Design, development and experimentation of a discovery service with multi-level matching

Abstract

The contribution of this thesis focuses on addressing the challenges of improving and integrating the UniFrame Discovery Service (URDS) and Multi-level Matching (MLM) concepts. The objective was to find enhancements for both URDS and MLM and address the need of a comprehensive discovery service which goes beyond simple attribute based matching. It presents a detailed discussion on developing an enhanced version of URDS with MLM (proURDS). After implementing proURDS, the thesis includes details of experiments with different deployments of URDS components and different configurations of MLM. The experiments and analysis were carried out using proURDS produced MLM contracts. The proURDS referred to a public dataset called QWS dataset. This dataset includes actual information of software components (i.e., web services), which were harvested from the Internet. The proURDS implements the different matching operations as independent operators at each level of matching (i.e., General, Syntactic, Semantic, Synchronization, and QoS). Finally, a case study was carried out with the deployed proURDS. The case study addresses real world component discovery requirements from the earth science domain. It uses the contracts collected from public portals which provide geographical and weather related data.