Advisory Committee Chair
Murat M Tanik
Advisory Committee Members
Murat N Tanju
Sanjay K Singh
Gregg L Vaughn
Buren E Wells
Document Type
Dissertation
Date of Award
2010
Degree Name by School
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) School of Engineering
Abstract
This dissertation addresses the problem of bridging the gap that exists between user requirements and the implemented software solution. This gap between the user needs and the actual implementation is usually termed the semantic gap problem. In this dissertation, the software solution is viewed as a composite of available software services and seeking semantically motivated approaches for the composition of a final solution. Representing user needs by capturing the semantic components of these needs and using this representation to build a composite service solution are therefore critical in reducing the aforementioned semantic gap. Although scientists have presented solutions that contribute to solving the problem of semantic gap, these solutions individually have not adequately resolved this problem. This dissertation presents a combinatorial approach in the form of a framework for reducing this semantic gap in building composite services. We term this framework the Process-as-a-Concept (PAAC) Framework because it is based on the philosophy of converting a process representation into a concept. The proposed PAAC Framework, designed to facilitate the reduction of this semantic gap, provides a structured guiding path for the semantic service composition process by using the input attributes provided by the user. The composition process accepts the user needs, employed to identify the user processes. The user processes are then represented in the form of a task system model. The task system model is then converted into a concept map, which is again converted into an XML-based document. The document thus obtained is in a machine-actable format that can be easily used to select appropriate services with which to build the composite service. The dissertation compares the PAAC Framework with other existing solutions that can be useful in reducing the problem of semantic gap. This framework can be further extended to include the conversion of the representation of a system into a concept map. Overall, we have introduced the idea of representing a process in the form of a concept and thereby reducing the semantic gap involved in building composite services.
Recommended Citation
Gurupur, Varadraj Prabhu, "A Framework for Composite Service Development: Process-as-a-Concept" (2010). All ETDs from UAB. 1825.
https://digitalcommons.library.uab.edu/etd-collection/1825