Selection of Web Services Based on Opinion Mining of Free-Text User Reviews

When multiple web services exist that perform identical tasks, non-functional attributes must be considered in order to choose the best service. Quality-of-service (QoS) attributes are often used to differentiate functionally redundant web services. However, ranking services according to QoS attributes is a complex problem. Additionally, the use of test data to establish those QoS ratings does not always yield accurate results. Therefore, this paper proposes a method that utilizes opinion mining techniques to extract information about the QoS attributes of a web service based on free-text user reviews. This method not only has the advantage of using real-world data rather than test data, but it also ensures that a variety of use cases are tested that would be common in the everyday usage of that service

Micro ad-hoc Health Social Networks (uHSN). Design and evaluation of a social-based solution for patient support

Objective: To contribute the design, development, and assessment of a new concept: Micro ad hoc Health Social Networks (uHSN), to create a social-based solution for supporting patients with chronic disease. Design: After in-depth fieldwork and intensive co-design over a 4-year project following Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR), this paper contributes a new paradigm of uHSN, defining two interaction areas (the “backstage” the sphere invisible to the final user, where processes that build services take place; and the “onstage” the visible part that includes the patients and relatives), and describes a new transversal concept, i.e., “network spaces segments, ” to provide timely interaction among all involved profiles and guaranteeing qualitative relationships. This proposal is applicable to any service design project and to all types of work areas; in the present work, it served as a social-based solution for supporting patients with chronic disease in two real-life health scenarios: a Parkinson disease patient association and a Stroke rehabilitation service in a hospital. These two scenarios included the following main features: thematic (related to the specific disease), private, and secure (only for the patient, relatives, healthcare professional, therapist, carer), with defined specific objectives (around patient support), small size (from tens to hundreds of users), ability to integrate innovative services (e.g., connection to hospital information service or to health sensors), supported by local therapeutic associations, and clustered with preconfigured relationships among users based in network groups. Measurements: Using a mixed qualitative and quantitative approach for 6 months, the performance of the uHSN was assessed in the two environments: a hospital rehabilitation unit working with Stroke patients, and a Parkinson disease association providing physiotherapy, occupational therapy, psychological support, speech therapy, and social services. We describe the proposed methods for evaluating the uHSN quantitatively and qualitatively, and how the scientific community can replicate and/or integrate this contribution in its research. Results: The uHSN overcomes the main limitations of traditional HSNs in the main areas recommended in the literature: privacy, security, transparency, system ecology, Quality of Service (QoS), and technology enhancement. The qualitative and quantitative research demonstrated its viability and replicability in four key points: user acceptance, productivity improvement, QoS enhancement, and fostering of social relations. It also meets the expectation of connecting health and social worlds, supporting distance rehabilitation, improving professionals’ efficiency, expanding users’ social capital, improving information quality and immediacy, and enhancing perceived peer/social/emotional support. The scientific contributions of the present paper are the first step not only in customizing health solutions that empower patients, their families, and healthcare professionals, but also in transferring this new paradigm to other scientific, professional, and social environments to create new opportunities

Formulating and managing viable SLAs in cloud computing from a small to medium service provider's viewpoint: A state-of-the-art review

© 2017 Elsevier Ltd In today's competitive world, service providers need to be customer-focused and proactive in their marketing strategies to create consumer awareness of their services. Cloud computing provides an open and ubiquitous computing feature in which a large random number of consumers can interact with providers and request services. In such an environment, there is a need for intelligent and efficient methods that increase confidence in the successful achievement of business requirements. One such method is the Service Level Agreement (SLA), which is comprised of service objectives, business terms, service relations, obligations and the possible action to be taken in the case of SLA violation. Most of the emphasis in the literature has, until now, been on the formation of meaningful SLAs by service consumers, through which their requirements will be met. However, in an increasingly competitive market based on the cloud environment, service providers too need a framework that will form a viable SLA, predict possible SLA violations before they occur, and generate early warning alarms that flag a potential lack of resources. This is because when a provider and a consumer commit to an SLA, the service provider is bound to reserve the agreed amount of resources for the entire period of that agreement – whether the consumer uses them or not. It is therefore very important for cloud providers to accurately predict the likely resource usage for a particular consumer and to formulate an appropriate SLA before finalizing an agreement. This problem is more important for a small to medium cloud service provider which has limited resources that must be utilized in the best possible way to generate maximum revenue. A viable SLA in cloud computing is one that intelligently helps the service provider to determine the amount of resources to offer to a requesting consumer, and there are number of studies on SLA management in the literature. The aim of this paper is two-fold. First, it presents a comprehensive overview of existing state-of-the-art SLA management approaches in cloud computing, and their features and shortcomings in creating viable SLAs from the service provider's viewpoint. From a thorough analysis, we observe that the lack of a viable SLA management framework renders a service provider unable to make wise decisions in forming an SLA, which could lead to service violations and violation penalties. To fill this gap, our second contribution is the proposal of the Optimized Personalized Viable SLA (OPV-SLA) framework which assists a service provider to form a viable SLA and start managing SLA violation before an SLA is formed and executed. The framework also assists a service provider to make an optimal decision in service formation and allocate the appropriate amount of marginal resources. We demonstrate the applicability of our framework in forming viable SLAs through experiments. From the evaluative results, we observe that our framework helps a service provider to form viable SLAs and later to manage them to effectively minimize possible service violation and penalties

A Review on Framework and Quality of Service Based Web Services Discovery

Selection of Web services (WSs) is one of the most important steps in the application of different types of WSs such as WS composition systems and the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) registries. The more available these WSs on the Internet are, the wider the number of these services whose functions match the various service requests is. Selecting WSs with higher quality largely depends on the quality of service (QoS) since it plays a significant role in selecting such services. In achieving this selection of the best WSs, the potential WSs are ranked according to the user’s necessities on service quality. In many cases, the value of QoS ontology is realized by its support for nonfunctional features of WSs. This ontology is also capable of providing solutions to the interoperability of QoS description. Moreover, based on the QoS ontology, it becomes more possible to develop a framework of semantic WS discovery. The framework enhances the automatic discovery of WSs and can improve the users’ efficiency in finding the best web services. Thus, Web Services are software functionalities publish and accessible through the Internet. Different protocols and web mechanism have been defined to access these Services

A predictive model for risk and trust assessment in cloud computing: taxonomy and analysis for attack pattern detection

Cloud computing environments consist of many entities that have different roles, such as provider and customer, and multiple interactions amongst them. Trust is an essential element to develop confidence-based relationships amongst the various components in such a diverse environment. The current chapter presents the taxonomy of trust models and classification of information sources for trust assessment. Furthermore, it presents the taxonomy of risk factors in cloud computing environment. It analyses further the existing approaches and portrays the potential of enhancing trust development by merging trust assessment and risk assessment methodologies. The aim of the proposed solution is to combine information sources collected from various trust and risk assessment systems deployed in cloud services, with data related to attack patterns. Specifically, the approach suggests a new qualitative solution that could analyse each symptom, indicator, and vulnerability in order to detect the impact and likelihood of attacks directed at cloud computing environments. Therefore, possible implementation of the proposed framework might help to minimise false positive alarms, as well as to improve performance and security, in the cloud computing environment