software service (SS) refers to the operational software provided to VC to support a service (e.g. Google Hangouts,. Skype, iMessage). II. CONTRIBUTION.
Online Community Evolution using Mediation System in SOA Jihad Kheireddine Itani(*)(**), Eric Gouarderes(*) and Philippe Aniorte(*) (*) LIUPPA, Computer Science Laboratory (**) Arts Sciences and Technology University in Lebanon University of Pau P.O. Box 14 - 6495 Pau, France Beirut, Lebanon { itani.jihad, eric.gouarderes, philippe.aniorte}@univ-pau.fr
Abstract— During the last couple of years, virtual communities (VCs) have gained worldwide popularity and conquer different domains, from business to medicine to aviation to education to entertainment to technology. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) proves to be a major catalyzer in the creation of software applications due to its rapid development, distributed feature and dynamic adaptability. Mediation systems (MS) on the other hand played a critical role in Service Oriented Computing (SOC) to promote loose coupling between service providers and consumers. Dynamic evolution, monitoring and management of services are critical factors that affect the lifespan of VCs. Moreover, providing the right service to the right user on the right time is an ultimate objective for VCs to achieve. We propose a new model that will serve virtual communities regardless of their types or objectives. The model is built on top of SOA and empowered with MS. Keywords: Virtual communities, mediation systems, SOA
I.
INTRODUCTION
VCs trace their roots back to the early beginning of internet use in 1993 with Rheingold [2]. Advancement in internet, mobile technology and smart phones during the past years in addition to the physical distance between people made these types of communities evolve and grow. Social, professional, educational, business, gaming, and many more are some types of virtual communities that were created with a common objective of grouping people virtually. To achieve this objective, VCs provide set of services. From our point of view, managing services based on user’s needs and profiles is an important issue regarding lifespan and lifecycle of these services.[6] added the success of a VC relies on management and service quality such as focusing on the needs of the members. [5] mentioned the significance of this dimension on information system success in VCs, where customer service is crucial. But today, users are not involved in the definition of services available inside their communities. As a consequence, communities might have excess in services provided or scarcity in services available which result in hundreds of VCs end up paralyzed and then dead. Management of services on the other hand is poorly addressed since the business and social aspects attracted most of the researches work on VCs and fewer
studies concentrate on technology and software development aspects. Our work addresses these aspects by providing a new vision of VC management from service perspective. In our context, VC service refers to a feature provided by the VC and used by its members (e.g. "Instant Messaging") whereas software service (SS) refers to the operational software provided to VC to support a service (e.g. Google Hangouts, Skype, iMessage). II.
CONTRIBUTION
Our contribution promotes the concept of providing the right service to the right member in the right time and sustains community services continuous evolution. To achieve this, we benefit from the Service Oriented Computing paradigm (SOC) to propose a new model to support the management and evolution of software services in virtual communities. This new model defines the primary elements that have to be added to a basic Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) model in order to consider virtual communities “Fig. 1”. The work focuses on the integration of mediation system [4] as a middle layer between the three SOA actors (Service Requester, Service Registry and Service Provider) in order to (a) make closer the involved actors towards service negotiation and (b) provide the necessary monitoring activities, management services and evolution tasks to maintain services used inside the community and make users experience inside their virtual communities in continuous flux. The underlying principle is to classify services in two types, personal and group, in order to manage finer service settings based on user needs. A personal service setting depends only on one user whereas a group service setting considers two or more users. As a consequence, the mediation system has to maintain a service registry VC Registry local to the community and two member's lists: one for recording the personal service settings and one for recording the settings for group services. Mediation system will have major roles in developing the community by continuously monitoring users’ requests and act accordingly. Its tasks are much more than just classifying services and publish them in VC Registry. These tasks are divided into two major categories: (1) functional, affecting the objective of each service and (2) non-functional, addressing Quality of Service, Service Level Agreements (SLA), service
availability, service adaptability, service negotiation, and more. The system will generate a SLA for each service entry in the personal and group service lists. SLA in its general context will concentrate on the Quality of Service (QoS) being delivered to members. To pursue its job, the mediation system will interact with the other elements of the model presented “Fig. 1” in order to perform different tasks in the community space: Fetch for new service in ServiceRegistry. Publish and Monitor services in VcRegistry. Monitor services in PersonalServiceList. Monitor services in GroupServiceList. Monitor requests of Member. Monitor SLA. III.
paradigms and we addressed this issue in [1]. We will benefit from this experience in the design process of our model. ACKNOWLEDGMENT This work is partially supported by AUL Arts, Sciences and Technology University in Lebanon. REFERENCES [1]
[2]
CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
This paper reports a first contribution to approach the problem of community services sustainability, but this is still a work in progress that needs to be explored deeper in order to provide a complete and accurate model. In particular, Service Level Agreement (SLA) is obviously a critical point in order to improve members’ interest and satisfaction for services. The agreement will hold some nonfunctional indicators that must be respected as long as the service is used by members and provided by suppliers. These indicators are related to available resources from suppliers such as processing power, storage capacity, downtime of service, in addition to other non-functional criteria that could be of interest to members. These properties will be monitored by the mediation system in order to alert members in case SLA is not respected. SLA and QoS need more work with concentration on the resources available from suppliers and the negotiation of these SLAs with members. As service level agreement supposes negotiation and commitment between the parties, it is often the subject of work at the intersection of service paradigm and agent paradigm. That's why works like [3] [7] consider integration of both
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Figure1 . Proposed model for mediation system in virtual community.
