Data-Driven Composition for Service-Oriented Situational Web Applications

The convergence of Services Computing and Web 2.0 gains a large space of opportunities to compose “situational” web applications from web-delivered services. However, the large number of services and the complexity of composition constraints make manual composition difficult to application developers, who might be non-professional programmers or even end-users. 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 a 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.