DataTalks:AUnifiedKnowledgePoolinSaaSand

MashupSystems
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Keywords:unifiedknowledgepool,SaaS,Mashups,Businessprocesses,BPEL,DataTalks
Authors: Sasha Mile Rudan <sasharu@ifi.uio.no>, Dino Karabeg <dino@ifi.uio.no>, Alf Martin
Johansen<amj@inductsoftware.com>
Why this paper is interesting for the conference participants: This paper derives from a
real case scenario of finding feasible ways of opening an Open Innovation system (already
employed by institutions such as Yale University, as well as in the US and British Health Care
Systems)towardadistributedSaaSsystemcapableofunifyingitsusersknowledge.
Abstract:
Research presented in this paper derives from a specific set of user behavior observations
within a welldefined environment. The environment in question consists of a set of distributed
services that do not all belong to the same vendor, and users are observed as they perform
businessprocessesoverthesetofservicesthat,together,constituteSaaS/Mashup.
Clearly, users cannot be aware of the heterogeneous structure of services that mashup
seeks to unify. Therefore, from the users perspective, those mashups ideally ought to build
frictionless systems. However, the knowledge footprint produced through the performance of
business processes usually ends up segmented all over the knowledge space of different
service vendors. Even in the case of services offered by the same vendor, knowledge unity is far
fromrealitytoday.
Here we can identify many knowledge usage issues. Users delayed needs for produced
knowledge have problem of identifying an appropriate knowledge location. The next one is
knowledge access diversity if we are not accessing knowledge through the mashup interface,
we are facing different AAAs (Authorization, Access, Authentication) which demotivate
knowledgereuseevenmore.
Since users want to use knowledge over different usage patterns (offered (unfortunately)
through different services) they face the problem of knowledge redundancy. Therefore we are
largely faced with the necessity to reenter knowledge or to resort to a series of unnecessary
workarounds.Thesamesituationpersistswiththeprocessofsharingknowledge.
All the previous issues, however tiresome, are possible to overcome. However, dealing with
more complex knowledge processes is virtually impossible to manage given the distributed
nature of knowledge. If we want to aggregate knowledge, we should be able to crawl over
different services, interpret their specific knowledge representation and finally create
semitemporary aggregated presentations. Similar issues apply to knowledge navigation
and knowledge landscaping, where at least the semitemporary approach seems to provide a
morefeasiblesolution.
Here we present a solution model based on our initial research on initially monolithic systems
that later, through an increasing need for opening their platforms toward external
developers/vendors,becamePaaS/SaaS/mashupsystems.
Our DataTalks model is based on a unified knowledge pool, conceptually laying under the
mashup of services in use. We introduced two ways of manipulating with knowledge marshaling
between the knowledge pool and the mashup 1) DASKI (DataTalks Aware Services Knowledge
Interface) for the services that are aware of living inside of the DataTalks environment and are
willing to cooperate and 2) DUSKI (DataTalks Unaware Services Knowledge Interface) for the
services that do not know or have no interest of adapting to the DataTalks environment. Just to
give a short hint of the DUSKI implementation, we hooked up in between SaaS/mashup
business logic (in our case implemented as a set of BPEL processes) at the top and the
servicesatthebottombyimpersonatingtheseservicesinterfaces.
In our case, the top layer of the SaaS/mashup business logic is aware of the DataTalk
environment which is much easier scenario of DataTalks use, but we also claim that similar
usabilityresultsareachievedonSaaS/mashupsunawareoftheunderlyingDataTalksstack.