Definition and Induction of a Specification Order Relation between Capabilities

Capability-driven engineering plays a key role in advanced information systems. Service discovery and business process reuse, for instance, are firstly based on the functionalities they achieve. Semantic models based on state shift fail to provide scalable solutions for the discovery and reuse of software artifacts based on their functionalities. In this paper, we are interested in defining and inferring a specification partial order relation that enables building capability-based indexing structures. We rely on our previously developed capability model which describes capabilities via ontological features that characterize and specify the functionality achieved by a given service. We formally define a partial order specification relation between two capabilities. Moreover, we define a set of inference rules enabling the deduction of such partial order relation. The implementation details of our approach are presented, with an in-depth evaluation on shipping services, for a fair assessment of its usefulness and convenience.