Keyword Search for Building Service-Based Systems

With the fast growth of applications of service-oriented architecture (SOA) in software engineering, there has been a rapid increase in demand for building service-based systems (SBSs) by composing existing Web services. Finding appropriate component services to compose is a key step in the SBS engineering process. Existing approaches require that system engineers have detailed knowledge of SOA techniques which is often too demanding. To address this issue, we propose Keyword Search for Service-based Systems (KS3), a novel approach that integrates and automates the system planning, service discovery and service selection operations for building SBSs based on keyword search. KS3 assists system engineers without detailed knowledge of SOA techniques in searching for component services to build SBSs by typing a few keywords that represent the tasks of the SBSs with quality constraints and optimisation goals for system quality, e.g., reliability, throughput and cost. KS3 offers a new paradigm for SBS engineering that can significantly save the time and effort during the system engineering process. We conducted large-scale experiments using two real-world Web service datasets to demonstrate the practicality, effectiveness and efficiency of KS3.