SEKE 2012 Proceedings - Knowledge Systems Institute

and (iv) the reduced amount of lines of code implemented.
These benefits reject the null hypothesis H 0 ’’: there are no
benefits in implementing the application according to Social
Machines model, which validates the alternative hypothesis H 2.
However, the subjects reported some questions which not
reject the null hypothesis H 0 ’’’: there are difficulties and
challenges in implementing the application according to
Social Machines model. Initially, they reported the difficulty to
define some SM’s, in special the SMs that are not developed
by the team, such as Twitter or Wikipedia SMs, mainly
because developers do not have full access to information
about them. Thus, we concluded that can be more effective to
create two classes of SMs − Internal and External − and reduce
the tuple of external SMs to SM = .
Moreover, they also reported the difficulty to apply the
proposal of SM Architecture Description Language (SMADL)
presented in [8, 9], and prefer to represent items graphically or
descriptively, such as in the Figure 2.
Finally, they related the need to create SMs controllers in
order to manage groups of SMs. For example, instead of using
only the Flickr to get photos, the application could use other
image services, such as Google Images or Bing Images.
Thereby, some mechanism is necessary to manage where to get
the photos, based on heuristics, such as: service constraints,
QoS or availability, and should change the policy dynamically,
for example, if the preferred service became unstable. After
several discussions, the subjects and specialists concludes that
one possible approach is to create federations of SMs. The
federations would be a group of SMs with similar services, and
would have a manager, which implements the selection
policies. In this way the application wrapper interface would
only communicate and call the services exposed by federation
manager. This approach have the potential of increase the
application modularity and abstraction, because the final
application developer won’t need to know services API’s, but
only the federation manager API.
V. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORKS
In this paper, we revisited the concept of the emerging web
of social machines [8, 9], a model to provide a common and
coherent conceptual basis for the understanding of the young,
upcoming and possibly highly innovative phase of software
development, the “programmable web”. Due to the fact that
this is an initial concept and need to be more tested, we
performed a case study by developing an application that uses
several web API’s of several application domains in according
to Social Machines model.
The results of the case study showed that it is possible to
implement web applications which interact with several web
services of several domains. Some benefits were listed, such as
the increase of modularity and maintainability, abstraction,
reuse and the facility of use third part services and API’s.
Some improvements of the concept of SMs were suggested,
such as the creation of Internal/External SMs, and the
differentiation of the tuple for external SMs.
Moreover, we discuss a possible solution to some
challenges presented in initial SMs preliminary definition,
such as the creation of federation of SMs and a new type of
SM, Federation Manager, which can be used to address these
challenges.
For future developments we updated the preliminary agenda
of social machines research, in special: (i) to define,
implements and test a Social Machine’ federation model; (ii)
to investigate self-awareness characteristics of SMs and the
possibility to, in conjunction with federations, allow the
autonomous lifecycle management of SMs. In addition, the
preliminary agenda are been performed, including an
architectural framework for defining and developing SM-based
Systems, security, billing, monitoring and fault tolerance
questions, among others. Finally, more case studies are being
developed to continue to validate and investigate the model.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was partially supported by the National Institute of
Science and Technology for Software Engineering (INES 2 ),
funded by CNPq and FACEPE, grants 573964/2008-4, APQ-
1037- 1.03/08 and APQ-1044-1.03/10 and Brazilian Agency
(CNPq processes number 475743/2007-5 and 140060/2008-1).
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