Schemes for locating, collaboration, and management of net-centric services

As service-oriented computing paradigm and technologies become increasingly important and in demand, they have emerged as key enablers for flexible and scalable Internet and Web application solutions. Effective locating of services and efficient metadata management are an important and integral part of the service-oriented paradigm of computing. However, there are limitations on dealing with service functional properties matching and also uncertainties caused by service semantics matching. Mobile service collaboration and domain-specific service locating are yet insufficient.; In this thesis, we present a virtual service ontology model as the fundamental approach, to address and tackle large-scale net-centric services locating and management issues. These issues include service functional properties matching, distributed service metadata management in repositories, and mobile services collaboration. Within the virtual service ontology model, we use facets-based service ontological taxonomies to organize and manage service metadata in distributed repositories. This approach offers an operational framework for interactive and automated service locating tasks. We develop and provide a new location-transparent naming and routing algorithm for mobile services collaboration and interaction. With facets-based service ontological descriptions, we propose and give a progressive method for the dynamic formation of domain-specific ontological taxonomies of services. The soundness of this approach and the developed algorithms and mechanisms are validated through analytic reasoning with the schemes, experiments, and prototype.; The contributions of this dissertation include the following. At the framework level, we present a data model of faceted service ontologies for service metadata management and service locating. Facets-based multiform taxonomic hierarchies of service ontologies characterize the modeling. Extended from the model, a location transparent routing and naming algorithm is developed for effective collaboration and interaction of mobile services. A novel approach to the dynamic formation of service ontological taxonomies is given; this optimizes domain-specific service locating and management by using constraint satisfaction for adaptive and dynamic formation of service ontology representations. By providing an operational prototype, we combine interactive and automated services locating as a means of reducing uncertainties of service semantics matching.