TY - GEN
T1 - Web Service Interface Decomposition Using Formal Concept Analysis
AU - Daagi, Marwa
AU - Ouniy, Ali
AU - Kessentini, Marouane
AU - Gammoudi, Mohamed Mohsen
AU - Bouktif, Salah
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 IEEE.
PY - 2017/9/7
Y1 - 2017/9/7
N2 - In the service-oriented paradigm, Web service interfaces are considered contracts between Web service subscribers and providers. The structure of service interfaces has an extremely important role to discover, understand, and reuse Web services. However, it has been shown that service developers tend to pay little care to the design of their interfaces. A common design issue that often appears in real-world Web services is that their interfaces lack cohesion, i.e., they expose several operations that are often semantically unrelated. Such a bad design practice may significantly complicate the comprehension and reuse of the services functionalities and lead to several maintenance and evolution problems. In this paper, we propose a new approach for Web service interface decomposition using a Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) framework. The proposed FCA-based approach aims at identifying the hidden relationships among service operations in order to improve the interface modularity and usability. The relationships between operations are based on cohesion measures including semantic, sequential and communicational cohesion. The identified groups of semantically related operations having common properties are used to define new cohesive and loosely coupled service interfaces. We conducted a quantitative and qualitative empirical study to evaluate our approach on a benchmark of 26 real world Web services provided by Amazon and Yahoo. The obtained results show that our approach can significantly improve Web service interface design quality compared to state-of-the-art approaches.
AB - In the service-oriented paradigm, Web service interfaces are considered contracts between Web service subscribers and providers. The structure of service interfaces has an extremely important role to discover, understand, and reuse Web services. However, it has been shown that service developers tend to pay little care to the design of their interfaces. A common design issue that often appears in real-world Web services is that their interfaces lack cohesion, i.e., they expose several operations that are often semantically unrelated. Such a bad design practice may significantly complicate the comprehension and reuse of the services functionalities and lead to several maintenance and evolution problems. In this paper, we propose a new approach for Web service interface decomposition using a Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) framework. The proposed FCA-based approach aims at identifying the hidden relationships among service operations in order to improve the interface modularity and usability. The relationships between operations are based on cohesion measures including semantic, sequential and communicational cohesion. The identified groups of semantically related operations having common properties are used to define new cohesive and loosely coupled service interfaces. We conducted a quantitative and qualitative empirical study to evaluate our approach on a benchmark of 26 real world Web services provided by Amazon and Yahoo. The obtained results show that our approach can significantly improve Web service interface design quality compared to state-of-the-art approaches.
KW - Web service
KW - cohesion
KW - design
KW - interface
KW - modularization
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85032369743&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85032369743&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/ICWS.2017.30
DO - 10.1109/ICWS.2017.30
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85032369743
T3 - Proceedings - 2017 IEEE 24th International Conference on Web Services, ICWS 2017
SP - 172
EP - 179
BT - Proceedings - 2017 IEEE 24th International Conference on Web Services, ICWS 2017
A2 - Chen, Shiping
A2 - Altintas, Ilkay
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 24th IEEE International Conference on Web Services, ICWS 2017
Y2 - 25 June 2017 through 30 June 2017
ER -