Designing a composite e-service platform with recommendation function

Abstract

Enterprises make e-services available via the Internet to drive new revenue streams or create new efficiencies. Composite e-services, which consist of various e-services provided by different e-service providers, are more valuable for customers. This work presents a novel platform capable of supporting e-service metadata, and modeling and recommending composite e-services. Composite e-services are modeled by using the activity diagram of Unified Modeling Language in which Event/Condition/Action (ECA) rules are employed to control the sequence of e-services enactment and to select e-service providers. Moreover, two-level e-service metadata is designed to extend Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) standard to enable semantic search and selection of e-services. Finally, data mining approach is proposed to discover the frequent predicates of e-services and the frequent orderings between e-services. Based on the mining result, the proposed platform provides a recommendation of top N composite e-services to customers. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.