Majority-Rule-Based Web Service Selection

Abstract

Abstract. Determining the appropriate service for a user request is a two step process. Initially, the available services whose description agrees with that of the request service are discovered. Then, the service selection process assists users in choosing the service that better matches their intention. In many practical situations, the responsibility to decide which is the appropriate service is shared among multiple parties, e.g., among the department heads of a university. The standard approach to such a service selection problem, is to discard services which are unanimously inappropriate, and return the rest. However, as the involved parties may have conflicting interests, it is possible that only few services are eliminated, and thus almost all discovered services need to be considered. This work addresses this shortcoming, by enforcing the majority rule: a service is discarded if the majority of the parties find it inappropriate. We formulate the majority-rule-based service selection problem based on the notions of dominance relationship and skyline. Furthermore, we propose an algorithm that (1) returns a more manageable set of services, eliminating many inappropriate ones, and (2) is more efficient that standard skyline techniques.