Retrieval of Service Descriptions using Structured Service Models
R.J. Müller, Stefan C. Müller · RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 2001
The Application Service Provider (ASP) market leads to rapidly increasing numbers of sites that offer software as an online service, rather than for download and installation. This creates a demand for intelligent solutions to retrieve the right service for a users problem. This paper introduces Structured Service Models to represent software services and explores a retrieval mechanism on repositories of structured service models. The mechanism is based on computing graph similarity on a special class of directed acyclic graphs. Finding most similar models is NP-complete, however the special structure of the graphs can be exploited for exact and heuristic algorithms. The paper also presents a prototype system which is designed as a three-tier client-server application where the client is implemented in Java. The system provides facilities for stating queries on a remote repository by drawing a structured service model in a Java applet. The paper concludes with a first evaluation of the system. 1