With the increasing use of web services in everyday tasks we are entering an era of Internet of Services (IoS). Service discovery and selection in both centralized and decentralized environments have become a critical issue in the area of web services, in particular when services having similar functionality but different Quality of Service (QoS). As a result, selecting a high quality service that best suits consumer requirements from a large list of functionally equivalent services is a challenging task. In response to increasing numbers of services in the discovery and selection process, there is a corresponding increase of service consumers and a consequent diversity in Quality of Service (QoS) available. Increases in both sides leads to a diversity in the demand and supply of services, which would result in the partial match of the requirements and offers. Furthermore, it is challenging for customers to select suitable services from a large number of services that satisfy consumer functional requirements. Therefore, web service recommendation becomes an attractive solution to provide recommended services to consumers which can satisfy their requirements. In this thesis, first a service ranking and selection algorithm is proposed by considering multiple QoS requirements and allowing partially matched services to be counted as a candidate for the selection process. With the initial list of available services the approach considers those services with a partial match of consumer requirements and ranks them based on the QoS parameters, this allows the consumer to select suitable service. In addition, providing weight value for QoS parameters might not be an easy and understandable task for consumers, as a result an automatic weight calculation method has been included for consumer requirements by utilizing distance correlation between QoS parameters. The second aspect of the work in the thesis is the process of QoS based web service recommendation. With an increasing number of web services having similar functionality, it is challenging for service consumers to find out suitable web services that meet their requirements. We propose a personalised service recommendation method using the LDA topic model, which extracts latent interests of consumers and latent topics of services in the form of probability distribution. In addition, the proposed method is able to improve the accuracy of prediction of QoS properties by considering the correlation between neighbouring services and return a list of recommended services that best satisfy consumer requirements. The third part of the thesis concerns providing service discovery and selection in a decentralized environment. Service discovery approaches are often supported by centralized repositories that could suffer from single point failure, performance bottleneck, and scalability issues in large scale systems. To address these issues, we propose a context-aware service discovery and selection approach in a decentralized peer-to-peer environment. In the approach homophily similarity was used for bootstrapping and distribution of nodes. The discovery process is based on the similarity of nodes and previous interaction and behaviour of the nodes, which will help the discovery process in a dynamic environment. Our approach is not only considering service discovery, but also the selection of suitable web service by taking into account the QoS properties of the web services. The major contribution of the thesis is providing a comprehensive QoS based service recommendation and selection in centralized and decentralized environments. With the proposed approach consumers will be able to select suitable service based on their requirements. Experimental results on real world service datasets showed that proposed approaches achieved better performance and efficiency in recommendation and selection process.

A social media stream allows users to share user-generated content as well as aggregate different external sources into one single stream. In Enterprise 2.0 such social media streams empower co-workers to share their information and to work efficiently and effectively together while replacing email communication. As more users share information it becomes impossible to read the complete stream leading to an information overload. Therefore, it is crucial to provide the users a personalized stream that suggests important and unread messages. The main characteristic of an Enterprise 2.0 social media stream is that co-workers work together on projects represented by topics: the stream is topic-centered and not user-centered as in public streams such as Facebook or Twitter. A lot of work has been done dealing with recommendation in a stream or for news recommendation. However, none of the current research approaches deal with the characteristics of an Enterprise 2.0 social media stream to recommend messages. The existing systems described in the research mainly deal with news recommendation for public streams and lack the applicability for Enterprise 2.0 social media streams. In this thesis a recommender concept is developed that allows the recommendation of messages in an Enterprise 2.0 social media stream. The basic idea is to extract features from a new message and use those features to compute a relevance score for a user. Additionally, those features are used to learn a user model and then use the user model for scoring new messages. This idea works without using explicit user feedback and assures a high user acceptance because no intense rating of messages is necessary. With this idea a content-based and collaborative-based approach is developed. To reflect the topic-centered streams a topic-specific user model is introduced which learns a user model independently for each topic. There are constantly new terms that occur in the stream of messages. For improving the quality of the recommendation (by finding more relevant messages) the recommender should be able to handle the new terms. Therefore, an approach is developed which adapts a user model if unknown terms occur by using terms of similar users or topics. Also, a short- and long-term approach is developed which tries to detect short-term interests of users. Only if the interest of a user occurs repeatedly over a certain time span are terms transferred to the long-term user model. The approaches are evaluated against a dataset obtained through an Enterprise 2.0 social media stream application. The evaluation shows the overall applicability of the concept. Specifically the evaluation shows that a topic-specific user model outperforms a global user model and also that adapting the user model according to similar users leads to an increase in the quality of the recommendation. Interestingly, the collaborative-based approach cannot reach the quality of the content-based approach.

A social media stream allows users to share user-generated content as well as aggregate different external sources into one single stream. In Enterprise 2.0 such social media streams empower co-workers to share their information and to work efficiently and effectively together while replacing email communication. As more users share information it becomes impossible to read the complete stream leading to an information overload. Therefore, it is crucial to provide the users a personalized stream that suggests important and unread messages. The main characteristic of an Enterprise 2.0 social media stream is that co-workers work together on projects represented by topics: the stream is topic-centered and not user-centered as in public streams such as Facebook or Twitter. A lot of work has been done dealing with recommendation in a stream or for news recommendation. However, none of the current research approaches deal with the characteristics of an Enterprise 2.0 social media stream to recommend messages. The existing systems described in the research mainly deal with news recommendation for public streams and lack the applicability for Enterprise 2.0 social media streams. In this thesis a recommender concept is developed that allows the recommendation of messages in an Enterprise 2.0 social media stream. The basic idea is to extract features from a new message and use those features to compute a relevance score for a user. Additionally, those features are used to learn a user model and then use the user model for scoring new messages. This idea works without using explicit user feedback and assures a high user acceptance because no intense rating of messages is necessary. With this idea a content-based and collaborative-based approach is developed. To reflect the topic-centered streams a topic-specific user model is introduced which learns a user model independently for each topic. There are constantly new terms that occur in the stream of messages. For improving the quality of the recommendation (by finding more relevant messages) the recommender should be able to handle the new terms. Therefore, an approach is developed which adapts a user model if unknown terms occur by using terms of similar users or topics. Also, a short- and long-term approach is developed which tries to detect short-term interests of users. Only if the interest of a user occurs repeatedly over a certain time span are terms transferred to the long-term user model. The approaches are evaluated against a dataset obtained through an Enterprise 2.0 social media stream application. The evaluation shows the overall applicability of the concept. Specifically the evaluation shows that a topic-specific user model outperforms a global user model and also that adapting the user model according to similar users leads to an increase in the quality of the recommendation. Interestingly, the collaborative-based approach cannot reach the quality of the content-based approach.

L'objectif de cette thèse, menée dans un cadre industriel, est d'apparier des contenus textuels médiatiques. Plus précisément, il s'agit d'apparier à des articles de presse en ligne des vidéos pertinentes, pour lesquelles nous disposons d'une description textuelle. Notre problématique relève donc exclusivement de l'analyse de matériaux textuels, et ne fait intervenir aucune analyse d'image ni de langue orale. Surviennent alors des questions relatives à la façon de comparer des objets textuels, ainsi qu'aux critères mobilisés pour estimer leur degré de similarité. L'un de ces éléments est selon nous la similarité thématique de leurs contenus, autrement dit le fait que deux documents doivent relater le même sujet pour former une paire pertinente. Ces problématiques relèvent du domaine de la recherche d'information (ri), dans lequel nous nous ancrons principalement. Par ailleurs, lorsque l'on traite des contenus d'actualité, la dimension temporelle est aussi primordiale et les problématiques qui l'entourent relèvent de travaux ayant trait au domaine du topic detection and tracking (tdt) dans lequel nous nous inscrivons également.Le système d'appariement développé dans cette thèse distingue donc différentes étapes qui se complètent. Dans un premier temps, l'indexation des contenus fait appel à des méthodes de traitement automatique des langues (tal) pour dépasser la représentation classique des textes en sac de mots. Ensuite, deux scores sont calculés pour rendre compte du degré de similarité entre deux contenus : l'un relatif à leur similarité thématique, basé sur un modèle vectoriel de ri; l'autre à leur proximité temporelle, basé sur une fonction empirique. Finalement, un modèle de classification appris à partir de paires de documents, décrites par ces deux scores et annotées manuellement, permet d'ordonnancer les résultats.L'évaluation des performances du système a elle aussi fait l'objet de questionnements dans ces travaux de thèse. Les contraintes imposées par les données traitées et le besoin particulier de l'entreprise partenaire nous ont en effet contraints à adopter une alternative au protocole classique d'évaluation en ri, le paradigme de Cranfield. / The goal of this thesis, conducted within an industrial framework, is to pair textual media content. Specifically, the aim is to pair on-line news articles to relevant videos for which we have a textual description. The main issue is then a matter of textual analysis, no image or spoken language analysis was undertaken in the present study. The question that arises is how to compare these particular objects, the texts, and also what criteria to use in order to estimate their degree of similarity. We consider that one of these criteria is the topic similarity of their content, in other words, the fact that two documents have to deal with the same topic to form a relevant pair. This problem fall within the field of information retrieval (ir) which is the main strategy called upon in this research. Furthermore, when dealing with news content, the time dimension is of prime importance. To address this aspect, the field of topic detection and tracking (tdt) will also be explored.The pairing system developed in this thesis distinguishes different steps which complement one another. In the first step, the system uses natural language processing (nlp) methods to index both articles and videos, in order to overcome the traditionnal bag-of-words representation of texts. In the second step, two scores are calculated for an article-video pair: the first one reflects their topical similarity and is based on a vector space model; the second one expresses their proximity in time, based on an empirical function. At the end of the algorithm, a classification model learned from manually annotated document pairs is used to rank the results.Evaluation of the system's performances raised some further questions in this doctoral research. The constraints imposed both by the data and the specific need of the partner company led us to adapt the evaluation protocol traditionnal used in ir, namely the cranfield paradigm. We therefore propose an alternative solution for evaluating the system that takes all our constraints into account.

Sistemas de Recomendação (SR) são softwares capazes de sugerir itens aos usuários com base no histórico de interações de usuários ou por meio de métricas de similaridade que podem ser comparadas por item, usuário ou ambos. Existem diferentes tipos de SR e dentre os que despertam maior interesse deste trabalho estão: SR baseados em conteúdo; SR baseados em conhecimento; e SR baseado em filtro colaborativo. Alcançar resultados adequados às expectativas dos usuários não é uma meta simples devido à subjetividade inerente ao comportamento humano, para isso, SR precisam de soluções eficientes e eficazes para: modelagem dos dados que suportarão a recomendação; recuperação da informação que descrevem os dados; combinação dessas informações dentro de métricas de similaridade, popularidade ou adequabilidade; criação de modelos descritivos dos itens sob recomendação; e evolução da inteligência do sistema de forma que ele seja capaz de aprender a partir da interação com o usuário. A tomada de decisão por um sistema de recomendação é uma tarefa complexa que pode ser implementada a partir da visão de áreas como inteligência artificial e mineração de dados. Dentro da área de inteligência artificial há estudos referentes ao método de raciocínio baseado em casos e da recomendação baseada em casos. No que diz respeito à área de mineração de dados, os SR podem ser construídos a partir de modelos descritivos e realizar tratamento de dados textuais, constituindo formas de criar elementos para compor uma recomendação. Uma forma de minimizar os pontos fracos de uma abordagem, é a adoção de aspectos baseados em uma abordagem híbrida, que neste trabalho considera-se: tirar proveito dos diferentes tipos de SR; usar técnicas de resolução de problemas; e combinar recursos provenientes das diferentes fontes para compor uma métrica unificada a ser usada para ranquear a recomendação por relevância. Dentre as áreas de aplicação dos SR, destaca-se a recomendação de notícias, sendo utilizada por um público heterogêneo, amplo e exigente por relevância. Neste contexto, a presente pesquisa apresenta uma abordagem híbrida para recomendação de notícias construída por meio de uma arquitetura implementada para provar os conceitos de um sistema de recomendação. Esta arquitetura foi validada por meio da utilização de um corpus de notícias e pela realização de um experimento online. Por meio do experimento foi possível observar a capacidade da arquitetura em relação aos requisitos de um sistema de recomendação de notícias e também confirmar a hipótese no que se refere à privilegiar recomendações com base em similaridade, popularidade, diversidade, novidade e serendipidade. Foi observado também uma evolução nos indicadores de leitura, curtida, aceite e serendipidade conforme o sistema foi acumulando histórico de preferências e soluções. Por meio da análise da métrica unificada para ranqueamento foi possível confirmar sua eficácia ao verificar que as notícias melhores colocadas no ranqueamento foram as mais aceitas pelos usuários / Recommendation Systems (RS) are software capable of suggesting items to users based on the history of user interactions or by similarity metrics that can be compared by item, user, or both. There are different types of RS and those which most interest in this work are content-based, knowledge-based and collaborative filtering. Achieving adequate results to user\'s expectations is a hard goal due to the inherent subjectivity of human behavior, thus, the RS need efficient and effective solutions to: modeling the data that will support the recommendation; the information retrieval that describes the data; combining this information within similarity, popularity or suitability metrics; creation of descriptive models of the items under recommendation; and evolution of the systems intelligence to learn from the user\'s interaction. Decision-making by a RS is a complex task that can be implemented according to the view of fields such as artificial intelligence and data mining. In the artificial intelligence field there are studies concerning the method of case-based reasoning that works with the principle that if something worked in the past, it may work again in a new similar situation the one in the past. The case-based recommendation works with structured items, represented by a set of attributes and their respective values (within a ``case\'\' model), providing known and adapted solutions. Data mining area can build descriptive models to RS and also handle, manipulate and analyze textual data, constituting one option to create elements to compose a recommendation. One way to minimize the weaknesses of an approach is to adopt aspects based on a hybrid solution, which in this work considers: taking advantage of the different types of RS; using problem-solving techniques; and combining resources from different sources to compose a unified metric to be used to rank the recommendation by relevance. Among the RS application areas, news recommendation stands out, being used by a heterogeneous public, ample and demanding by relevance. In this context, the this work shows a hybrid approach to news recommendations built through a architecture implemented to prove the concepts of a recommendation system. This architecture has been validated by using a news corpus and by performing an online experiment. Through the experiment it was possible to observe the architecture capacity related to the requirements of a news recommendation system and architecture also related to privilege recommendations based on similarity, popularity, diversity, novelty and serendipity. It was also observed an evolution in the indicators of reading, likes, acceptance and serendipity as the system accumulated a history of preferences and solutions. Through the analysis of the unified metric for ranking, it was possible to confirm its efficacy when verifying that the best classified news in the ranking was the most accepted by the users

Sistemas de Recomendação (SR) são softwares capazes de sugerir itens aos usuários com base no histórico de interações de usuários ou por meio de métricas de similaridade que podem ser comparadas por item, usuário ou ambos. Existem diferentes tipos de SR e dentre os que despertam maior interesse deste trabalho estão: SR baseados em conteúdo; SR baseados em conhecimento; e SR baseado em filtro colaborativo. Alcançar resultados adequados às expectativas dos usuários não é uma meta simples devido à subjetividade inerente ao comportamento humano, para isso, SR precisam de soluções eficientes e eficazes para: modelagem dos dados que suportarão a recomendação; recuperação da informação que descrevem os dados; combinação dessas informações dentro de métricas de similaridade, popularidade ou adequabilidade; criação de modelos descritivos dos itens sob recomendação; e evolução da inteligência do sistema de forma que ele seja capaz de aprender a partir da interação com o usuário. A tomada de decisão por um sistema de recomendação é uma tarefa complexa que pode ser implementada a partir da visão de áreas como inteligência artificial e mineração de dados. Dentro da área de inteligência artificial há estudos referentes ao método de raciocínio baseado em casos e da recomendação baseada em casos. No que diz respeito à área de mineração de dados, os SR podem ser construídos a partir de modelos descritivos e realizar tratamento de dados textuais, constituindo formas de criar elementos para compor uma recomendação. Uma forma de minimizar os pontos fracos de uma abordagem, é a adoção de aspectos baseados em uma abordagem híbrida, que neste trabalho considera-se: tirar proveito dos diferentes tipos de SR; usar técnicas de resolução de problemas; e combinar recursos provenientes das diferentes fontes para compor uma métrica unificada a ser usada para ranquear a recomendação por relevância. Dentre as áreas de aplicação dos SR, destaca-se a recomendação de notícias, sendo utilizada por um público heterogêneo, amplo e exigente por relevância. Neste contexto, a presente pesquisa apresenta uma abordagem híbrida para recomendação de notícias construída por meio de uma arquitetura implementada para provar os conceitos de um sistema de recomendação. Esta arquitetura foi validada por meio da utilização de um corpus de notícias e pela realização de um experimento online. Por meio do experimento foi possível observar a capacidade da arquitetura em relação aos requisitos de um sistema de recomendação de notícias e também confirmar a hipótese no que se refere à privilegiar recomendações com base em similaridade, popularidade, diversidade, novidade e serendipidade. Foi observado também uma evolução nos indicadores de leitura, curtida, aceite e serendipidade conforme o sistema foi acumulando histórico de preferências e soluções. Por meio da análise da métrica unificada para ranqueamento foi possível confirmar sua eficácia ao verificar que as notícias melhores colocadas no ranqueamento foram as mais aceitas pelos usuários / Recommendation Systems (RS) are software capable of suggesting items to users based on the history of user interactions or by similarity metrics that can be compared by item, user, or both. There are different types of RS and those which most interest in this work are content-based, knowledge-based and collaborative filtering. Achieving adequate results to user\'s expectations is a hard goal due to the inherent subjectivity of human behavior, thus, the RS need efficient and effective solutions to: modeling the data that will support the recommendation; the information retrieval that describes the data; combining this information within similarity, popularity or suitability metrics; creation of descriptive models of the items under recommendation; and evolution of the systems intelligence to learn from the user\'s interaction. Decision-making by a RS is a complex task that can be implemented according to the view of fields such as artificial intelligence and data mining. In the artificial intelligence field there are studies concerning the method of case-based reasoning that works with the principle that if something worked in the past, it may work again in a new similar situation the one in the past. The case-based recommendation works with structured items, represented by a set of attributes and their respective values (within a ``case\'\' model), providing known and adapted solutions. Data mining area can build descriptive models to RS and also handle, manipulate and analyze textual data, constituting one option to create elements to compose a recommendation. One way to minimize the weaknesses of an approach is to adopt aspects based on a hybrid solution, which in this work considers: taking advantage of the different types of RS; using problem-solving techniques; and combining resources from different sources to compose a unified metric to be used to rank the recommendation by relevance. Among the RS application areas, news recommendation stands out, being used by a heterogeneous public, ample and demanding by relevance. In this context, the this work shows a hybrid approach to news recommendations built through a architecture implemented to prove the concepts of a recommendation system. This architecture has been validated by using a news corpus and by performing an online experiment. Through the experiment it was possible to observe the architecture capacity related to the requirements of a news recommendation system and architecture also related to privilege recommendations based on similarity, popularity, diversity, novelty and serendipity. It was also observed an evolution in the indicators of reading, likes, acceptance and serendipity as the system accumulated a history of preferences and solutions. Through the analysis of the unified metric for ranking, it was possible to confirm its efficacy when verifying that the best classified news in the ranking was the most accepted by the users