Natural language based on-demand service composition

Abstract

The widespread of Web services in the ubiquitous computing era and the impossibility to predict a priori all possible user needs generates the necessity for on-demand service composition. Natural language is one of the the easiest ways for a user to express what he expects regarding a service. Two main problems need to be solved in order to create a composite service to satisfy the user: a)retrieval of relevant services and b) orchestration/composition of the selected services in order to fulfill the user request. We solve the first problem by using semantic concepts associated with the services and we define a conceptual distance to measure the similarity between the user request and a service configuration. Retrieved services are composed, based on aspect oriented templates called Aspects of Assembly. We have tested our application in an environment for pervasive computing called Ubiquarium, where our system composes a service according to the user request described by a sentence. The implementation is based on the WComp middleware that enables us to use regular Web services but also Web services for devices. © 2006-2010 by CCC Publications.