A systematic literature review on service description methods

Abstract

[Context and Motivation] As a result of recent trends in enhancing Service Oriented Requirement Engineering activities, a number of service description methods have been proposed for describing services. The availability of different service description methods can give developers a range of options to choose from so that they can have an appropriate description method that fits best their services. [Question/problem] But there is neither holistic information on service description methods nor a clear understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of each service description method. The aim of this paper is to identify problems of service descriptions that have been researched so far, and the techniques or methods available to tackle these problems. [Principle ideas/results] Thus, to gather this relevant information available in the literature, a systematic review was conducted. A total of 191 articles were examined, of which 24 articles focus on service description related concepts. The results show that, despite the recent efforts in describing the nonfunctional requirements of services through approaches like semantic annotations and policy attachments, there is still a lot to do in enhancing the description of quality aspects of services. Furthermore, this study reveals that a negligible effort is given to the description of consumer oriented services. [Contribution] This paper identifies and analyzes the current service description methods that exist in the literature and explains the pros and cons inherent to these methods. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.