Service selection based on a practical interface assessment scheme

Abstract

Service-Oriented Computing promotes building applications by consuming reusable services. However, facing the selection of adequate services for a specific application still is a major challenge. Even with a reduced set of candidate services, the effort on assessing candidates could be overwhelming. We have defined an approach to assist developers in the selection of services, which mainly comprises an assessment process for service Interface Compatibility. This assessment process is based on a comprehensive structural scheme for services' interfaces matching. The scheme allows developers to gain knowledge on likely services' interactions and their required adaptations to achieve a successful integration. We evaluated the performance of the Interface Compatibility analysis with a data-set of 453 services and two different service discovery registries. The experiments shown an improvement of up to 17% in precision and up to 8% in the DCG usefulness metric, with regard to the previous results obtained using only textual (syntactical) queries.

Assessing Web Services Interfaces with Lightweight Semantic Basis

“…Message structures and complex XML schema types are compared through schema matching, representing complex types as labeled directed graphs. However, complex types similarity exploiting a lightweight semantic basis can be performed without dealing with the complexity of an XML schema, as in our approach [4].…”

“…The Interface Compatibility procedure ( Figure 1) assesses structural and semantic aspects from the interface (I S ) of a candidate service S against a simple specification of an interface (I R ) from a required functionality [4,5].…”

“…The main aspects of structural assessment are presented below. For details of the structural assessment, interested readers could refer to [4].…”

“…In order to ease the development of Service-Oriented Applications we have presented in previous work [4,5,6] an approach for service selection based in an Interface Compatibility procedure. All available information from interfaces of candidate services (previously discovered) is gathered to be assessed at structural and semantic levels.…”

Lightweight Semantic based Approach to Assess Readability of Web Service Interfaces

“…Then, producing readable service descriptions can be used as a strategy by service providers to attract service consumers [6]. Current research in the field is indeed compatible with the idea of generating readable service descriptions, since they address other relevant quality attributes such as maintainability [7], discoverability [8] and adaptability [9].…”