An Overview and Classification of Service Description Approaches in Automated Service Composition Research

Abstract

In recent years, automated service composition has been a fervid research area in service computing. Within this area, service description plays a crucial role in terms of the development of a diverse number of automation schemes. In this paper, we provide an investigation and classification of the service description approaches that have been used in a diverse collection of automated service composition studies. To position the service description approaches used in automated service composition throughout the service description world and to clearly classify them, we propose five two-value dimensions. Using the proposed dimensions, we first perform a categorization and provide a simple introduction to current representative industrial service description standards. Subsequently, because we discovered that most of the studied automated composition approaches follow a tuple-based service description paradigm, an exhaustive classification and discussion of this paradigm is made, with the automated composition approaches adopting this paradigm as an example. Finally, we discuss issues that are currently relevant to the service description field and possible solutions. With this study, the reader can obtain a complete understanding of service description approaches used in automated service composition research, including their common formulation and assumptions.

Model-Driven Engineering for End-Users in the Loop in Smart Ambient Systems

“…Service description supports automated service discovery, selection and composition [Fanjiang et al, 2017]. In that case, descriptions are processed by a program.…”

User-Oriented Description of Emerging Services in Ambient Systems

“…In automated service composition approaches, the description of services varies according to the requirements of the discovery and selection steps. The different solutions for service description have been classified [3]. Descriptions may be limited to a syntactic way.…”

“…Therefore, a service description should include extrafunctional characteristics that is QoS-related properties. According to [3], OWL-S has become a standard for industrial service composition. OWL-S is an ontology-based language for describing semantic Web services that enables their automated discovery, composition and use.…”

Automated user-oriented description of emerging composite ambient applications

“…Service description can take more or less advanced forms depending on the requirements for discovery, selection and composition. In [13], authors overview and classify service description approaches used in automated service composition research.…”

“…In [16], authors have proposed different techniques to create descriptions of services using the DAML-S language that was proposed to bridge the gap between the Web services infrastructure and the Semantic Web [17]. According to [13], OWL-S that succeeded to DAML-S has become a standard for industrial service composition. OWL-S [18] is an ontology for describing Semantic Web services that enables their automated discovery, composition and use.…”