Toward intention-aware services provision

A novel approach is proposed to cope with problems of how to interpret the service request intention from the user’s entered string and how to integrate the internal software functions implemented in the system and external services distributed on the Internet to satisfy the user’s request. We identify these two problems as user intention extraction problem and user intention satisfaction problem, respectively. If a service-oriented system with the abilities of user’s intention extraction and satisfaction, we call it an intention-aware service-oriented system (IASOS). An IASOS can provide a richer way for services provision. We start the system design from the view of system requirements engineering. In system construction phase, the requirements specification is generated by the goal-based requirements analysis in which the functional and nonfunctional requirements will be extended with goal models. The designer designs the system capabilities based on the requirements specification. A set of computable goal models that represents the user requirements is selected and refined as the basis for representing the user’s imprecise and vague service requests intentions. Based on the proposed intention extraction approach, the user’s vague and imprecise intention will be extracted and mapped to computer understandable and computable goal models which used to represent the intention. In our implementation, a case-based method is developed to implement the intention extraction process. Based on the hierarchical task network (HTN) planning, a plan could be automatically generated from a plan library to satisfy the extracted goal models.