Vol.14 No.1&2 March 1, 2015

Research Articles

Deriving Fault Trigger Metric for Web based Systems (pp001-028)
        Sangeeta Sabharwal, Ritu Sibal, and Chayanika Sharma
Important issues regarding web applications are measuring the complexity and reliability of the system and testing every possible sequence of events. Hence, there is a need to identify and analyze the potential failures of the system. In the current research work, the concept of web links and Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) technique has been used to identify the potential failures of a web application. The web application is divided into modules and possible faults in each module are represented by a fault tree. Each fault event in a fault tree is assigned a measure using number of static links or dynamic links calculated using a metric called, Fault Trigger Metric (FTM). The value of FTM is calculated at event, module and system level and can form the basis to predict reliability/testing effort of the web application. The value of FTM at system level is called Fault Vulnerability Metric (FVM) and can form the basis to predict reliability/testing effort of the web application. Systems with high FVM value will be less reliable and hence will require more testing effort.

(K, P)-Shortest Path Algorithm in the Cloud Maintaining Neighborhood Privacy (pp029-044)
        Shyue-Liang Wang Jia-Wei Chen I-Hsien Ting, and Tzung-Pei Hong
Privacy-preserving computation has recently attracted much attention in areas of transaction, social networking, location-based, and mobile services. The inexpensive storage and efficient computation of cloud computing technology is expected to further escalate these services to a higher and wider level, without compromising the breaches of sensitive information. In this work, we study the shortest path distance computing in the cloud while preserving two types of privacy in the same time: k-neighborhood privacy and sensitive path privacy. We propose a new privacy model called (k, p)-shortest path neighborhood privacy, which is an extension of [19] and more flexible than 1-neighborhood-d-radius model [6]. We also develop an efficient four-step shortest distance computation scheme to achieve (k, p)-shortest path neighborhood privacy on p outsourced servers in the cloud, which combines the construction of k-skip shortest path sub-graphs, sensitive vertex adjustment, vertex hierarchy labeling and bottom-up partitioning techniques. Numerical experiments show that the proposed approach is more efficient than prior model of constructing the 1-neighborhood privacy graph and also requires less querying time.

XANUI: a Textural Platform-Indepedent Model for Rich User Interfaces (pp045-083)
        Jesus M. Hermida, Santiago Melia, and Antonio Arias
In recent years, several model-driven proposals have defined user interface models that can represent both behavioural and aesthetic aspects. However, the software industry has ignored the majority of these proposals because the quality of the rich user interfaces generated out of these models is usually low and their code generators are not flexible, i.e., the UI templates cannot be customised easily. Furthermore, these proposals do not facilitate the separation between the visual design of the UI, normally performed by graphic designers in the industry, and the visualisation of data, which has been previously modelled using another domain-specific language.  This paper proposes a new textual domain-specific language called XANUI, which could be embedded in XML-based UI pages, e.g., HTML or XML. The designed language provides the mechanisms to bind visual components with data structures already existing, and to define the behaviour of these components based on events. In this paper, XANUI is integrated in two OOH4RIA development processes, i.e., the traditional data-intensive and the new design-first process, thus reusing the OOH4RIA models and transformations to generate a complete rich Internet application for any platform or device. In order to validate this approach, the XANUI solution is applied to the development of a RIA with two UI types: a) the administration view of a Web application using HTML5 and AngularJS, and b) a catalogue application for e-Commerce using Windows RT in a Tablet PC.

A Lexical Approach for Taxonomy Mapping (pp084-109)
        Lennart Nederstigt, Damir Vandic, and Flavius Frasincar
Obtaining a useful complete overview of Web-based product information has become difficult nowadays due to the ever-growing amount of information available on online shops. Findings from previous studies suggest that better search capabilities, such as the exploitation of annotated data, are needed to keep online shopping transparent for the user. Annotations can, for example, help present information from multiple sources in a uniform manner. In order to support the product data integration process, we propose an algorithm that can autonomously map heterogeneous product taxonomies from different online shops. The proposed approach uses word sense disambiguation techniques, approximate lexical matching, and a mechanism that deals with composite categories. Our algorithm's performance compared favorably against two other state-of-the-art taxonomy mapping algorithms on three real-life datasets. The results show that the $F_1$-measure for our algorithm is on average 60\% higher than a state-of-the-art product taxonomy mapping algorithm.

Semantic Similarity Based Context-Aware Web Service Discovery Using NLP Techniques (pp110-139)
        Sowmya Kamath S and Ananthanarayana V.S.
Due to the high availability and also the distributed nature of published web services on the Web, efficient discovery and retrieval of relevant services that meet user requirements can be a challenging task. In this paper, we present a semantics based web service retrieval framework that uses natural language processing techniques to extract a service's functional information. The extracted information is used to compute the similarity between any given service pair, for generating additional metadata for each service and for classifying the services based on their functional similarity. The framework also adds natural language querying capabilities for supporting exact and approximate matching of relevant services to a given user query. We present experimental results that show that the semantic analysis \& automatic tagging effectively captured the inherent functional details of a service and also the similarity between different services. Also, a significant improvement in precision and recall was observed during Web service retrieval when compared to simple keyword matching search, using the natural language querying interface provided by the proposed framework.

A Survey of RESTful Transaction Models: One Model Does not Fit All (pp140-169)
        Nandana Mihindukulasooriya, Raul Garcia-Castro, Miguel Esteban-Gutierrez, and Asuncion Gomez-Perez
The REpresentational State Transfer (REST) architectural style is getting traction as a light-weight alternative to SOAP-based Web Services in industry for building loosely coupled applications. In addition, the REST architectural constraints induce scalability and the World Wide Web is a great example of a distributed hypermedia system that is built using REST principles. Despite these benefits, one of the main drawbacks of RESTful services is the lack of standard mechanisms to support advanced quality-of-service requirements such as transactions, which are vital to maintain the high-level of consistency required in common enterprise scenarios. To fill this gap, several RESTful transaction models have been proposed in the past decade; the goal of this paper is to survey such transaction models and to analyse them based on the common transactional scenarios that appear in most enterprise systems. To this end, this paper presents a systematic literature review that was conducted to identify and summarize the state of the art of the RESTful transaction models; the review is followed by a detailed analysis of the models found in the survey. For the analysis, the paper proposes a comparison framework for the RESTful transaction models to evaluate them according to various dimensions, such as their capability to satisfy common transactional scenarios, the level of transaction guarantees provided, compliance to the REST constraints, and other miscellaneous properties. The results of the survey provide a good overview of the current RESTful transaction models and their evolution over the past decades and help to identify the current gaps in the state of the art. In addition, the paper identifies a set of challenges for the current RESTful transaction models by examining the limitations identified in the analysis. A main conclusion of this analysis is that building a generic RESTful transaction model capable of satisfying the requirements of all the scenarios is hard though several models solidly satisfy some specific scenarios in some specific domains.

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