Design-based Service Discovery

Andrea Zisman ( School of Informatics, City University, London )

The development of service centric systems, i.e software systems constructed as compositions of autonomous services, has been recognised as an important approach for software system development. Recently, there has been a proliferation of systems which are developed, deployed, and consumed in this way. To develop such systems, it is necessary to identify services that can be combined in order to fulfill the functionality and achieve quality criteria of the system being developed. We present a framework to support design-based service discovery - the discovery of services that can provide functionalities and satisfy properties and constraints of systems as specified during the design phase of the development lifecycle. Our framework assumes an iterative design process and allows for the (re-)formulation of design models of service-centric systems based on the discovered services. The framework supports queries composed of structural, behavioural, and quality conditions. These queries are executed against service registries based on graph matching techniques. We discuss a prototype tool that we have developed to demonstrate and evaluate the work. We also present the results of a set of preliminary experiments that we have conducted to evaluate the framework.