Measuring the Conceptual Coupling of Services Using Latent Semantic Indexing

Low coupling is a service-oriented design and development principle that should be taken into account during all stages. Having loosely coupled services not only increases service reusability, but also prevents the propagation of changes to other services and thus simplifies maintenance of service-oriented systems as well. In this paper, we focus on measuring conceptual coupling as an indicator of how much a service depends on the other services from functional point of view. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is a well-known technique in the field of information retrieval (IR) which has been widely used to measure the degree of semantic relationship between text based documents. In this paper, a metric namely CCS is proposed to measure the degree of conceptual coupling of a service to its environment based on the LSI technique. The proposed metric is evaluated theoretically based on a set of coupling principles.