Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

This research program provides models, techniques and tools for developing and analyzing collaborative, smart, and customizable service integration and decision making systems. It introduces ""consultant services"" as a new type of decision support systems that amalgamate semantic analysis techniques with the exploration nature of data mining operations to find an effective match between the user's desired features and the available web services, without overwhelming the user with long lists of possibilities, but only those with the highest semantic similarities. Furthermore, for sensitive application domains such as healthcare or banking, in-depth analysis of the distributed structural or behavioral properties of the candidate services may be necessary. This research provides two complementary techniques for in-depth service quality assessment. It provides dynamic analysis techniques based on execution pattern mining to explore the structural properties of distributed web services. It also provides a new technique based on test cases to assess the behavior aspects of candidate web services. This research proposes a new model for service infrastructure using a ""customizable expert agent"" which is inspired from real business enterprises. This new service is processed at the client's platform; hence it enhances the client's privacy and reduces network traffic. The customizable agent is used to implement the functionality of the proposed consultant services and service assessment techniques. The case-based and ad-hoc collaborative decision-making is increasingly important in health and medical environments. The collaborative teams require smart services to communicate and share information; access to patient's electronic health records and images; consult and make decisions; and diagnosis and treat patients. This program will provide the required infrastructure for a simulation environment, which will be compatible and interoperable with HL7 v3 messaging and SNOMED CT terminology system standards. Such an environment will also apply a new behavior-based access control mechanism to ensure data privacy in communicating and sharing sensitive information.