Piled the 6th chapter

Today, I finished my 6th chapter of my PhD thesis. This makes the draft 111 pages long, giving me a good excuse to actually celebrate Christmas this year and not be in office until 01.01.2008.

ICWE 2008 Website online

The Eighth International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE2008) will be held in July 2008 in Yorktown Heights, New York, USA. ICWE2008 aims at promoting research and scientific excellence on Web Engineering and at bringing together practitioners, scientists, and researchers interested in technologies, methodologies, tools, and techniques used to develop and maintain Web-based applications. The ICWE 2008 website is now online, featuring the Call For Papers and first information about the event.

New Book on Web Engineering

A new book on Web Engineering has recently been published at Springer London. "Web Engineering: Modelling and Implementing Web Applications" presents the state of the art of approaches for obtaining a correct and complete Web software product from conceptual schemas, represented via well-known design notations. We contributed the section "The Web as an Application Platform", in which we highlight the specific challenges of distributed Web-based systems.

Cooperation with LIFIA

Triggered by the research visit at LIFIA a few weeks ago, a cooperative project has now been initiated between the two groups. This involves a student thesis conducted at La Plata in the area of composition with respect to business processes, workflows and data integration.

Student projects with idFS underway

The reengineering of idFS V2.2 is paying off again, as it is now being used within two student projects at the DSS group. One is using it for the protection of a Web application, possibly extending idFS with a new identity provider to authenticate against the university-wide account system. The other one is concerned with building a more capable and flexible identity store, adding more interfaces and management features.

Joining the Force

We recently managed to recruit some new members for the DSS. Ronny Jahn has joined us as a student assistant and has already started to help us with the reconstruction of our homepage. He will be accompanied by a second student assistant, Sebastian Brandt.

Trip to LA-WEB / LIFIA - Resumé

While the LA-WEB conference felt quite short, it gave some interesting insights, especially in the direction of search and advertisement. One interesting point was for example to see the new developments of Yahoo, who now has some semi-structured search features that almost look like semantic search. Moreover, I got some feedback for our own presented work on change propagation in distributed Web-based systems, e.g. the idea to put more effort in pro-active change announcement via the notion of deprecation etc.

Trip to LA-WEB / LIFIA

Tomorrow, I will be leaving to La Plata, Argentina for a short research visit at LIFIA group of the National University of La Plata, who is also working in the field of Web Engineering. The program includes a joined Seminar, where I will give a talk about the WebComposition Architecture Model. Directly after that, I will attend the LA-Web 2007 conference in Santiago de Chile to present our work on architecture changes in distributed Web applications.

ISWE Activities

During the past months, the International Society for Web Engineering (ISWE) has attracted several more members. We now have about 30 members from 13 countries. Moreover, the societies work is now organized in sub-groups called Activities, as can be seen on the ISWE homepage. This includes MDWEnet, an initiative started by a group of researchers that have been working on model-driven Web Engineering for the past few years.

New developments at DSS

At the beginning of the month, our group leader Martin Gaedke acquired his full professorship. The group has also been reinforced by a new member, Andreas Heil, who I have been working with before at the University of Karlsruhe. On the technical site, our homepage is just in the process of a major update, including the establishment of a consistent URL convention.

The new Semester

I’m back in office, just in time before the start of the new Semester. This time, I’ll be conducting a practical course on Web Engineering technologies, a joined seminar / pro-seminar on Web 2.0, and a lecture-related tutorial on the design of distributed systems. All courses will start in the second week of the semester.

Off to visit uncle Ho

It is finally time for this year's holidays. I will be out of office for most of September, and not be able to answer any email. Meanwhile, please contact the other group members in case of any urgent requests.

idFS Version 2.2

The next version of Identity Federation System (idFS) is complete and deployed for the webengineering.org and iswe-ev.de web sites. idFS V2.2 core component is now a standalone library (formerly it was integrated into the WebComposition Service Linking System, WSLS). This makes it much easier to deploy, not requiring any sort of programming to secure an application. Additionally, idFS has been extended with the AuthorizationManager, a Web application to manage the access control policy for idFS-secured applications and services.

Piled Higher and Deeper

A few weeks ago, I started to work on my PhD thesis, which since then has been growing slowly but consistently. With the semester break and nearly the entire remaining group on holiday, it's currently an excellent time to get things started. If all works according to plan, I should be able to finish it by spring 2008.

Paper presentation at LA-WEB 2007

LA-Web 2007 is the fifth of a series of refereed conferences aimed at providing a venue in Latin America for researchers and technologists from around the world to present, demonstrate and discuss the latest Web developments. LA-Web 2007 will be held in Santiago de Chile. DSS has submitted a paper on "Enabling Architecture Changes in Distributed Web-Applications", which we will present in October.

Seventh International Conference on Web Engineering - Resumé

This year’s ICWE conference took place in Como, Italy. As during the last years, I enjoyed very much the open atmosphere and the many interesting discussions both in and outside the sessions. Moreover, the Web Engineering community seems to advance in terms of common activities: The society (ISWE) won many new members, while at the same time more and more groups cooperate on a working level, as e.g. in the context of the MDWEnet initiative.

Real-life testbed for Federation research

Within the last few days, several Web sites have gone online, where I am involved in the development and operation process: a relaunch of the community portal webengineering.org, the official Web site of the International Society for Web Engineering e.V. (iswe-ev.de), and a homepage for the Hanoi research project. This is a nice opportunity for applying our Federation-related research approaches and systems. Currently, all sites already use idFS for access control.

OpenID

Still following up on all the exiting new developments that could be seen at the World Wide Web conference, I gave a group-internal presentation today on OpenID. OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. Web sites supporting OpenId let users identity by entering their URL (e.g. of their homepage) and delegate the authentication process to arbitrary identity providers. As a result, users can access many different sites using the same account, which has a lot of interesting implications on how data can be used across multiple applications.

ISWE Meeting in Karlsruhe

The next meeting of the members of the International Society for Web Engineering e.V. will take place in Karlsruhe, on Fri, 6 July 2007. The society promotes science and research in the entire field of Web Engineering, i.e. the systematic engineering of Web applications. Among other issues, we will discuss last preparations for the society’s appearance on this year’s Web Engineering conference (ICWE 2007).

idFS Version 2.1

After a longer period of work related to other things, I have recently found the time to continue working on my research prototype, the Identity Federation System (idFS). idFS is a system that can be used to secure Web applications and Web services with security tokens, based on Federation specifications. Today, I completed version 2.1, which solves some technical difficulties with certificates and is now compatible with the latest specifications.

More Semantics

Continuing my private experiments with machine-readable information on the Web, I have recently added some semantic mark-up directly into the page. Today’s browsers cannot see this, but you can make it visible by using plug-ins, like for example Operator and Tails (for the Firefox browser) or by entering my homepage URL into the Tabulator. Technically, the markup is extracted by using a new W3C draft called GRDDL. Adding semantics into Web pages is actually not very difficult. The challenging part is to transform your legacy HTML files into an XHTML-compliant format, which is the precondition for extraction mechanism to work.

FOAF-games

FOAF (Friend of a Friend) is a project for machine-readable modelling of homepage-like profiles and social networks with the means of the Semantic Web. Last week, I experimented a bit with my own profile and some Semantic Web tools, which become increasingly available (e.g. the Tabulator or the FOAF explorer). Hopefully, there will be some more data to link to in the near future.

Paper presentation at ICWE 2007

The Seventh International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE2007) will be held in July 2007 in Como, Italy. ICWE2007 aims at promoting research and scientific excellence on Web Engineering and at bringing together practitioners, scientists, and researchers interested in technologies, methodologies, tools, and techniques used to develop and maintain Web-based applications. DSS has submitted a paper on "Component-Based Content Linking Beyond the Application", which we will present in July.

Homepage online

After 2 months at my new office in Chemnitz, I finally got around to set up my homepage. Inspired by all the new fancy ideas around Web 2.0 and Linked Data, this site also servers as a playground for experimenting with FOAF, microformats, external REST-services, etc.