1 research outputs found
External Service Sensing (ESS): Research Framework, Challenges and Opportunities
The flourish of web-based services gave birth to the research area
\textit{services computing}, a rapidly-expanding academic community since
nearly 20 years ago. Consensus has been reached on a set of representative
research problems in services computing, such as service selection, service
composition, service recommendation, and service quality prediction. An obvious
fact is that most services keep constant changes to timely adapt to changes of
external business/technical environment and changes of internal development
strategies. However, traditional services computing research does not consider
such changes sufficiently. Many works regard services as \textit{static}
entities; this leads to the situation that some proposed models/algorithms do
not work in real world. Sensing various types of service changes is of great
significance to the practicability and rationality of services computing
research. In this paper, a new research problem \textit{External Service
Sensing} (ESS) is defined to cope with various changes in services, and a
research framework of ESS is presented to elaborate the scope and boundary of
ESS. This framework is composed of four orthogonal dimensions: sensing objects,
sensing contents, sensing channels, and sensing techniques. Each concrete ESS
problem is defined by combining different values in these dimensions, and
existing research work related to service changes can be well adapted to this
framework. Real-world case studies demonstrate the soundness of ESS and its
framework. Finally, some challenges and opportunities in ESS research are
listed for researchers in the services computing community. To the best of our
knowledge, this is the first time to systematically define service
change-related research as a standard services computing problem, and thus
broadening the research scope of services computing