Tomorrow I will be presenting the paper I submitted to the DGSS 2012 workshop. It’s a poster presentation, which will be a new thing for me. I’ve done plenty of slide presentations in all manner of venues, but I haven’t done a poster presentation. Luckily, I have a friend who owns a plotter and can print the poster for me; that’s saving me a bundle. Now all I need to do is tell a good story.

In the meantime, my advisor wants me to submit a paper to the 2012 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining in Istanbul. It should be similar to the one I just submitted to the SRII Global Conference, so that will help get it started. I’m overdue getting him an outline, but that’s mostly a matter of typing; I already have it drafted. I guess I’d better get to work.

I’m mostly done with the paper I was working on for the Annual SRII Global Conference. Now I’m just waiting for comments from my advisor before I submit it. It had been due on February 29, but early on the 28th they announced the deadline was being extended by popular request. The new deadline is March 15. So for now, I’ve set the paper aside for a few days. I’ll review it again after it’s mellowed for a little while. I find it helpful to walk away from something for a little while and then re-read it after being away from it. I often find new things that I didn’t see earlier, and the end result is a better product.

Now I’m on the hunt for another publishing opportunity. One more in the bag (assuming the SRII paper gets accepted) and I should be in a position to put my dissertation together and start working on my defense. In the meantime, I’ve got to prepare my poster presentation for the DGSS workshop on April 1st.

I’ve been working on integrating social media into my service composition work. My advisor suggested it as a way to add a little more kick to the work. I’m sure the fact that he’s teaching a class on social networks this semester has a little something to do with it as well.

The concept is pretty easy — find the pages for service providers on a social network, mine the information available to make a judgment about how that provider compares to others. I expected the hard part to be learning the APIs well enough to retrieve the information from the networks. Oddly enough, it seems that’s the easy part. The hard part is finding APIs for the various networks.

I decided to start with the 800 pound gorilla of social networking, Facebook. There’s an excellent and dead-simple API called RestFB that does everything I need and is easy to use. But because I”m (nominally) working with business services, I thought that looking to sites devoted to business reviews would be a good next step. Yelp was not a disappointment; they also have an easy-to-use search API. (These are both REST APIs, but are easy to use with thick clients as well.)

But that’s about it. Angie’s List doesn’t have a public API available, and don’t get me started on trying to learn anything from the Service Magic site — don’t waste your time on it. I still need to look at other organizations like the Better Business Bureau, but it looks like there’s not much out there for my purposes beyond Facebook and Yelp (I don’t want to get into trying to divine emotions from Twitter — that’s someone else’s dissertation.)

At the same time, I’m learning the Manchester OWL API so I can query an ontology to find potential service providers and read in their social network IDs. Luckily, the OWL API is also proving pretty easy to use.

But for now, I’ve managed to figure out how to find the service providers in an ontology, read in their Facebook ID, and get the number of “Likes” for that business from Facebook. Not too bad for a week’s work, given that I’m not a real programmer and I’m holding down a full time job.

I met with my advisor about 10 days ago as the new semester started, and we discussed adding social network aspects to the paper I’m working on for the SRII Conference. So I’ve spent some time learning the APIs for Yelp and Facebook (as a start).

The good news is that the APIs don’t seem all that complex. Well, the Yelp API isn’t that complex; I haven’t worked with the Facebook API enough to make a judgment. Complicating the fact is that I’m writing thick client Java code, and these apps are both built on the assumption that it is other web sites that will be using their applications. The practical effect is that the responses I get are JSON objects that I’ll need to parse if I want to get at the information of interest to me. Not necessarily a difficult task, just a pain.

But I am making progress, so that’s a good thing.

A little over a week ago I received notification that my paper was accepted for the 28th International Conference on Data Engineering Workshop on Data-Driven Decision Support and Guidance Systems (hereinafter referred to as DGSS). The notification was a couple of days late, but the comments weren’t too bad, so I updated my paper and sent them the camera-ready copy this past Monday.

Another one down, two or three more to go! (I’m trying to make sure I’ve got plenty of padding in the publications department.)

But now the semester is over, and I still need to update my committee members on my progress. I supposed I’ll have to type something u pto send them, but I really need to sit down with them in the spring.

In the meantime, it’s back to work on defining a service description specification.

I spent the weekend working on my prototype implementation using some service agents I had kicking around from previous work. I added a “graph agent” that collects information from the various service agents and assembles them into a directed graph for further analysis. Building the initial graph turned out to be pretty easy. There’s a very easy-to-use directed graph library called JGraphT that made the task pretty simple.

Now comes the hard part: verifying that the graph is correct. The easiest way to do that is to see it, so I followed the recommendation on the JGraphT site and downloaded the JGraph library. It’s a commercial product, but it does have a free license for non-commercial use.Unfortunately, the latest version (called JGraphX) doesn’t have a simple importer for the latest version of JGraphT, but the previous version, JGraph v5, still works pretty seamlessly wiht JGraphT. It wasn’t too hard to get the graph to display in a window, but figuring out how to do it with a reasonably useful layout is proving tricky. By default, it lays out with all of the vertices stacked on top of each other. But it is a start.

Now I need to troubleshoot why the edges aren’t behaving the way I expect them to; only some of them are correct. I think I’ve got an idea, but it will take a little time to code up and check. But in the meantime, I am making progress.

I survived the mad rush to complete that paper in 96 hours. I successfully submitted it and now I’m waiting to hear whether it was accepted or not. My advisor told me it was a good job and he liked the final product, so that was good news. There were 14 papers submitted for that particular workshop. It’s a one-day event, so I expect there will be about 7 papers selected. Those aren’t bad odds.

I spoke to my advisor this past Friday and he told me again that he thought it was a good paper, so I’m cautiously optimistic about my chances of being accepted. In the meantime, I have begun some implementation work to try and show the work i described in the paper. I’m successfully parsing a BPMN model and launching individual agents for each task in the model, so I’m off to a decent start. Now I am trying to figure out how to assemble the discovered services into a connected graph. I’ve got a couple of ideas, but I need to mull them over a little more.

In the meantime, I still have a fighting chance of completing my research by the end of the spring semester.