Composing heterogeneous services from end users' perspective.

摘要

As the Internet becomes more pervasive, the content and services are increasing in quantity as well as improving in quality. This trend is fostered by the advancement of technologies, such as RESTful services, Web 2.0, and Mashups. Service composition integrates services to fulfill specific tasks using a set of tools. The existing service composition techniques and tools are mainly designed for the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) professionals. The business processes used in the service composition systems are primarily designed by business analysts who have extensive process knowledge. Due to the lack of process knowledge, novice business analysts and end users face challenge to identify and orchestrate service into a well-defined business process. Even for the experienced users, it is challenging to select appropriate services from a set of functionally similar services as the quality information of services may not be available.;In this thesis, we propose a framework that allows a non-technical user to combine web services to achieve a goal. Our approach helps users to find the process knowledge from the web. We index web services based on the semantic concepts available in the service description documents and help users to formulate a web service search query. We use online reviews to choose a web service from a set of functionally similar web services. Our approach automatically finds the data flow between web services and generates a user interface to execute a composite service. The effectiveness of our proposed approaches is demonstrated through a series of case studies. The results of our case studies show that our approaches for process knowledge extraction, service discovery, and service selection make it easier for people with less technical knowledge to compose services.