Open Student Project Topics @ CSIRO

The Web Services group headed by Athman Bouguettaya at the CSIRO ICT Centre (Information Engineering Laboratory) has a number of open projects for students in the area of Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) [1]. The SOC paradigm uses software services to support the development of low-cost and interoperable distributed applications. Services are autonomous, platform-independent software entities that can be described, published and discovered. Services differ in their granularity, ranging from simple services (e.g., for querying weather information) to complex coarse-grained business functionality (like CRM systems). In the context of SOC, there is a predominant architectural style commonly referred to as Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). It consists of a service provider who creates services and publishes them in a service registry. A service consumer can then look up services in the registry and dynamically bind to those services and invoke them. This allows a loose coupling between the provider and the consumer. These three assets are often referred to as the SOA triangle. The Web services stack (WSDL, SOAP, UDDI, etc) is probably the most common set of technologies for implementing SOAs within the SOC space. A good introduction and overview of SOC can be found in [2].
So much for the theory, in practice however, things do not always work as dynamic and agile as envisioned, e.g., dynamically find and invoke a service [4], managing services [5]. Therefore, we do some research in this area ;). My particular research interest focuses on service composition, an important area of research within the field of SOC [3]. In general, simple Web services are often not sufficient to implement complex business logic. Such an implementation may require the invocation of several other Web services to achieve this task. Combining the functionality of several Web services creates a new composite service. The process of developing it is generally referred to as service composition. Composition can be achieve in different ways, manually, semi-automated, fully-automated by leveraging semantic descriptions of service, etc. A lot of exciting research is going on in this area, so come and join us :).

[1] Papazoglou, M.P., Traverso, P., Dustdar, S., Leymann, F. (2007). Service-Oriented Computing: State of the Art and Research Challenges, IEEE Computer, November 2007, p 64 - 71.
[2] Dustdar, S., Papazoglou, M. (2008). Services and Service Composition - An Introduction. it - Information Technology, April 2008, (c) Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag
[3] Dustdar, S., Schreiner W. (2005). A Survey on Web services Composition. International Journal of Web and Grid Services, 1(1), 1 - 30, 2005.
[4] Michlmayr, A., Rosenberg, F., Platzer, C., Treiber, M., Dustdar, S. (2007). Towards Recovering the Broken SOA Triangle - A Software Engineering Perspective. Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Service Oriented Software Engineering (IW-SOSE'07), co-located with the 6th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE'07), 03-07. September 2007, Dubrovnik, Croatia.
[5] Yu, Q., Liu X., Bouguettaya, A., and Medjahed, B. (2008). Deploying and managing Web services: issues, solutions, and directions. VLDB Journal, Volume 17, Number 3, May 2008

• A Domain-Specific Language (DSL) for QoS-Aware Service Composition
• Automatic Generation of Multi-Step Web Forms for Simple and Composite Services
• A Simulation Environment for a Service Delivery Platform
• Personalized Service Composition and Adaptation
• A Universal Benchmark Toolkit for QoS-aware Service Composition Algorithms
• (Semi-)Automated Service Composition Techniques and Algorithms

If you are interested in any of these projects, please email or call Florian Rosenberg. Contact information can be found on my Web page. Please also feel free to propose a project if you have any great ideas that fit well into our area. All projects can either be carried out during a summer internship, as honours project or as part of any other project course (depending on that, the scope of the project varies a bit).