The most dominant architecture in the contemporary business domain is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The large number of the existing service description and discovery systems available today, including the ones proposed in research proposals, reveals an increasing need for adaptive, semantically enriched and context-aware, wide-area service discovery. This need will become more intense in the years to come as the number of available services increases rapidly. The main reason behind the existence of a plethora of such systems is that before these initiatives, the standard in service discovery was taking into account only the syntactic descriptions of the services, causing conflicts when services, with similar syntactic descriptions, needed to be evaluated. The research solutions available today offer efficient and accurate discovery at the syntactic, functional semantic and non-functional semantic level. However, the problem is that there is no general consensus yet regarding service discovery. Research by its very nature, leads to point solutions rather than complete systems. Based on these observations, we propose an adaptive service description and discovery framework for carrier applications, enabling the model-driven specification of services and client profiles, and also, for allowing the dynamic configuration of the services to meet specific quality requirements defined by the clients. The framework was implemented in the context of Model Driven Development, to ensure platform independence at the level of the specification of services. The framework takes the union of the point solutions offered by research proposals in the area of service description and discovery, creates an abstract model, and can compile that model to platform specific code. More specifically, services for carrier applications can be specified in a platform independent way both in terms of service signatures (syntactic properties) and in terms of the functionality and the QoS service characteristics (semantic properties). A model transformation framework allows for the creation of a platform specific model for the description of services in a specific technology platform (e.g., Web services). The framework is extensible to accommodate future extensions. In addition, as a proof of concept, we designed and developed an Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) prototype tool, implementing our proposal.

The most dominant architecture in the contemporary business domain is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The large number of the existing service description and discovery systems available today, including the ones proposed in research proposals, reveals an increasing need for adaptive, semantically enriched and context-aware, wide-area service discovery. This need will become more intense in the years to come as the number of available services increases rapidly. The main reason behind the existence of a plethora of such systems is that before these initiatives, the standard in service discovery was taking into account only the syntactic descriptions of the services, causing conflicts when services, with similar syntactic descriptions, needed to be evaluated. The research solutions available today offer efficient and accurate discovery at the syntactic, functional semantic and non-functional semantic level. However, the problem is that there is no general consensus yet regarding service discovery. Research by its very nature, leads to point solutions rather than complete systems. Based on these observations, we propose an adaptive service description and discovery framework for carrier applications, enabling the model-driven specification of services and client profiles, and also, for allowing the dynamic configuration of the services to meet specific quality requirements defined by the clients. The framework was implemented in the context of Model Driven Development, to ensure platform independence at the level of the specification of services. The framework takes the union of the point solutions offered by research proposals in the area of service description and discovery, creates an abstract model, and can compile that model to platform specific code. More specifically, services for carrier applications can be specified in a platform independent way both in terms of service signatures (syntactic properties) and in terms of the functionality and the QoS service characteristics (semantic properties). A model transformation framework allows for the creation of a platform specific model for the description of services in a specific technology platform (e.g., Web services). The framework is extensible to accommodate future extensions. In addition, as a proof of concept, we designed and developed an Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) prototype tool, implementing our proposal.

This thesis addresses the question of what would be a domain independent taxonomy that is capable of representing the non-functional properties of conventional, electronic and web services. We cover all forms of services, as we prefer not to make any distinction between the three forms. Conventional service descriptions, such as newspaper advertisements, are rich in detail, and it is this richness that we wish to make available to electronic and web service descriptions. In a conventional service context, when we ask a service provider for details, perhaps by phoning the service provider, we are seeking ways to assist with decision making. It is this same decision making or reasoning that we wish to be available to electronic services. Historically, services have always been distinguished according to some criteria of a service requestor. Examples are price, payment alternatives, availability and security. We are motivated to ensure that the criteria used to evaluate conventional services are also available for electronic and web services. We believe that the ability to richly and accurately describe services has significant applicability in the areas of electronic service discovery, dynamic service composition, service comparison, service optimisation, and service management. In particular, the increased level of descriptive depth will also facilitate more thorough decision-making by a service requestor. Whilst we acknowledge the importance of service functionality, this thesis is primarily concerned with the non-functional properties of services. A service is not a function alone. It is a function performed on your behalf at a cost. And the cost is not just some monetary price; it is a whole collection of limitations. This thesis is all about these. We believe that to accurately represent any service, a description requires information relating to both the functionality and the associated constraints. We consider these constraints over the functionality of the service to be non-functional properties. We believe that a service description is only complete once the non-functional aspects are also expressed. We undertook a significant analysis of services from numerous domains. From our analysis we compiled the non-functional properties into a series of 80 conceptual models that we have categorised according to availability (both temporal and locative), payment, price, discounts, obligations, rights, penalties, trust, security, and quality. Our motivation is to provide a theoretical basis for automated service discovery, comparison, selection, and substitution. The need to describe a service is analogous with labelling for goods or products. Product labelling occurs for the safety and benefit of purchasers. Why is the same labelling not afforded for the benefit of service requestors?

Web services are a new breed of Web application. They are self-contained, self-describing, modular applications that can be published, located, and invoked across the Web [154] Web services are a promising technology for ad hoc machine to machine interaction across application, enterprise and web boundaries. Self describing web services is a catchy phrase but it should mean more than having an interface description written in XML syntax. This research is motivated by the vision of web services in the future as loosely coupled applications operating on different platforms inter-operating without prior agreements in place and without direct human intervention at runtime. The main obstacle to advancing the vision of ad hoc runtime interaction is complexity. The complexity of ad hoc interaction for web services is related to 1) the information the service requires and provides and the nuances of the domain or context the service operates on and in. 2) The specific nature of the operations the service provides and the constraints related to those operations and 3) the necessary ordering of operations to achieve the desired result. There are three problems that must be addressed before the vision for web services can become a reality. These problems are aligned with the three aspects of service complexity identified above. The three inter-related elements of this research address each of these problems. The first part of the research deals with what web services "talk" about and how the data required or provided by services can be described to enable mutual understanding. An extension to traditional conceptual models, called outsourced type descriptions, allows the description of shared data in terms of publicly available information, including standards, specifications, ontologies and definitions from dictionaries and thesauri. The second part is concerned with describing why services interact and the capabilities (actions or information) services can provide. A structured format for the description, advertisement and discovery of services based on what they actually do is presented. The structured format is based on previous work in the description of actions and the context in which they are performed. The last part of the research addresses how previously unknown services can talk to one another to supply and use the advertised capabilities. Interaction is based on providers having "plans" for the delivery of capabilities. The flow of interaction is directed by the service providers' data requirements and is responsive to the resources of the client. A small language for information gathering based on well known interaction primitives is defined. An example implementation of a capability plan interpreter demonstrates how messages are generated, managed and interpreted at runtime in order to satisfy the client's goals.

The vision of the Semantic Web aims at enhancing today's Web in order to provide a more efficient and reliable environment for both providers and consumers of Web resources (i.e. information and services). To deploy the Semantic Web, various technologies have been developed, such as machine understandable description languages, language parsers, goal matchers, and resource composition algorithms. Since the Semantic Web is just emerging, each technology tends to make assumptions about different aspects of the Semantic Web's architecture and use, such as the kind of applications that will be deployed, the resource descriptions, the consumers' and providers' requirements, and the existence and capabilities of other technologies. In order to ensure the deployment of a robust and useful Semantic Web and the applications that will rely on it, several aspects of the technologies must be investigated, such as whether the assumptions made are reasonable, whether the existing technologies allow construction of a usable Semantic Web, and the systematic identification of which technology to use when designing new applications. In this thesis we provide a means of investigating these aspects for service discovery, which is a critical task in the context of the Semantic Web. We propose a simulation and evaluation platform for evaluating current and future Semantic Web technology with different resource sets and consumer and provider requirements. For this purpose we provide a model to represent the Semantic Web, a model of the evaluation platform, an implementation of the evaluation platform as a multi-agent system, and an illustrative use of the platform to evaluate some service discovery technology in a travel scenario. The implementation of the platform shows the feasibility of our evaluation approach. We show how the platform provides a controlled setting to support the systematic identification of bottlenecks and other challenges for new Semantic Web applications. Finally, the evaluation shows that the platform can be used to assess technology with respect to both hardware issues such as the kind and number of computers involved in a discovery scenario, and other issues such as the evaluation of the quality of the service discovery result.

This article introduces a n-gram-based approach to automatic classification of Web services using a multilayer perceptron-type artificial neural network. Web services contain information that is useful for achieving a classification based on its functionality. The approach relies on word n-grams extracted from the web service description to determine its membership in a category. The experimentation carried out shows promising results, achieving a classification with a measure F=0.995 using unigrams (2-grams) of words (characteristics composed of a lexical unit) and a TF-IDF weight.

Le développement orienté-service et le cloud computing offrent beaucoup d'opportunités au développement et au déploiement d'applications. En effet, le développement orienté-service permet de composer des fonctionnalités issues de services distribués, développés par différentes organisations. D'un autre côté, le cloud computing permet de provisionner des environnements évolutifs (en fonction du besoin en ressources) de développement et de déploiement, à la demande. Dans ce travail de recherche, nous proposons et décrivons une méthode de provisonnement automatique d'applications métier, orientées-service sur le cloud. Nous avons appelé cette méthode MADONA (Method for AutomateD prOvisioning of service-oriented busiNess Applications). MADONA couvre le cycle de vie de provisionnement d'applications et est basée sur un orchestrateur de services pour la gestion de la configuration, du déploiement, et de la composition de services métier.Dans ce travail, nous visons à réduire les connaissances techniques nécessaires au provisionnement d'applications métier. Pour ce faire, nous apportons trois contributions majeures. Premièrement, l'automatisation de ce provisionnement. En effet, les phases de MADONA sont complètement automatisées. L'utilisateur n'intervient que pour exprimer son besoin et pour utiliser l'application métier automatiquement générée (par la composition de services métier) et déployée sur une IaaS présélectionnée. Deuxièmement, l'enrichissement de la description des services par des concepts liés aux relations d'un service. En effet, les langages de description de services décrivent le plus souvent ces derniers comme des entités isolées et ne considèrent pas les relations entre services. Nous avons défini dans ce travail les relations de composition qui décrivent pour chaque service métier les services nécessaires à son bon fonctionnement, et les services avec lesquels il peut être composé.Troisièmement, nous permettons à l'utilisateur d'exprimer son besoin à un haut niveau d'abstraction des détails techniques de composition et de déploiement. Nous avons pour cela défini un vocabulaire pour formaliser ces besoins fonctionnels (en termes de mots clés décrivant les fonctionnalités désirées, ou de noms de services désirés) et non fonctionnels (en termes de coût, de préférences de déploiement (ex : localisation de déploiement), et de qualité de service). La méthode a été prototypée et testée suivant plusieurs scénarios montrant sa faisabilité / Service-oriented computing and cloud computing offer many opportunities for developing and deploying applications. In fact, service-oriented computing allows to compose several functionalities from distributed services developed by different organizations. On the other hand, cloud computing allows to provision on demand scalable development and deployment environments. In this resarch work, we propose and describe a Method for AutomateD prOvisioning of service-oriented cloud busiNess Applications (MADONA). The method covers the whole application’s lifecycle and is based on cloud orchestration tools that manage the deployment and dependencies of supplied components. This research work aims to reduce the necessary technical knowledge for provisioning service-oriented cloud applications. To this end, we bring three major contributions. Firstly, we automatise the whole application provisioning. In fact, MADONA phases are fully automated. The user intervenes only in requirement elicitation and when the application is deployed and ready to use. The business application is automatically generated (by composing business services) and deployed in an automatically preselected IaaS. Secondly, we enrich the description of services by integrating concepts describing services’ interactions. In fact, service description languages usually describe services as isolated components and does not consider the interactions between services. We define in this work, composition interactions which describe for each business service, its necessary services and the services with which it can be composed. Thirdly, we allow the user to express her requirements abstracting composition and deployment technical details. To this end, we defined a RequIrement VocAbuLary (RIVAL) to formalize user’s functional (in terms of keywords describing the desired functionalities, or names of desired services) and non-functional requirements (in terms of cost, deployment preferences (ex. preferred location), and quality of service). The method has been implemented and tested showing its faisability

Les travaux de recherche menés autour de la description de services Web utilisent de plus en plus des modèles sémantiques pour fournir une représentation interprétable automatiquement. Toutefois, nous avons décelé des lacunes dans les approches sémantiques actuelles qui engendrent ambiguïté et non pertinence au niveau de l’appariement et de la découverte de services Web. Pour remédier à ces lacunes nous proposons des contributions à la description et à la découverte de services Web sémantiques. En ce qui concerne la description de services, nous avons défini un langage basé sur une recommandation W3C. En plus d’une annotation métier sémantique des éléments d’un service, notre principale contribution à la description sémantique consiste à spécifier la nature de ces annotations en utilisant une ontologie technique que nous avons définie. Cette ontologie met en relation plusieurs concepts sémantiques de services Web que nous avons identifiés dans des approches existantes et intègrera d’autres concepts qu’on définira ultérieurement sans pour autant modifier notre langage de description ou nos techniques d’appariement associées. Nous avons également défini un algorithme d’appariement entre une requête de service et les descriptions des services publiés. Cet algorithme se base sur un appariement entre éléments d’une requête et un service publié et trois techniques d’agrégation des résultats d’appariements élémentaires. L’algorithme tire avantage de la description sémantique que nous avons définie. Il a été mis en œuvre dans un annuaire de services Web sémantiques et a été également comparé aux algorithmes de référence. Les expérimentations montrent clairement l’efficacité de notre approche en termes de temps de réponse et de précision / Researches conducted around Web service description use more and more of semantic models to provide an automatically interpretable representation. However, we identified gaps in current approaches that generate semantic ambiguity and impertinence at Web service matching and discovery. To address these shortcomings we propose contributions about semantic Web service description and discovery. As for the Web services description, we have defined a language based on a W3C Recommendation. In addition to a semantic business annotation of service components, our main contribution about the semantic description is to specify the nature of these annotations using a technical ontology that we have defined. This ontology merges several semantic concepts of web services that we identified in existing approaches and may include other concepts that can be defined later without changing our description language or our matching techniques. We also defined a matching algorithm between a service request and published service descriptions. This algorithm is based on matching between elements of a service request and descriptions of published services. This matching is may be computed by three aggregation techniques of the results of those elements’ matching. The algorithm takes advantage of the semantic description we have defined. It was implemented in a semantic web services registry and was also compared to referenced algorithms. The experiments clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in terms of response time and precision

Ces dernières années ont témoigné du succès du projet Linked Open Data (LOD) et de la croissance du nombre de sources de données sémantiques disponibles sur le web. Cependant, il y a encore beaucoup de données qui ne sont pas encore mises à disposition dans le LOD telles que les données sur demande, les données de capteurs etc. Elles sont néanmoins fournies par des API des services Web. L'intégration de ces données au LOD ou dans des applications de mashups apporterait une forte valeur ajoutée. Cependant, chercher de tels services avec les outils de découverte de services existants nécessite une connaissance préalable des répertoires de services ainsi que des ontologies utilisées pour les décrire.Dans cette thèse, nous proposons de nouvelles approches et des cadres logiciels pour la recherche de services web sémantiques avec une perspective d'intégration de données. Premièrement, nous introduisons LIDSEARCH, un cadre applicatif piloté par SPARQL pour chercher des données et des services web sémantiques.De plus, nous proposons une approche pour enrichir les descriptions sémantiques de services web en décrivant les relations ontologiques entre leurs entrées et leurs sorties afin de faciliter l'automatisation de la découverte et de la composition de services. Afin d'atteindre ce but, nous utilisons des techniques de traitement automatique de la langue et d'appariement de textes basées sur le deep-learning pour mieux comprendre les descriptions des services.Nous validons notre travail avec des preuves de concept et utilisons les services et les ontologies d'OWLS-TC pour évaluer nos approches proposées de sélection et d'enrichissement. / The last years witnessed the success of the Linked Open Data (LOD) project as well as a significantly growing amount of semantic data sources available on the web. However, there are still a lot of data not being published as fully materialized knowledge bases like as sensor data, dynamic data, data with limited access patterns, etc. Such data is in general available through web APIs or web services. Integrating such data to the LOD or in mashups would have a significant added value. However, discovering such services requires a lot of efforts from developers and a good knowledge of the existing service repositories that the current service discovery systems do not efficiently overcome.In this thesis, we propose novel approaches and frameworks to search for semantic web services from a data integration perspective. Firstly, we introduce LIDSEARCH, a SPARQL-driven framework to search for linked data and semantic web services. Moreover, we propose an approach to enrich semantic service descriptions with Input-Output relations from ontologies to facilitate the automation of service discovery and composition. To achieve such a purpose, we apply natural language processing techniques and deep-learning-based text similarity techniques to leverage I/O relations from text to ontologies.We validate our work with proof-of-concept frameworks and use OWLS-TC as a dataset for conducting our experiments on service search and enrichment.

Les sources de données multimédias provenant de divers domaines (médical, tourisme, commerce, art et culture, etc.) sont devenues incontournables sur le web. L’accès à ces sources multimédias dans les systèmes distribués pose de nouveaux problèmes en raison de nombreux paramètres : volumétrie, diversité des interfaces, format de représentation, localisation, etc. En outre, l’exigence de plus en plus forte des utilisateurs et des applications à vouloir intégrer la sémantique dans la recherche d’information pose de nouvelles questions à résoudre. Pour prendre en compte cette nouvelle complexité, nous nous intéressons dans notre travail de recherche aux solutions d’intégration de données basées sur les services web. Dans cette thèse, nous proposons une approche orientée service pour la recherche sémantique de contenus multimédia. Nous avons appelé cette approche SeSaM (Semantic Search of Multimedia content). SeSaM repose sur la définition d’un nouveau type de services accédant aux contenus multimédias, qui est les services MaaS (Multimedia as a Services). Elle est basée sur un processus en deux phases : description et découverte des services MaaS. En ce qui concerne la description de services MaaS, nous avons défini le langage SA4MaaS (Semantic Annotation for MaaS services), qui est une extension de SAWSDL (recommandation W3C). L’idée principale de ce langage est l’intégration, en plus de la sémantique métier, de la sémantique de l’information multimédia dans la description des services MaaS. En ce qui concerne la découverte de services MaaS, nous avons proposé un nouveau matchmaker MaaS-MX (MaaS services Matchmaker) adapté au modèle de description des MaaS. MaaS-MX est composé de deux étapes primordiales : appariement métier et appariement multimédia. L’appariement métier consiste à comparer la description métier des services et de la requête, tandis que l’appariement multimédia compare la description multimédia des services et de la requête. L’approche a été prototypée et évaluée dans deux domaines différents : médical et tourisme. Les résultats indiquent que l’utilisation de l’appariement métier et l’appariement multimédia a considérablement amélioré les performances des systèmes de recherche de données multimédias. / Multimedia data sources from various fields (medical, tourism, trade, art and culture, etc.) became essential on the web. Accessing to multimedia data in distributed systems poses new challenges due to many system parameters: volume, diversity of interfaces, representation format, location, etc. In addition, the growing needs of users and applications to incorporate semantics in the information retrieval pose new issues. To take into account this new complexity, we are interested in our research of data integration solutions based on web services. In this thesis, we propose an approach-oriented service for the semantic search of multimedia content. We called this approach SeSaM (Semantic Search of Multimedia content). SeSaM is based on the definition of a new pattern of services to access multimedia content, which is the MaaS services (Multimedia as a Services). It is based on a two-phase process: description and discovery of MaaS services. As for the MaaS services description, we have defined the SA4MaaS language (Semantic Annotation for MaaS services), which is an extension of SAWSDL (W3C recommendation). The main idea of this language is the integration, in addition to business domain semantic, of multimedia information semantics in the MaaS services description. As for the MaaS service discovery, we have proposed a new matchmaker MaaS-MX (MaaS services Matchmaker) adapted to the MaaS services description model. MaaS-MX is composed of two essential steps: domain matching and multimedia matching. Domain matching consists in comparing the business domain description of MaaS services and the query, whereas multimedia matching compares the multimedia description of MaaS services and the query. The approach has been implemented and evaluated in two different domains: medical and tourism. The results indicate that using both domain and multimedia matching considerably improves the performance of multimedia data retrieving systems.