A Coherent Measurement of Web-Search Relevance

We present a metric for quantitatively assessing the quality of Web searches. The relevance-of-searching-on-target index measures how relevant a search result is with respect to the searcher\u27s interest and intention. The measurement is established on the basis of the cognitive characteristics of common user\u27s online Web-browsing behavior and processes. We evaluated the accuracy of the index function with respect to a set of surveys conducted on several groups of our college students. While the index is primarily intended to be used to compare the Web-search results and tell which is more relevant, it can be extended to other applications. For example, it can be used to evaluate the techniques that people apply to improve the Web-search quality (including the quality of search engines), as well as other factors such as the expressiveness of search queries and the effectiveness of result-filtering processes

Web Services Communities: from Intra-Community Coopetition to Inter-Community Competition

This chapter discusses the structure and management of communities of Web services from two perspectives. The first perspective, called coopetition, shows the simultaneous cooperative and competitive behaviors that Web services exhibit when they reside in the same community. These Web services offer similar functionalities, and hence are competitive, but they can also cooperate as they share the same savoir-faire. The second perspective, called competition, shows the competition that occurs not between Web services but between their communities, which are associated with similar functionalities. To differentiate such communities, a competition model based on a set of metrics is discussed in this chapter

Toward behavioral web services using policies

Making Web services context-aware is a challenge. This is like making Web service expose appropriate behaviors in response to changes detected in the environment. Context awareness requires a review and extension of the current execution model of Web services. This paper discusses the seamless combination of context and policy to manage behaviors that Web services expose during composition and in response to changes in the environment. For this purpose, a four-layer approach is devised. These layers are denoted by policy, user, Web service, and resource. In this approach, behavior management and binding are subject to executing policies of types permission, obligation, restriction, and dispensation. A prototype that illustrates how context and policy are woven into Web services composition scenarios is presented as well