Effective decision support for semantic web service selection

The objective of this dissertation is to demonstrate the feasibility of the vision of the Internet of Services based on Semantic Web Services by suggesting an approach to end-user mediated Semantic Web Service selection. Our main contribution is an incremental and interactive approach to requirements elicitation and service selection that is inspired by example critiquing recommender systems. It alternates phases of intermediate service recommendation and phases of informal requirements specification. During that process, the user incrementally develops his service requirements and preferences and finally makes a selection decision. We demonstrate how the requirements elicitation and service selection process can be directed and focused to effectively reduce the system's uncertainty about the user's service requirements and thus to contribute to the efficiency of the service selection process. To acquire information about the actual performance of available services and thus about the risk that is associated with their execution, we propose a flexible feedback system, that leverages reported consumer experiences made in past service interactions. In particular, we provide means that allow to detailedly describe a service's performance with respect to its multiple facets. This is supplemented by a user-adaptive method that effectively assists service consumers in providing such feedback as well as a privacy-preserving technique for feedback propagation. We also demonstrate that available consumer feedback can be effectively exploited to assess the degree and kind of risk that is associated with the execution of an offered service and show how the user can be effectively made aware of this risk. In contrast to many other approaches related to Semantic Web Service technology, we performed an extensive and thorough evaluation of our contribution and documented its results. These show the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach

Investigating Decision Support Techniques for Automating Cloud Service Selection

The compass of Cloud infrastructure services advances steadily leaving users in the agony of choice. To be able to select the best mix of service offering from an abundance of possibilities, users must consider complex dependencies and heterogeneous sets of criteria. Therefore, we present a PhD thesis proposal on investigating an intelligent decision support system for selecting Cloud based infrastructure services (e.g. storage, network, CPU).Comment: Accepted by IEEE Cloudcom 2012 - PhD consortium trac

Semantic Web Technologies in Support of Service Oriented Architecture Governance

As Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) deployments gradually mature they also grow in size and complexity. The number of service providers, services, and service consumers increases, and so do the dependencies among these entities and the various artefacts that describe how services operate, or how they are meant to operate under specific conditions. Appropriate governance over the various phases and activities associated with the service lifecycle is therefore indispensable in order to prevent a SOA deployment from dissolving into an unmanageable infrastructure. The employment of Semantic Web technologies for describing and reasoning about service properties and governance requirements has the potential to greatly enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of SOA Governance solutions by increasing the levels of automation in a wide-range of tasks relating to service lifecycle management. The goal of the proposed research work is to investigate the application of Semantic Web technologies in the context of service lifecycle management, and propose a concrete theoretical and technological approach for supporting SOA Governance through the realisation of semantically-enhanced registry and repository solutions

mSpace meets EPrints: a Case Study in Creating Dynamic Digital Collections

In this case study we look at issues involved in (a) generating dynamic digital libraries that are on a particular topic but span heterogeneous collections at distinct sites, (b) supplementing the artefacts in that collection with additional information available either from databases at the artefact's home or from the Web at large, and (c) providing an interaction paradigm that will support effective exploration of this new resource. We describe how we used two available frameworks, mSpace and EPrints to support this kind of collection building. The result of the study is a set of recommendations to improve the connectivity of remote resources both to one another and to related Web resources, and that will also reduce problems like co-referencing in order to enable the creation of new collections on demand