Open Framework For Web Service Selection Using Multimodal and Configurable Techniques

Abstract

Services as part of our daily life represent an important mean to deliver value to their consumers and have a great economic impact for organizations. The service consumption and their exponential proliferation show the importance and acceptance by their customers. In this sense, it is possible to predict that the infrastructure of future cities will be supported by different kind of services, such as, smart city services, open data services, as well as common services (e.g., e-mail services), etc. Nowadays a large percentage of services are provided on the Web commonly called web services (WS). This kind of services have become one the most used technologies in software systems. Among the challenges when integrating web services in a given system, requirements-driven selection occupies a prominent place. A comprehensive selection process needs to check compliance of Non-functional Requirements (NFR), which can be assessed by analyzing the Quality of Service (QoS). In this paper, we describe a framework called WeSSQoS that aims at ranking available WS based on the comparison of their QoS and the stated NFR. The framework is designed as an open Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that hosts a configurable portfolio of normalization procedures and ranking algorithms that can be selected by users when starting a selection process. The QoS data from WS can be obtained either from a static, WSDL-like description, or dynamically through monitoring techniques. WeSSQoS is designed to work over multiple WS repositories and QoS sources. The impact of having a portfolio of different normalization and ranking algorithms is illustrated with an example.