Robertson, Dave

Klein, Ewan

Vasconcelos, Wamberto

Bai, Xi

Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA)

2013-10-22T13:53:55Z

2013-10-22T13:53:55Z

2013-07-02

The Internet and Web have brought in a new era of information sharing and opened up countless opportunities for people to rethink and redefine communication. With the development of network-related technologies, a Client/Server architecture has become dominant in the application layer of the Internet. Nowadays network nodes are behind firewalls and Network Address Translations, and the centralised design of the Client/Server architecture limits communication between users on the client side. Achieving the conflicting goals of data privacy and data openness is difficult and in many cases the difficulty is compounded by the differing solutions adopted by different organisations and companies. Building a more decentralised or distributed environment for people to freely share their knowledge has become a pressing challenge and we need to understand how to adapt the pervasive Client/Server architecture to this more fluid environment. This thesis describes a novel framework by which network nodes or humans can interact and share knowledge with each other through formal service-choreography specifications in a decentralised manner. The platform allows peers to publish, discover and (un)subscribe to those specifications in the form of Interaction Models (IMs). Peer groups can be dynamically formed and disbanded based on the interaction logs of peers. IMs are published in HTML documents as normal Web pages indexable by search engines and associated with lightweight annotations which semantically enhance the embedded IM elements and at the same time make IM publications comply with the Linked Data principles. The execution of IMs is decentralised on each peer via conventional Web browsers, potentially giving the system access to a very large user community. In this thesis, after developing a proof-of-concept implementation, we carry out case studies of the resulting functionality and evaluate the implementation across several metrics. An increasing number of service providers have began to look for customers proactively, and we believe that in the near future we will not search for services but rather services will find us through our peer communities. Our approaches show how a peer-to-peer architecture for this purpose can be obtained on top of a conventional Client/Server Web infrastructure.

http://hdl.handle.net/1842/7968

en

The University of Edinburgh

Bai, X. (2011). Addressing the RDFa Publishing Bottleneck. In Proceedings of the 20th international conference companion on World wide web, WWW ’11, pages 331–336. ACM.

Bai, X., Cheng, B., and Robertson, D. (2009). MobileWidget Sharing By Mining Peer Groups. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Inductive Reasoning and Machine Learning on the Semantic Web at ESWC 2009. CEUR-WS.org.

Bai, X., Delbru, R., and Tummarello, G. (2008). RDF Snippets for Semantic Web Search Engines. In Proc. OTM ’07, volume 5332, pages 1304–1318. Springer.

Bai, X., Klein, E., and Robertson, D. (2011). RDFa2: Lightweight Semantic Enrichment for Hypertext Content. In Pan, J., Chen, H., Kim, H.-G., Li, J., Wu, Z., Horrocks, I., Mizoguchi, R., andWu, Z., editors, The SemanticWeb, volume 7185 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 318–333. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg.

Bai, X., Klein, E., and Robertson, D. (2012). Choreographing Web Services with Semantically Enhanced Scripting. In IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI 2012)

Bai, X. and Robertson, D. (2010). Service Choreography Meets the Web of Data via Micro-Data. In Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Linked Data Meets Artificial Intelligence (LINKEDAI 2011), pages 8–13. AAAI Press.

Bai, X., Vasconcelos, W., and Robertson, D. (2010). OKBook: Peer-to-Peer Community Formation. In Proceedings of the Extended Semantic Web Conference, pages 106–120. Springer.

process calculus

calculus-based coordination

semantic annotation

linked data

agent-oriented programming

Peer-to-peer, multi-agent interaction adapted to a web architecture

Thesis or Dissertation

Doctoral

PhD Doctor of Philosophy