College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University

Web services

Graduate student brings researchers together to study "novel," "hot" topic
At first glance, it's hard to pinpoint a common thread in the research of computer scientists Samik Basu, Vasant Honavar and Robyn Lutz.

Their work, however, complements each other enough to have earned a three-year $335,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant. The project, "Interactive and Verifiable Composition of Web Services to Satisfy End-User Goals," will look at the increasingly important role that web services play in scientific, engineering, government, health care and business applications.

Basu studies formal verification methods, model checking and program analysis. Honavar's interests include artificial intelligence, bioinformatics and computational biology, and data mining. And Lutz researches software engineering, safety-critical product line, and fault monitoring and recovery.

So how did the three professors in the Department of Computer Science come together on this project?

"This research collaboration started with a graduate student," said Honavar, a professor in the department.

That graduate student, Jyotishman Pathak, is pursuing his Ph.D. in computer science and works with Honavar in the Artificial Intelligence Research Laboratory. His research focuses on web services and information extraction and integration.

He has coauthored several research papers with Honavar, Basu and Lutz, including one that received a best paper award at last year's IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence.

In general, web services can be viewed as software components that are accessible using standard Internet protocols. Some of the widely used web services include "Google Earth," a service that provides interactive maps and satellite/aerial imagery; and hotel, rental car and airline reservations and services provided online by companies and agencies such as Amazon.com.

"With the proliferation of web-based applications, service-oriented software development has gained importance both in academia and industry. For instance, many researchers from major companies and software vendors such as IBM, HP and Microsoft are looking at a number of fundamental problems that need to be addressed in service-oriented computing," said Basu, an assistant professor in the department.

"Complex applications call for tools that support users to assemble composite services from independently developed component services to achieve the desired functionality."

The nature of the problems requires a team of researchers who complement one another in a number of areas including formal methods, artificial intelligence and software engineering. By developing novel approaches to service composition, the ISU computer science team hopes to address this need.

The computer scientists say the main contributions of the research will be the development of powerful interactive methods for firms and scientists to utilize.

The new methods will provide provable guarantees that
the assembly of web services meets the user's requirements.

"We'll be able to tell the user (of the web service) that the business can't meet their stated requirements for a product or service they wish to purchase," said Lutz, a professor in the department. "The approach we're taking is novel. It gives the user guidance about what to do next, to get as close as possible to the desired results the consumer wants."

"A major research challenge is how to discover relevant services and how to combine them to meet the user requirements," Honavar said.

Initial funding from Iowa State's Center for Computational Intelligence, Learning and Discovery got the project off the ground, and Honavar says the preliminary results helped the group prepare a
competitive research proposal.

By the time the NSF grant runs out in 2010, the computer science research team hopes to create software tools for interactive service composition as well as benchmarks for the evaluation of alternative approaches to service composition.