An automatic approach for ontology-driven service composition

Current service composition techniques and tools are mainly designed for use by service oriented architecture (SOA) professionals to solve business problems. This focus on SOA professionals creates challenges for the non-expert users, with limited SOA knowledge, who try to integrate SOA solutions into their online experience. To shelter non-expert users from the complexity of service composition, we propose an approach which automatically composes a service on the fly to meet the situational needs of a user. We present a tag-based service description schema which allows non-expert users to easily understand the description of services and add their own descriptions using descriptive tags. Instead of specifying the detailed steps for composing a service, a non-expert user would specify the goal of their desired activities using a set of keywords then our approach can automatically identify the relevant services to achieve the goal at run-time. A prototype is developed as a proof of concept. We conduct a case study to compare the performance of our approach in automatic service composition with a baseline approach which consists of the manual process of searching for services using keywords. The case study shows that our approach can achieve higher precision and recall than the baseline approach.