Devis Bianchini

Ontology-based methodology for e-service discovery

Service discovery is a critical aspect in the Service Oriented Computing approach. A model, a methodology and a tool environment based on ontologies are proposed in this paper. The requester and provider perspectives are discussed, both to support the service publication phase and the search phase. The proposed service ontology is based on functional aspects and it is organized on three layers, to support traditional search based on classification such as proposed in UDDI as well as search based on abstracting service characteristics. In addition, nonfunctional features such as requester and provider contexts and quality of service are considered to refine the search results according to the requester requirements.

Flexible Semantic-Based Service Matchmaking and Discovery

Automated techniques and tools are required to effectively locate services that fulfill a given user request in a mobility context. To this purpose, the use of semantic descriptions of services has been widely motivated and recommended for automated service discovery under highly dynamic and context-dependent requirements. Our aim in this work is to propose an ontology-based hybrid approach where different kinds of matchmaking strategies are combined together to provide an adaptive, flexible and efficient service discovery environment. The approach, in particular, exploits the semantic knowledge about the business domain provided by a domain ontology underlying service descriptions, and the semantic organization of services in a service ontology, at different levels of abstraction.

Semantic-Enriched Service Discovery

Automated techniques and tools are required to effectively locate services that fulfil a given user request. To this purpose, the use of semantic descriptions of services has been widely motivated and recommended for automated service discovery under highly dynamic and contextdependent requirements in distributed environments. Our aim in this work is to propose a semantic-enriched framework to describe services and an ontology-based hybrid approach where such framework is exploited combining together different kinds of comparison strategies to provide a flexible and efficient matchmaking between service descriptions. For service discovery two matchmaking strategies are proposed: a deductive strategy based on Description Logics, with a reasoning procedure exploiting ontology knowledge to assess the type of match between services; a similarity-based strategy, exploiting retrieval metrics to measure the degree of match between services.

Context-Aware Composition of E -services

Composition of E-Services in a multichannel environment requires taking into account the constraints imposed by the context: user profiles, geographical locations, available channels, and usable devices.

A multi-perspective framework for web API search in enterprise mashup design

Enterprise mashups are agile applications which combine enterprise resources with other external applications or web services, by selecting and aggregating Web APIs provided by third parties. In this paper, we provide a framework based on different Web API features to support Web API search and reuse in enterprise mashup design. The framework operates according to a novel perspective, focused on the experience of web designers, who used the Web APIs to develop enterprise mashups. This new perspective is used jointly with other Web API search techniques, relying on classification features, like categories and tags, and technical features, like the Web API protocols and data formats. This enables designers, who as humans learn by examples, to exploit the collective knowledge which is based on past experiences of other designers to find the right Web APIs for a target application. We also present a preliminary evaluation of the framework.

Service Identification in Interorganizational Process Design

Service identification is one of the main phases in the design of a service-oriented application. The way in which services are identified may influence the effectiveness of the SOA architecture. More specifically, the granularity of the services is very important in reaching flexibility and reusing them. Such properties are crucial in interorganizational interactions based on collaborative business processes. In fact, collaboration is facilitated by ensuring a homogeneous description of services at the right level of granularity. In this paper, we provide a detailed description of P2S (Process-to-Services), a computer-aided methodology to enable the identification of services that compose a collaborative business process. The methodology is based on metrics defined to setup service granularity, cohesion, coupling, and reuse. A prototype tool based on the methodology is also described with reference to a real case scenario.

P2S: A Methodology to Enable Inter-organizational Process Design through Web Services

With the advent of Service Oriented Architecture organizations have experienced services as a platform-independent technology to develop and use simple internal applications or outsource activities by searching for external services, thus enabling inter-organizational interactions. In this scenario, services are units of work provided by service providers and offered to the other organizations involved in a collaborative business process. Collaboration should be facilitated by guaranteeing a homogeneous description of services at the right level of granularity. We propose a methodology to support the designer of a business process in the identification of services that compose the process itself. The methodology should allow collaborative partners to standardize process modelling through component services, enabling effective inter-organizational service discovery. The methodology is presented by means of a running example in a real case scenario.

A linked data perspective for effective exploration of web APIs repositories

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to provide a comprehensive cross-repositories view of the available Web APIs information, in order to enhance effective multi-perspective Web APIs search for fast development of web mashups. The approach is based on Linked Data principles to identify and use semantic links across repositories for search purposes. Specifically, the paper considers Web APIs search across the popular ProgrammableWeb and Mashape repositories by combining their distinctive Web API descriptions.

Service-Based Semantic Search in P2P Systems

Recently, Semantic Web Services have been increasingly provided to search, access and manipulate information made available from autonomous and heterogeneous systems interacting in a P2P environment. Platform independency is obtained and the possibility of integrating different information sources over the Web is augmented. Service providers can act as peers on the P2P network being able to supply services and to reply to incoming service requests. Highly dynamicity and absence of a common resource conceptualization characterize the environment. As a consequence, a semantic infrastructure to organize on-the-fly distributed services and to support their automatic location is recommended. In this paper we present basic concepts and experimental evaluation of a reference architecture, SERVANT, apt to support service-based semantic search, by means of a distributed service registry.

P2P-SDSD: on-the-fly service-based collaboration in distributed systems

Recently, Information Systems evolved towards distributed architectures relying on P2P technologies, where peers share data and functionalities as services to enable interoperability, without a-priori knowledge about each other. In this context, automatic service discovery is a crucial task. We propose Semantic Driven Service Discovery in a P2P scenario, P2P-SDSD. In our framework, peers that use and supply Web Services are equipped with their own ontologies, to maintain semantic descriptions of local services (local knowledge) and links towards peers, that provide semantically related services (network knowledge). Local and network knowledge constitute a semantic service overlay over the P2P network. Semantic-driven service matchmaking techniques are exploited both to organise services in the semantic overlay and to guide service discovery through the P2P network.