A User-Oriented Approach to Automated Service Composition

Abstract

In the past a few years, the Web has undergone a tremendous change towards a highly user-centric environment. Millions of users can participate and collaborate for their own interests and benefits. Service oriented computing and Web services have created great potential opportunities for the users to build their own applications. Then, it is a pressing issue that, the users can compose services without too complex tasks and efforts. In this paper, we introduce a user-oriented approach which aims to simplify service composition. We leverage the plentiful information residing in service tags, both from service descriptions (such as WSDL) and the annotations tagged by users. Employing some mining algorithms, a direct acyclic graph is built up to represent potential composition opportunities. With a simple and intuitive search, it allows users to explore the space of potentially composable services and achieve service composition in a heuristic manner. We have developed a composition advisor to provide recommendations guiding and assisting the users. It also lets the users discover and make use of services without having to understand too many details of individual candidate services. To enable the users to accomplish service composition in a more interactive access channel, we finally provide a user-friendly prototype based on Web browsers. It undoubtedly reduces the complexity and lowers the entry barrier for the users, and makes them better play their role in the service-oriented Web environment.