A customized semantic service retrieval methodology for the digital ecosystems environment

With the emergence of the Web and its pervasive intrusion on individuals, organizations, businesses etc., people now realize that they are living in a digital environment analogous to the ecological ecosystem. Consequently, no individual or organization can ignore the huge impact of the Web on social well-being, growth and prosperity, or the changes that it has brought about to the world economy, transforming it from a self-contained, isolated, and static environment to an open, connected, dynamic environment. Recently, the European Union initiated a research vision in relation to this ubiquitous digital environment, known as Digital (Business) Ecosystems. In the Digital Ecosystems environment, there exist ubiquitous and heterogeneous species, and ubiquitous, heterogeneous, context-dependent and dynamic services provided or requested by species. Nevertheless, existing commercial search engines lack sufficient semantic supports, which cannot be employed to disambiguate user queries and cannot provide trustworthy and reliable service retrieval. Furthermore, current semantic service retrieval research focuses on service retrieval in the Web service field, which cannot provide requested service retrieval functions that take into account the features of Digital Ecosystem services. Hence, in this thesis, we propose a customized semantic service retrieval methodology, enabling trustworthy and reliable service retrieval in the Digital Ecosystems environment, by considering the heterogeneous, context-dependent and dynamic nature of services and the heterogeneous and dynamic nature of service providers and service requesters in Digital Ecosystems.The customized semantic service retrieval methodology comprises: 1) a service information discovery, annotation and classification methodology; 2) a service retrieval methodology; 3) a service concept recommendation methodology; 4) a quality of service (QoS) evaluation and service ranking methodology; and 5) a service domain knowledge updating, and service-provider-based Service Description Entity (SDE) metadata publishing, maintenance and classification methodology.The service information discovery, annotation and classification methodology is designed for discovering ubiquitous service information from the Web, annotating the discovered service information with ontology mark-up languages, and classifying the annotated service information by means of specific service domain knowledge, taking into account the heterogeneous and context-dependent nature of Digital Ecosystem services and the heterogeneous nature of service providers. The methodology is realized by the prototype of a Semantic Crawler, the aim of which is to discover service advertisements and service provider profiles from webpages, and annotating the information with service domain ontologies.The service retrieval methodology enables service requesters to precisely retrieve the annotated service information, taking into account the heterogeneous nature of Digital Ecosystem service requesters. The methodology is presented by the prototype of a Service Search Engine. Since service requesters can be divided according to the group which has relevant knowledge with regard to their service requests, and the group which does not have relevant knowledge with regard to their service requests, we respectively provide two different service retrieval modules. The module for the first group enables service requesters to directly retrieve service information by querying its attributes. The module for the second group enables service requesters to interact with the search engine to denote their queries by means of service domain knowledge, and then retrieve service information based on the denoted queries.The service concept recommendation methodology concerns the issue of incomplete or incorrect queries. The methodology enables the search engine to recommend relevant concepts to service requesters, once they find that the service concepts eventually selected cannot be used to denote their service requests. We premise that there is some extent of overlap between the selected concepts and the concepts denoting service requests, as a result of the impact of service requesters’ understandings of service requests on the selected concepts by a series of human-computer interactions. Therefore, a semantic similarity model is designed that seeks semantically similar concepts based on selected concepts.The QoS evaluation and service ranking methodology is proposed to allow service requesters to evaluate the trustworthiness of a service advertisement and rank retrieved service advertisements based on their QoS values, taking into account the contextdependent nature of services in Digital Ecosystems. The core of this methodology is an extended CCCI (Correlation of Interaction, Correlation of Criterion, Clarity of Criterion, and Importance of Criterion) metrics, which allows a service requester to evaluate the performance of a service provider in a service transaction based on QoS evaluation criteria in a specific service domain. The evaluation result is then incorporated with the previous results to produce the eventual QoS value of the service advertisement in a service domain. Service requesters can rank service advertisements by considering their QoS values under each criterion in a service domain.The methodology for service domain knowledge updating, service-provider-based SDE metadata publishing, maintenance, and classification is initiated to allow: 1) knowledge users to update service domain ontologies employed in the service retrieval methodology, taking into account the dynamic nature of services in Digital Ecosystems; and 2) service providers to update their service profiles and manually annotate their published service advertisements by means of service domain knowledge, taking into account the dynamic nature of service providers in Digital Ecosystems. The methodology for service domain knowledge updating is realized by a voting system for any proposals for changes in service domain knowledge, and by assigning different weights to the votes of domain experts and normal users.In order to validate the customized semantic service retrieval methodology, we build a prototype – a Customized Semantic Service Search Engine. Based on the prototype, we test the mathematical algorithms involved in the methodology by a simulation approach and validate the proposed functions of the methodology by a functional testing approach

Soft computing-based methods for semantic service retrieval

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.Nowadays, a large number of business services have been advertised to customers via online channels. To access the published services, the customers typically search for the services by using search engines. Consequently, in order to meet the customers' desires, many researchers have focused on improving performance of the retrieval process. In the recent past, semantic technologies have played an important role in service retrieval and service querying. A service retrieval system consists of two main processes; service annotation and service querying. Annotating services semantically enables machines to understand the purpose of services, while semantic service querying helps machines to expand user queries by considering meanings of query terms, and retrieve services which are relevant to the queries. Because of dealing with semantics of services and queries, both processes can further assist in intelligent and precise service retrieval, selection and composition. In terms of semantic service annotation, a key issue is the manual nature of service annotation. Manual service annotation requires not just large amount of time, but updating the annotation is infrequent and, hence, annotation of the service description changes may be out-of-date. Although some researchers have studied semantic service annotation, they have focused only on Web services, not business service information. Moreover, their approaches are semi-automated, so service providers are still required to select appropriate service annotations. Similar to semantic service annotation, existing literature in semantic service querying has focused on processing Web pages or Web services, not business service information. In addition, because of issues of ubiquity, heterogeneity, and ambiguity of services, the use of soft computing methods offers an interesting solution for handling complex tasks in service retrieval. Unfortunately, based on the literature review, no soft-computing based methods have been used for semantic service annotation or semantic service querying. In this research, intelligent soft-computing driven methods are developed to improve the performance of a semantic retrieval system for business services. The research includes three main parts, namely, intelligent methods for semantically annotating services, querying service concepts, and retrieving services based on relevant concepts. Furthermore, a prototype of a service retrieval system is built to validate the developed intelligent methods. The research proposes three semantic-based methods; ECBR, Vector-based and Classification-based, for accomplishing each research part. The experimental results present that the Classification-based method, which is based on soft-computing techniques, performs well in the service annotation and outperforms both the ECBR and the Vector-based methods in the service querying and service retrieval

ORPMS: An ontology-based real-time project monitoring system in the cloud

Project monitoring plays a crucial role in project management, which is a part of every stage of a project’s life-cycle. Nevertheless, along with the increasing ratio of outsourcing in many companies’ strategic plans, project monitoring has been challenged by geographically dispersed project teams and culturally diverse team members. Furthermore, because of the lack of a uniform standard, data exchange between various project monitoring software becomes an impossible mission. These factors together lead to the issue of ambiguity in project monitoring processes. Ontology is a form of knowledge representation with the purpose of disambiguation. Consequently, in this paper, we propose the framework of an ontology-based real-time project monitoring system (ORPSM), in order to, by means of ontologies, solve the ambiguity issue in project monitoring processes caused by multiple factors. The framework incorporates a series of ontologies for knowledge capture, storage, sharing and term disambiguation in project monitoring processes, and a series of metrics for assisting management of project organizations to better monitor projects. We propose to configure the ORPMS framework in a cloud environment, aiming at providing the project monitoring service to geographically distributed and dynamic project members with great flexibility, scalability and security. A case study is conducted on a prototype of the ORPMS in order to evaluate the framework

A QOS-based service retrieval methodology for the digital ecosystems

The emergence of the World Wide Web and its influence on the field of industry, commerce, healthcare etc. has led to an innovative, dynamic, open, collaborative and interactive environment - Digital Ecosystems. Whereas service plays an important role in the Digital Ecosystems, there is no technology available to retrieve the heterogeneous and geographically dispersed services. Additionally, no methodology has been proposed in the literature that can distinguish or rank the services based on the Quality of Services(QoS). In order to address these issues, we propose a semantic service retrieval engine which incorporates a novel semantic QoS evaluation methodology. The salient feature of this methodology, that sets it apart from any other QoS evaluation methodologies, is that the evaluation of the service and the subsequent quantification of QoS is a combination of subjective QoS measures and objective QoS measures. Another salient feature of our proposed methodology is that it enables the domain-specific ranking of services. Finally, an online prototype is implemented to evaluate our methodology, the results of which are discussed in this paper