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Research interests

Web service retrieval
Main research interest is about the Web service retrieval. I start with the assumption that two Web services are equal when both they require the same information as input and they produce same data as output. Consistently with the Service Oriented Computing paradigm, Web services are treated as black boxes and the similarity algorithm only works with the Web service signatures expressed by WSDL/SAWSDL, regardless of their implementation. The similarity algorithm takes into account both naming and structural aspects. On the one hand, naming aspects refer to the names adopted for identifying the service, the available operations, and the related exchanged parameters. On the other hand, the structural aspects refer to the number of operations available and the data type of the input/output parameters.
The results in this research field have been implemented in URBE (Uddi Registry By Example): an UDDI extension supporting content-based queries. This tool aims at supporting programmers during both the development and the execution of Web service-based applications. Despite the current registry, the user can find a Web service not only browsing pre-defined taxonomies, or by keyword. In fact, with URBE, the user can submit a WSDL specifying the required Web service in terms of supported operations and input and output parameters. As a result, URBE returns the set of published Web service more similar to the submitted one. URBE is a part of PAWS.
The work is now focused on the improvement of the performance of the algorithm in terms of precision, recall, and response time. About the precision and recall I am exploiting additional models to describe a Web service (e.g., OWL-S, REST). About the response time, it is under evaluation to join a clusterization mechanisms.

Main publication: P. Plebani, B. Pernici, "URBE: Web service Retrieval based on Similarity Evaluation", to appear on IEEE Transaction on Knowledge and Data Engineering. [link]

Web service adaptation
In this field I participate during the design and the implementation of PAWS (Processes with Adaptive Web Services): a framework for flexible and adaptive execution of managed Web service-based business processes. In the framework several modules for service adaptation are integrated in a coherent way. An original characteristic of this framework is to couple design-time and run-time mechanisms for process specification and execution in a global framework. At design-time, flexibility is achieved through a number of mechanisms, i.e., identifying a set candidate services for each process tasks, negotiating quality of service, specifying quality constraints, and identifying mapping rules for invoking services with different interfaces. In turn, the run-time exploits the design-time mechanisms to support adaptation during process execution, in terms of selecting the best set of services to execute the process, reacting to a service failure, or preserving the execution when a context change occurs.
WS-CoL (WS-Constraint Language) and WS-ReL (WS-Recovery Language) as WS-Policy compliant language to express contraints and recovery mechanisms for BPEL processes.
Currently, I am going to validate and possibly extend the approach by considering a specific scenario: Risk Management Systems.

Main publication: D. Ardagna, M. Comuzzi, E. Mussi, B. Pernici, and P. Plebani. PAWS: a framework for processes with adaptive web services, IEEE Software 24(6), pp. 39-46 [link]

Web service quality
Before a service invocation takes place, an agreement between the service provider and the service user might be required. Such an agreement is the result of a negotiation process between the two parties and defines how the service invocation has to occur. Considering the Service Oriented Computing paradigm, the relationship among providers and users is extremely loose. Traditional agreements are likely to concern long term relationships and to be manually performed.
In this scenario, the research is focused on the definition of a quality model that supports both users requirements and providers capabilities definition and on a model to generate service level agreement on-the-fly. Just before the invocation commences, the quality of the service is negotiated in order to generate a service level agreement tied to that specific invocation.
The use of Semantic Web approaches to improve the automation of the negotiation is under investigation.

Main publication: C. Cappiello, M. Comuzzi, P. Plebani, “On Automated Generation of Web Service Level Agreements”, In Proceedings of International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE'07), Trondheim , Norway, June 2007. [pdf (1.5 MB)] [link]

Sensors as a Service
Sensor Networks represents a new area in which I would like to work in a very next future by exploiting the accumulated experience in Service Oriented Computing by considering a sensor node as a service.

In this case, the research starts from previous experience in Mobile Information Systems where we developed MAS (Micro Application Server): a J2ME CLDC/MIDP based application server designed in order to cater to incoming web service requests by invoking the corresponding web services installed within the server and to respond with an appropriate response. The special feature of this application server software is that it can be implemented on the least-capable CLDC (Connected Limited Device Configuration) micro (or mobile) devices increasing efficiency and productivity of such constrained devices. This micro device profile has the least number of classes available which makes it difficult to implement certain server features. However, these shortcomings have been overcome in our implementation. Source code of MAS si available on Sourceforge.net

Recent publications

M. Comuzzi, K. Kritikos, P. Plebani, "A semantic based framework for supporting negotiation in Service Oriented Architectures", accepted for publication in Proceedings of 11th IEEE Conference on Commerce and Enterprise Computing (CEC’09), Vienna, Austria, July 20-23, 2009.

P. Plebani, B. Pernici, "URBE: Web service Retrieval based on Similarity Evaluation", to appear on IEEE Transaction on Knowledge and Data Engineering. [link]

M. Comuzzi, K. Kritikos, P. Plebani, "Semantic-aware Service Quality Negotiation", in Proceedings of First European Conference, ServiceWave 2008, LNCS 5377, Madrid, Spain, December 10-13, 2008. [link]

L. Baresi, M. Miraz, P. Plebani, “A Flexible and Semantic-aware Publication Infrastructure for Web services”, in Proceedings of International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE'08), LNCS 5074, Montpellier, France, June 2008 [link] [pdf]

D. Ardagna, M. Comuzzi, E. Mussi, B. Pernici, and P. Plebani. PAWS: a framework for processes with adaptive web services, IEEE Software 24(6), pp. 39-46, 2007 [link]

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Active projects

S-CUBE Project	TEKNE Project

Past projects

WS-DIAMOND Project	Easylog Project
MAIS Project	EIDA Project