Behavior Classes for Specification and Search of Complex Services and Processes

In the Web there are a large number of (business) services with complex behavior, such as e-commerce Web sites that require multiple interactions with the user, as well as an increasing number of Web automation scripts to coordinate the execution of multiple complex services. However, while there are a quite a few search techniques for atomic Web services, search techniques for complex services are still rare and only foundational. In this paper, we present textit{behavior classes} that have formal semantics as well as human comprehensible names in order to foster usability of specification of constraints, and efficiency of search for complex services and processes. Our approach enables automatic methods for (i) assigning behavior classes to complex behavior descriptions, (ii) checking consistency of such a classification, and (iii) computing behavior class hierarchies. Furthermore, human comprehensible names for the behavior classes increase usability by allowing for shorter service descriptions and requests. Our evaluation results show that a behavior class hierarchy can be exploited as an indexing structure to gain performance of search.