Section: Application Domains

Web services and distributed active documents

Data centric systems are already deployed, and our goal is not to design new languages, architectures, or standards for them, but rather to propose techniques for the verification and monitoring of existing systems. A bottleneck is the complexity and heterogeneity of web-based systems, that make them difficult to model and analyze. However, one can still hope for some lightweight verification or monitoring techniques for some specific aspects, for example to check the absence of conflict of interest in a transaction system, to verify (off line) and maintain (on line) the QoS, to prevent security breaches, etc. Safety aspects of Web Services have received little attention; any progress in that area would be useful. Besides, modeling issues are central for some applications of data centric systems. Collaborative work environments with shared active documents can be found in many domains ranging from banking, maintenance of critical systems, webstores... We think that models for data driven systems can find applications in most of these areas. Our approach will be to favor purely declarative approaches for the specification of such collaborative environments. We have contacts with Centre Pasteur in Yaoundé on the design of diseases monitoring systems in developing countries. Diseases monitoring systems can be seen as a collaborative edition work, where each actor in the system reports and aggregates information about cases he or she is aware of. This collaboration is an opportunity to confront our models to real situations and real users needs. Formally modeling such a large distributed system can be seen as a way to ensure its correctness. We also envision to promote this approach as a support for maintenance operations in complex environments (train transportation, aeronautics,...). We believe this framework can be useful both for the specification of distributed maintenance procedures, for circulating information and sharing processes across teams, but also for the analysis of the correctness of procedures, possibly for their optimization or redesign, and finally to automatically elaborate logs of maintenance operations. We are in contact with several major companies on these topics, for the maintenance application side. Other industrial contacts need to be built: we have preliminary contact with IBM (leader in business artifacts), and would like to establish relations with SAP (leader in service architectures).