A Requirement-Centric Approach to Web Service Modeling, Discovery, and Selection

Abstract

Abstract. Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) has gained considerable popularity for implementing Service-Based Applications (SBAs) in a flexible and effective manner. The basic idea of SOC is to understand users' requirements for SBAs first, and then discover and select relevant services (i.e., that fit closely functional requirements) and offer a high Quality of Service (QoS). Understanding users' requirements is already achieved by existing requirement engineering approaches (e.g., TROPOS, KAOS, and MAP) which model SBAs in a requirement-driven manner. However, discovering and selecting relevant and high QoS services are still challenging tasks that require time and effort due to the increasing number of available Web services. In this paper, we propose a requirement-centric approach which allows: (i) modeling users' requirements for SBAs with the MAP formalism and specifying required services using an Intentional Service Model (ISM); (ii) discovering services by querying the Web service search engine Service-Finder and using keywords extracted from the specifications provided by the ISM; and(iii) selecting automatically relevant and high QoS services by applying Formal Concept Analysis (FCA). We validate our approach by performing experiments on an e-books application. The experimental results show that our approach allows the selection of relevant and high QoS services with a high accuracy (the average precision is 89.41%) and efficiency (the average recall is 95.43%).

Model Driven Software Product Line Process for Service/Component-Based Applications

“…We also found some commercial tools (Pure: Variants [17] or GEARS [18], [27]). Pure: Variants support feature modeling and configuration by using a tree-view render without feature cardinalities.…”

Selection of Composable Web Services Driven by User Requirements

“…Many works in the literature like [15], [16], [17], [18], [29], [19], [30] have addressed the classification of Web services using concept lattices. Peng et al [15] present an approach to classify and select services.…”

“…The services registry is viewed as a formal context where the services are the individuals and the services types, functional, and non-functional characteristics (security characteristics) are properties. In [30], Driss et al propose a requirement-centric approach to Web services, modelling, discovery, and selection. They consider formal contexts with services as individuals and QoS characteristics as properties.…”

“…The obtained lattices are used to check out relevant (that best fit functional requirements) and high QoS Web services. All the works detailed above [15], [16], [17], [18], [29], [19], [30] are based on FCA, and not on RCA. In addition, they do not deal with service composition since they propose to classify and select only individual services.…”

Une approche centrée exigences pour la composition de services web

“…Cette approche est l'extension du travail présenté dans (Driss et al, 2010) dans lequel nous nous contentons de présenter la modélisation, la découverte et la sélection de services. Notre approche consiste donc en quatre étapes successives comme le montre la figure 1.…”