ABSTRACT:
This paper presents a systematic data-driven approach to assisting situational application development. We first propose a technique to extract useful information from multiple sources to abstract service capabilities with set tags. This supports intuitive expression of user’s desired composition goals by simple queries, without having to know underlying technical details. A planning technique then exploits composition solutions which can constitute the desired goals, even with some potential new interesting composition opportunities. A browser-based tool facilitates visual and iterative refinement of composition solutions, to finally come up with the satisfying outputs. A series of experiments demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach. Data-driven composition technique for situational web applications by using tag-based semantics in to illustrate the overall life-cycle of our “compose as-you-search” composition approach, to propose the clustering technique for deriving tag-based composition semantics, and to evaluate the composition planning effectiveness, respectively.
Compared with previous work, this paper is significantly updated by introducing a semi-supervised technique for clustering hierarchical tag based semantics from service documentations and human-annotated annotations. The derived semantics link service capabilities and developers’ processing goals, so that the composition is processed by planning the “Tag HyperLinks” from initialquery to the goals. The planning algorithm is also further evaluated in terms of recommendation quality, performance, and scalability over data sets from real-world service repositories. Results show that our approach reaches satisfying precision and high-quality composition recommendations. We also demonstrate that our approach can accommodate even larger size of services than real world repositories so as to promise performance. Besides, more details of our interactive development prototyping are presented. We particularly demonstrate how the composition UI can help developers intuitively compose situational applications, and iteratively refine their goals until requirements are finally satisfied.
INTRODUCTION:
We develop and deliver software systems more quickly, and these systems must provide increasingly ambitious functionality to adapt ever-changing requirements and environments. Particularly, in recent a few years, the emergence and wide adoption of Web 2.0 have enlarged the body of service computing research. Web 2.0 not only focuses on the resource sharing and utilization from user and social perspective, but also exhibits the notion of “Web as a Platform” paradigm. A very important trend is that, more and more service consumers (including programmers, business analysts or even endusers) are capable of participating and collaborating for their own requirements and interests by means of developing situational software applications (also noted as “situated software”).
Software engineering perspective, situational software applications usually follow the opportunistic development fashion, where small subsets of users create applications to fulfill a specific purpose. Currently, composing available web-delivered services (including SOAP based web services, REST (RE presentational State Transfer) web services and RSS/Atom feeds) into a single web applications, or so called “service mashups” (or “mashups” for short) has been popular. They are supposed to be flexible response for new needs or demands and quick roll-out of some potentially unanticipated functionality. To support situational application development, a number of tools from both academia and industry have emerged.
However, we argue that, the large number of available services and the complexity of composition constraints make manual composition difficult. For the situational applications developers, who might be non-professional programmers, the key challenge remained is that they intend to represent their desired goals simply and intuitively, and be quickly navigated to proper service that can response their requests. They usually do not care about (or understand) the underlying technical details (e.g., syntactics, semantics, message mediation, etc). They just want to figure out all intermediate steps needed to generate desired outputs.
Moreover, many end-users may have a general wish to know what they are trying to achieve, but not know the specifics of what they want or what is possible. It means that the process of designing and developing the situational application requires not only the abstraction of individual services, but also much broader perspective on the evolving collections of services that can potentially incorporate with current onesWe first present a data-driven composition technique for situational web applications by using tag-based semantics in ICWS 2011 work.
The main contributions in this paper are to illustrate the overall life-cycle of our “composeas-you-search” composition approach, to propose the clustering technique for deriving tag-based composition semantics, and to evaluate the composition planning effectiveness, respectively. Compared with previous work, this paper is significantly updated by introducing a semi-supervised technique for clustering hierarchical tag-based semantics from service documentations and human-annotated annotations. The derived semantics link service capabilities and developers’ processing goals, so that the composition is processed by planning the “Tag HyperLinks” from initialquery to the goals.
The planning algorithm is also further evaluated in terms of recommendation quality, performance, and scalability over data sets from real-world service repositories. Results show that our approach reaches satisfying precision and high-quality composition recommendations. We also demonstrate that our approach can accommodate even larger size of services than real world repositories so as to promise performance. Besides, more details of our interactive development prototyping are presented. We particularly demonstrate how the composition UI can help developers intuitively compose situational applications, and iteratively refine their goals until requirements are finally satisfied.
SCOPE OF THE PROJECT
User-oriented abstraction: The tourist uses tags to represent their desired goals and find relevant services. Tags provide a uniform abstraction of user requirements and service capabilities, and lower the entry barrier to perform development.
Data-driven development: In the whole development process, the tourist selects or inputs some tags, while some relevant services are recommended. This reflects a “Compose-as-you-Search” development process. Recommended services either process these tags as inputs, or produce these tags as outputs. As shown in Fig. 1, each service has some inputs and outputs, which are associated with tagged data. In this way, services can be connected to build data flows. Developers can search their goals by means of tags, and compose recommended services in a data driven fashion.
Potential composition navigation: The developer is always assisted with possible composition suggestions, based on the tags in the current goals. The composition engine interprets the user queries and automatically generates some appropriate compositions alternatives by a planning algorithm (Section 4). The recommendations not only contain the desired outputs from the developers’ goals, but also suggest some interesting or relevant suggestions leading to potential new composition possibilities.
For example, the tag “Italian” introduced the Google Translation service, which tourist was not aware of such composition possibility. In this way, the composition process is not like traditional semantic web services techniques which might need specific goals, but leads to some emergent opportunities according to current application situations.
LITRATURE SURVEY:
COMPOSING DATA-DRIVEN SERVICE MASHUPS WITH TAG-BASED SEMANTIC ANNOTATIONS
AUTHOR: X. Liu, Q. Zhao, G. Huang, H. Mei, and T. Teng
PUBLISH: Proc. IEEE Int’l Conf. Web Services (ICWS ’11), pp. 243-250, 2011.
EXPLANATION:
Spurred by Web 2.0 paradigm, there emerge large numbers of service mashups by composing readily accessible data and services. Mashups usually address solving situational problems and require quick and iterative development lifecyle. In this paper, we propose an approach to composing data driven mashups, based on tag-based semantics. The core principle is deriving semantic annotations from popular tags, and associating them with programmatic inputs and outputs data. Tag-based semantics promise a quick and simple comprehension of data capabilities. Mashup developers including end-users can intuitively search desired services with tags, and combine several services by means of data flows. Our approach takes a planning technique to retrieving the potentially relevant composition opportunities. With our graphical composition user interfaces, developers can iteratively modify, adjust and refine their mashups to be more satisfying.
TOWARDS AUTOMATIC TAGGING FOR WEB SERVICES
AUTHOR: L. Fang, L. Wang, M. Li, J. Zhao, Y. Zou, and L. Shao
PUBLISH: Proc. IEEE 19th Int’l Conf. Web Services, pp. 528-535, 2012.
EXPLANATION:
Tagging technique is widely used to annotate objects in Web 2.0 applications. Tags can support web service understanding, categorizing and discovering, which are important tasks in a service-oriented software system. However, most of existing web services’ tags are annotated manually. Manual tagging is time-consuming. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to tag web services automatically. Our approach consists of two tagging strategies, tag enriching and tag extraction. In the first strategy, we cluster web services using WSDL documents, and then we enrich tags for a service with the tags of other services in the same cluster. Considering our approach may not generate enough tags by tag enriching, we also extract tags from WSDL documents and related descriptions in the second step. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, a series of experiments are carried out based on web-scale web services. The experimental results show that our tagging method is effective, ensuring the number and quality of generated tags. We also show how to use tagging results to improve the performance of a web service search engine, which can prove that our work in this paper is useful and meaningful.
A TAG-BASED APPROACH FOR THE DESIGN AND COMPOSITION OF INFORMATION PROCESSING APPLICATIONS
AUTHOR: E. Bouillet, M. Feblowitz, Z. Liu, A. Ranganathan, and A. Riabov
PUBLISH: ACM SIGPLAN Notices, vol. 43, no. 10, pp. 585-602, Sept. 2008.
EXPLANATION:
In the realm of component-based software systems, pursuers of the holy grail of automated application composition face many significant challenges. In this paper we argue that, while the general problem of automated composition in response to high-level goal statements is indeed very difficult to solve, we can realize composition in a restricted context, supporting varying degrees of manual to automated assembly for specific types of applications. We propose a novel paradigm for composition in flow-based information processing systems, where application design and component development are facilitated by the pervasive use of faceted, tag-based descriptions of processing goals, of component capabilities, and of structural patterns of families of application. The facets and tags represent different dimensions of both data and processing, where each facet is modeled as a finite set of tags that are defined in a controlled folksonomy. All data flowing through the system, as well as the functional capabilities of components are described using tags. A customized AI planner is used to automatically build an application, in the form of a flow of components, given a high-level goal specification in the form of a set of tags. End-users use an automatically populated faceted search and navigation mechanism to construct these high-level goals. We also propose a novel software engineering methodology to design and develop a set of reusable, well-described components that can be assembled into a variety of applications. With examples from a case study in the Financial Services domain, we demonstrate that composition using a faceted, tag-based application design is not only possible, but also extremely useful in helping end-users create situational applications from a wide variety of available components.