News at last

Finally there's a little bit of forward movement on the Masters course - we've got the dates for the seminars sorted. Of course, the first one is scheduled for one of the few days in the next few weeks where I have something on that cannot be cancelled or moved at all, but I guess that's life...

But at least there's stuff going on. In other news there, the collection of papers to do with SOA and the application of genetic algorithms thereto continues. There's been a bit more work done on this field than I'd anticipated, which was a little surprising, and it falls into two general streams.

One takes a composed service, made up of lots of interchangeable component services, and tries to work out the best combination of services given a specific set of requirements. This is pretty similar to work that I've done already in this area, so that's encouraging.

The second uses the genetic approach to try and combine services efficiently into a single component service. This looks fantastically interesting and useful, but it would mean learning a whole new mathematical language of combinatorial algebra, and then trying to code it into Java. Which is unlikely to take place over the course of a single, part-time year.

But hey - I'm meeting up with my supervisor soon enough, and we'll have a look through the papers to see if he thinks that the gaps I've spotted are (a) actually gaps at all and (b) big enough gaps for a research project.