Abstract-Given the large amount of existing services and the diversified needs nowadays, it is time-consuming for end-users to find appropriate services. To help end-users obtain their desired services, context-aware systems provide a promising way to automatically search and recommend services using a user's context. However, existing context-aware techniques have limited support for dynamic adaption to newly added context types (e.g., location, time and activity). Due to the diversity of user's environment, the available context types may change over time. It is challenging to anticipate a complete set of context types while we design a context aware system. In this paper, we propose a context modeling approach which can dynamically handle various context types and values. More specifically, we use ontologies to enhance the meaning of a user's context values and automatically indentify the relations among different context values. Based on the relations among context values, we capture the potential services which the user might need. A case study is conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach. The results show that our approach can use contexts to find users' needs and recommend their desired services with high precision and recall.
Current service composition techniques and tools are mainly designed for use by Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) professionals to solve business problems. Little attention has been paid to allowing end-users without sufficient service composition skills to compose services and integrate SOA solutions into their online experience to fulfill their daily activities. To shelter end-users from the complexity of service composition, we propose an approach which can compose services on the fly to meet the situational needs of end-users. We present a tag-based service description schema which allows non-IT professional users to easily understand the description of services and add their own descriptions using descriptive tags. Instead of requiring end-users to specify detailed steps for composition, the end-users only need to describe their goals using a few keywords. Our approach expands the meaning of a user's goal using ontologies then derives a group of keywords to discover services in order to fulfill the goal. A prototype is developed as a proof of concept to show that our approach enables end-users to discover and compose services easily. We conduct a case study to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach that eases end-users to compose services without the knowledge of SOA technologies. The results of our case study show that our approach can effectively generate ad-hoc processes and discover services with relatively high precision and recall.
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