for CoSTEP conferences
Mon. George Cybenko, Professor, Dartmouth College
Tue. Werner Vogels, Vice President & Chief Technology Officer, Amazon.com
Wed. Stephen S. Yau, Professor, Arizona State University; Paul C. Clements, Carnegie Mellon University; Warren Harrison, Portland State University; John Knight, University of Virginia (Plenary Panel) Thur. Steve Fisher, Senior Vice President of AppExchange, Salesforce.com
Fri. K Ananth Krishnan, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Tata Consultancy Services Limited

IEEE SOA Industry Summit (two-day program for industry practitioners)
Invited Talk: Jeff Barr, Evangelist, Web Services at Amazon.com, Amazon.com

6 Tutorials
1. SOA and Web Services, Liang-Jie Zhang (IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA)
2. SOA Solutions and Services, Hong Cai (IBM China Research Lab), Jia Zhang (North Illinois University , USA)
3. Automatic Web Services Composition, Giuseppe De Giacomo and Massimo Mecella (Università di Roma LA SAPIENZA, Italy)
4. Web Services on Rails, E. Michael Maximilien (IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, CA USA)
5. Business Agility and Process Management, Hemant Jain (University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, USA)
6. Security in SOA and Web Services, Elisa Bertino and Lorenzo Martino (Purdue University)

Next Generation SOA?