Home // International Journal On Advances in Internet Technology, volume 10, numbers 1 and 2, 2017 // View article

Cloud-based Infrastructure for Workflow and Service Engineering Using Semantic Web Technologies

Authors:
Volkan Gezer
Simon Bergweiler

Keywords: Cloud infrastructure; semantic workflow description; Semantic Web services; graphical workflow editing; workflow execution

Abstract:
This paper presents the concept and implementation of a cloud-based infrastructure platform and tailored tools for graphical support for user-driven experiments. The focus lies on the creation of a platform that allows multiple users to integrate their expertise via Web service interfaces and combine them to compose workflows for their experiments in the engineering domain. The platform employs Semantic Web technologies, which increase interoperability of the services and assist during workflow design by suggesting compatible services. The implemented tools give users the possibility to utilize the platform using a standard Web browser, without any knowledge of service engineering and the underlying complex technologies. An experiment is described as a workflow and consists of orchestrated services from several software vendors that encapsulate specific tasks for improving product development. One advantage of this approach is the automatic execution of the services and data flow among them. The cloud-based platform can also be combined with high-performance computing when services require complex calculations. The created platform offers optimal conditions to involve independent specialists and conduct short or long-running experiments, depending on the complexity of the task. This results in tremendous time savings and allows experts to carry out more experiments with products, which were omitted due to the complexity and the limited computing power, until now. The possibility to conduct these experiments improves the productive know-how of the companies and enhances the products they are selling.

Pages: 36 to 45

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2017. Used with permission.

Publication date: June 30, 2017

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2652