Athman Bouguettaya

Web services and service oriented environments are key enablers for the migration of entertainment, business, sociability, science and health-care from the physical world to the virtual world. The result of this on-going migration is a new place very much different from the physical world, one where interconnected services interact with human users, sensors and embedded devices. Yet for this vision to become reality, trust needs to be addressed as members of the global e-society r- ularly today deal with the question whether they can trust other, unknown parties. Trust is a vital component of internet-based interactions and service-oriented en- ronment, but all too often it is assumed to be an implicit property that exists in the background rather than being an explicit property that is well-de ned and quant- able. While providing trust is challenging in existing computing systems, providing trust in service oriented environments is much more complex due to the dynamic and adaptable nature of these environment which are often large scale and across domains. To date the problem of trust for service oriented environments has been largely unexplored. This book represents the rst comprehensivecoverageof the principles,methods and systems for trust management and evaluation in service oriented environments.

Foundations for Efficient Web Service Selection describes the foundational framework for efficient Web service selection. It lays out a theoretical underpinning for the design of models and algorithms for searching and optimizing access to Web services. Excerpts from Prof. Fabio Casati’s foreword: " This excellent book looks at the search problem from a broader perspective. Instead of narrowing down on a specific aspect or subproblem of service search, it dissects and analyzes the fundamental problems in search and presents concrete, applicable solutions as well as the theoretical foundations behind them…One aspect I found particularly significant in the book is the mind shift it generates from thinking about service modeling for the sake of supporting deployment or invocation to modeling for supporting search. This design for search approach is exactly what we do when we design databases because search is what we worry about in that case, and there is no reason why this shouldn’t be the case for services if we want services to be searchable with a similar effectiveness."

Access to Mobile Services focuses on methods for accessing broadcast based M-services from multiple wireless channels. This book presents a novel infrastructure that provides a multi-channel broadcast framework for mobile users to effectively discover and access composite M-services. Multi-channel algorithms are proposed for efficiently accessing composite services. Access to Mobile Services provides an in-depth survey of wireless data access and motivates the need to treat mobile services differently. A wireless adaptation of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is also covered. Designed for researchers and practitioners who work in the general area of mobile services, this book is also suitable for advanced-level students in computer science. Forewords by: Michael P. Papazoglou, Tilburg University, The NetherlandsFabio Casati, University of Trento, Italy

Information systems are the backbone of many of today's computerized applications. Distributed databases and the infrastructure needed to support them have been well studied. However, this book is the first to address distributed database interoperability by examining the successes and failures, various approaches, infrastructures, and trends of the field. A gap exists in the way that these systems have been investigated by real practitioners. This gap is more pronounced than usual, partly because of the way businesses operate, the systems they have, and the difficulties created by systems' autonomy and heterogeneity. Telecommunications firms, for example, must deal with an increased demand for automation while at the same time continuing to function at their current level. While academics are focusing on investigating differences between distributed databases, federated databases, heterogeneous databases, and, more generally, among loosely connected and tightly coupled systems, those who have to deal with real problems right away know that the only relevant research is the one that will ensure that their system works to produce reasonably correct results. Interconnecting Heterogeneous Information Systems covers the underlying principles and infrastructures needed to realize truly global information systems. The book discusses technologies related to middleware, the Web, workflows, transactions, and data warehousing. It also overviews architectures with a discussion of critical issues. The book gives an overview of systems that can be viewed as learning platforms. While these systems do not translate to successful commercial realities, they push the envelope in terms of research. Successful commercial systems have benefited from the experiments conducted in these prototypes. The book includes two case studies based on the authors' own work. Interconnecting Heterogeneous Information Systems issuitable as a textbook for a graduate-level course on Interconnecting Heterogeneous Information Systems, as well as a secondary text for a graduate-level course on database or information systems, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.