Ontology-driven service composition for end-users

Abstract

Current service composition techniques and tools are mainly designed for use by Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) professionals to solve business problems. Little attention has been paid to allowing end-users without sufficient service composition skills to compose services and integrate SOA solutions into their online experience to fulfill their daily activities. To shelter end-users from the complexity of service composition, we propose an approach which can compose services on the fly to meet the situational needs of end-users. We present a tag-based service description schema which allows non-IT professional users to easily understand the description of services and add their own descriptions using descriptive tags. Instead of requiring end-users to specify detailed steps for composition, the end-users only need to describe their goals using a few keywords. Our approach expands the meaning of a user's goal using ontologies then derives a group of keywords to discover services in order to fulfill the goal. A prototype is developed as a proof of concept to show that our approach enables end-users to discover and compose services easily. We conduct a case study to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach that eases end-users to compose services without the knowledge of SOA technologies. The results of our case study show that our approach can effectively generate ad-hoc processes and discover services with relatively high precision and recall.