All ETDs from UAB

Advisory Committee Chair

Murat M Tanik

Advisory Committee Members

David G Green

Gary J Grimes

John L Hartman IV

Document Type

Thesis

Date of Award

2007

Degree Name by School

Master of Science in Electrical Engineering (MSEE) School of Engineering

Abstract

Service-Oriented Enterprises are currently focused on offering enhanced user experiences to customers, employees, and enterprise partners who use the enterprise’s software applications. A better user experience is delivered through the presentation of services and business processes to the user in a composite manner, and by facilitating a better user-application interaction for the user. Our experience with the bioinformatics domain helped us to see that although existing models of enterprise portals offer an integrated environment to present applications and enterprise resources, they are not sufficient to address certain complex user-application interactions. In this thesis, we present a design for a Service-Oriented Dashboard to address this deficiency. The service-oriented dashboard leverages Service-Oriented Architecture to present an integrated environment to access and interact with the diverse and isolated software tools, applications, and resources of an enterprise. We address the design of the dashboard at three levels: the presentation layer, the task composition layer, and the services layer. We introduce in the thesis the notion of describing the user’s job function as a composition of tasks. Users, through this approach, will be able to compose applications according to the user’s tasks. This thesis also presents the design of the serviceoriented dashboard, focusing on two notions – the tools-as-services and service-enabled tools approach. The tools-as-services approach involves making the tools in an application available to the user as services. The service-enabled tools approach allows applicaiii iii tions to consume services and thereby provides the functionality of the consumed service inside that application. We also present two case studies from the bioinformatics domain. We use the case studies to demonstrate the need for the dashboard, and also to derive the requirements for the design of the dashboard. We also illustrate how the dashboard can enhance the workflow in the case studies described in the thesis.

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