Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

11-2007

Abstract

When meeting the challenges in automatic and semi-automatic Web service composition, capturing the user’s service demand and preferences is as important as knowing what the services can do. This paper discusses the idea of semantic service requests for composite services, and presents a multi-attribute utility theory (MAUT) based model of composite service requests. Service requests are modeled as user preferences and constraints. Two preference structures, additive independence and generalized additive independence, are utilized in calculating the expected utilities of service composition outcomes. The model is also based on an iterative and incremental scheme meant to better capture requirements in accordance with service consumers’ needs. OWL-S markup vocabularies and associated inference mechanism are used as a means to bring semantics to service requests. Ontology conceptualizations and language constructs are added to OWL-S as uniform representations of possible aspects of the requests. This model of semantics in service requests enables unambiguous understanding of the service needs and more precise generation of the desired compositions. An application scenario is presented to illustrate how the proposed model can be applied in the real business world.

Keywords

Web service composition, MAUT, Semantic service request, Expected utility, Preference structure, Additive independence, Generalized additive independence, Iterative and incremental request elicitation

Discipline

Computer Sciences | Management Information Systems

Research Areas

Information Systems and Management

Publication

Knowledge and Information Systems

Volume

13

Issue

3

First Page

367

Last Page

394

ISSN

0219-1377

Identifier

10.1007/s10115-006-0052-4

Publisher

Springer

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-006-0052-4

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