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DGSS 2012

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The Data-Driven Decision Support and Guidance Systems workshop went well yesterday. I had several interesting conversations with people, both about my own research and about theirs. I also watched my friend Susan Farley present her paper to the workshop. Given that her advisor is one of the organizers, it’s good that her paper was accepted.

Now it’s on to preparing a paper for the conference in Istanbul that my advisor is interested in. I also want to prepare a few more as backups so I make sure I have enough publications to complete my dissertation this year. Oh, and I also need to actually complete my research an get my prototype built and running.

Another Glimmer of Hope

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I got the update to my paper for the DGSS12 conference completed and submitted, along with all of the associated copyright paperwork. and shortly after that, I learned the abstract I submitted to the Annual Service Research & Innovation Institute Global Conference was accepted. Granted, it’s not a publication. But it is a ticket to the dance, so to speak. Now I jsut need to do enough research to compile a worthy paper by February 29.

Toward that end, I met with my advisor this afternoon to discuss the direction the paper is going. We were generally thinking of the same things, but he did have an interesting idea to apply some social networking ideas that may offer enough novelty to make the paper very attractive to the reviewers (assuming I can pull it off). Even better, when I asked him how close I was to being done, he initially hedged his comments and told me that if I was diligent I should be able to graduate in May. By “diligent” I’m pretty sure he meant “if you work your @$$ off.” That was way more than I expected; I thought he’d say I have to work hard to finish by the end of year. So now I’m pretty confident that I’ll be able to finish my research by the summer, and just worry about completing and defending my dissertation through the fall. That is way better news than I had hoped for.

Getting Closer

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I haven’t had the time to update this because I’ve swamped with work and with preparing my presentation. My slides have been through many drafts, but a couple of weeks ago I finally got my advisor’s approval. Since then, I’ve run the slides and my notes past some trusted friends for a good sanity check and to make sure I’m covering all the right bases.

In the meantime, I’ve had to navigate the corporate approval process to make sure I don’t run afoul of any restrictions they have. I’m pretty sure this was entirely new territory for them, and they really didn’t know quite how to handle it at first. But they’re good folks and flexible, so they adapted quickly and got me the necessary approvals.

So I’ve spent most of the past two weeks rehearsing and re-rehearsing my presentation for timing and content. I’m not completely happy with it, but then I never am. I think I’ve got it down well enough to get my points across and hopefully generate some thoughts and discussion. I’ll post the slides here after the conference, which begins later this morning. My speaking slot is at 12:30, right before lunch. I’m the first speaker in the “Standards” track; I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not. I suppose we’ll see how it goes.

Where it stands as I start this blog

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My doctoral research is focused in improving the user of web services and attempting to make it possible for end users (i.e., non-programmers) to modify the capabilities of their applications by adding new web services or composing existing web services into new workflows at run time. A major promise of web services has been that they will enable just that — users will be able to find new web services as they are published and add them to their applications without recompiling.

Previous efforts in this arena have focused on one of two main approaches: using purpose-built frameworks that channel all web service development to conform to specific standards that foster interoperability; or requiring developers to generate significant amounts of semantic metadata that is then appended to the web service description.

My approach is based on the belief that web service interface descriptions (generally in the form of Web Service Description Language (WSDL) documents) contain within them an implicit ontology, and that it is possible to tease out that ontology and match it to similar ontologies in other WSDL documents. Put another way, I believe that the structure and content of the WDSL interface description reflects the developer’s understanding of the information, and thereby the structure and relationship of the different input and output elements.

Parsing out this sort of information is traditionally the province of artificial intelligence researchers, but I am hopeful that by using a multitude of simple, task-specific agents, I can predict parameter matches with sufficient fidelity to enable me to state with some degree of accuracy that the outputs of Service A can be matched to the inputs of Service B, and that A and B can therefore be composed into a viable workflow.

I am using an agent-based framework (the Java Agent Development Framework) to develop a proof of concept application. So far, I am making slow but (hopefully) steady progress. I have a basic agent set that will parse a WSDL document into its operations, the input and output messages for each operation, and the individual parameters for each operation. All of these are stuck into a database for ease of access when I need them. I’ll fill in more details as I have time.

Shame is a powerful motivator

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I seem to be unable to maintain a dissertation log*, which is a recommended practice for anyone working on their doctoral dissertation. At least, I can’t maintain one in the form of a paper document or a word processor file.

So I have resorted to maintaining one here, in public, where anyone and everyone can see whether I am maintaining it. Perhaps the potential shame of being called out for not updating it will be enough to keep me at it. I can only hope.

*In the process of proofreading I realized that the document is normally called a “dissertation journal,” but I guess old habits die hard. Those of us in the sea services maintain “logs” of our doings. On reflection, I like the sound of it better than “journal.”