A human-centered semantic service platform for the digital ecosystems environment

Abstract

Digital Ecosystems (DEST) have emerged with the purpose of enhancing communications among small and medium enterprises (SMEs) within the worldwide Business Ecosystem. However, because of the diversity and heterogeneity of the services in the DEST environment, existing commercial products or research outputs cannot be directly applied to this field so as to fulfill the requirements of SMEs. Human-centered computing has been applied to many areas, such as social classification, community-based ontology evolution, and more importantly, human-centered systems. In this paper, we propose a framework for a human-centered semantic service platform, in order to address the issue in the DEST environment. This framework incorporates the features of human-centered metadata publishing, maintenance and clustering, community-based ontology revolution and human-centered service retrieval, evaluation and ranking. To thoroughly validate the framework, we implement a prototype in the transport service domain, and conduct a series of evaluation experiments on the basis of this prototype. © 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.