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Provalets: Component-Based Mobile Agents as Microservices for Rule-Based Data Access, Processing and Analytics

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Abstract

Provalets are mobile rule agents for rule-based data access, semantic processing, and inference analytics. They can be dynamically deployed as microservices from Maven repositories into standardized container environments such as OSGi, where they can be used via simple REST calls. The programming model supports rapid prototyping and reuse of Provalets components to build Linked Enterprise Data applications where the sensible corporate data is not transmitted outside the enterprise, but instead the Provalets providing data processing and knowledge inference capabilities are moved closer to the data.

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Notes

  1. http://www.corporate-semantic-web.de, accessed 1 Jun 2016.

  2. http://sce.corporate-smart-content.de/, accessed 1 Jun 2016.

  3. http://www.w3.org/TR/ldp/, accessed 1 Jun 2016.

  4. Microservices is a software architecture style designing a software application as a suite of independently deployable small services providing e.g., (agent) intelligence in the endpoints, and decentralized control of languages and data.

  5. Martin Fowler: http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html, accessed 1 Jun 2016.

  6. Data is subject to the laws of the country in which it is located, which becomes a big privacy and compliance issue if data is moved to cloud service provides which operate cross-countries.

  7. http://sce.corporate-smart-content.de/provalets, accessed 1 Jun 2016.

  8. http://prova.ws, accessed 1 Jun 2016.

  9. http://reaction.ruleml.org, accessed 1 Jun 2016.

  10. SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language is a W3C recommendation for an RDF query language.

  11. W3C LDP http://www.w3.org/TR/ldp/, accessed 1 Oct 2015.

  12. Apache Marmotta http://marmotta.apache.org/. Accessed 20 Aug 2013.

  13. Apache Clerezza https://clerezza.apache.org/, accessed 1 Oct 2015.

  14. http://www.prova.ws, accessed 1 Jun 2016.

  15. Prova has various built-ins for rule-based data access such as Java object access, file access, XML (DOM), SQL, RDF triples, XQuery, SPARQL.

  16. Gitlab: https://git.imp.fu-berlin.de/ag-csw/provalets.

  17. it should be noted that the evaluation of the full Prova rule language and the Prova agents, which are used within a Provalet, is out of the scope of this article and can be found elsewhere in the publications about Prova.

  18. For further details see Zhao et al. (2016).

  19. Our numbering of the patterns is according to ordering in release (Russell et al. 2006).

  20. http://www.omgwiki.org/API4KB/.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been partially supported by the “InnoProfile-Corporate Smart Content” project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the BMBF Innovation Initiative for the New German Länder – Entrepreneurial Regions.

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  1. Institute of Computer Science, AG Corporate Semantic Web, Freie Universität Berlin, Königin-Luise-Str. 24, 14195, Berlin, Germany

    Adrian Paschke

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Correspondence to Adrian Paschke.

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Accepted after two revisions by the editors of the special issue.

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Paschke, A. Provalets: Component-Based Mobile Agents as Microservices for Rule-Based Data Access, Processing and Analytics. Bus Inf Syst Eng 58, 329–340 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12599-016-0447-z

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