A Dissertation in Three Essays
Proposal Defense

A Study of Language-Action Perspective as a Theoretical Framework for Web services


Karthikeyan Umapathy


College of Information Sciences and Technology
The Pennsylvania State University


Visit me at http://karthikeyan.umapathy.com/
Access this talk at http://karthikeyan.umapathy.com/distprop/
Created based on S5 slide system
Best viewed using FireFox with 1400 x 1050 screen resolution

Dissertation Committee Members

Presentation

  1. Research Problem
    • Context
    • Background
    • Need for theory
  2. Research Questions
    • Methodologies
  3. Three Essays
    • Investigation
    • Demonstration
    • Evaluation
  4. Next Steps

Research Context

  • A growing service sector (ABCDoha 2005)
  • Demand to transform business and technology components of organizational strategy
  • A key technology component
    • Service-Oriented Computing (SOC)
      • Services: autonomous, platform-independent computational entity

Web Services

Need for Theory

  • Current status
    • Use of formal theories
    • Narrow concerns
    • Piecemeal approach
    • Lack of holistic perspective
  • Complexity of the domain
    • Complex and overlapping standards
    • Adoption delays

Core of Web Services


A Candidate Theory


The Key Challenge


Research Questions

Research Methodology

  • RQ1. Conceptual development and logical argument (Weick 1989)
  • RQ2. Design science research (Henver et. al. 2004)
  • RQ3. Controlled experiment (Shadish et al. 2001)

    • Essay 1

  • RQ1: Can LAP constructs describe and explain the web services architecture?

    • LAP-Inspired Framework

    Essay 1: Outcomes

    Essay 2

  • RQ2: How can LAP constructs be used for supporting design of web service solutions?


  • How to design good web services-based integration solutions?

    • Enterprise Integration using Web Services

    Enterprise Integration using Web Services

    A Methodology

    Design Support

    Essential Components

    1. Parsimonious set of speech acts (9 speech acts)
      • Source: Electronic messaging systems (Moore 2001) and Design principles for application integration (Johannesson and Perjons 2001)
    2. Representing EI patterns as sequence of speech acts (22 patterns)
      • Source: Enterprise Integration Pattern (Hohpe and Woolf 2004)
    3. Action types to depict high-level business actions (11 Actions types)
      • Source: Business activity descriptions in UML specification (UML 2005)
    4. Associations between action types and speech acts
    5. Inferring patterns and composing a solution
      • Knowledge base represented with OWL (OWL 2004)
      • Inference rules with Bossam OWL reasoner (Bossam 2006)
      • Individual patterns need to be composed into integration solution

    Implementation Support

    Research Prototype

    Essay 2: Outcomes

    Essay 3

  • RQ3: Is design support with LAP constructs effective for designing web service solutions?

    • Hypotheses

  • H1: Designs produced with the support of LAP constructs contain fewer design errors than designs produced without the support of LAP constructs
  • H2: Designs produced with the support of LAP constructs require less design effort than designs produced without the support of LAP constructs
  • H3: The use of design support with LAP constructs lead to greater reduction in design errors for complex integration problems than for simple integration problems
  • H4: The use of design support with LAP constructs lead to greater reduction in design effort for complex integration problems than for simple integration problems

    • Data Collection

    Recap

    ITP: a possible mapping


    Next Steps

    Expected Contributions

    Expected Contributions

    Thank You!


    Commonalities Among Initiatives


    Evaluation Against Theory Selection Criteria

    1. Selected theory’s historical context
      • Historical application of LAP to message-oriented phenomena
    2. Selected theory’s sensitivity towards details of the phenomenon under study
      • Focus on communication instead of data
    3. Selected theory’s impact on the choice of research method
      • Inapplicable in the context of this work because our research method relies on the conceptualization of a new reference architecture
    4. Selected theory’s contribution to cumulative theory-building
      • By suggesting LAP as a theoretical framework, our selection directly contributes to theory-building in the domain of web services

    LAP-Inspired Framework


    Assessment of LAP-Inspired Framework

    Insights from LAP-Inspired Framework

    Enterprise Integration

    Business Process Example


    Enterprise Integration Pattern Example


    Speech Acts and Action Types


    Representing Integration Patterns


    Business Process Modeling Notation

    Enterprise Integration Patterns

    Speech Act Theory


    Knowledge Base


    Inferring Patterns



    Composing Integration Solutions

    Research Prototype Architecture

    Conversation Policies

    • Guides peer-to-peer conversations
      • Conversations are multi-step exchange of correlated messages
    • Separates business logic and conversation logic
      • Different from composition languages
    • State machine
      • Each message send is a transition from one conversational state to another
    • Conversation Policy XML (cpXML) (Hanson et. al. 2002)
      • Machine readable specification
      • Pre-programmed interaction patterns

    Demonstration through an Example

    Design Science Research Guidelines

    Design Error Assessment Scheme

    Timeline


    ht: 50px;}