A service concept recommendation system for enhancing the dependability of semantic service matchmakers in the service ecosystem environment

A Service Ecosystem is a biological view of the business and software environment, which is comprised of a Service Use Ecosystem and a Service Supply Ecosystem. Service matchmakers play an important role in ensuring the connectivity between the two ecosystems. Current matchmakers attempt to employ ontologies to disambiguate service consumers’ service queries by semantically classifying service entities and providing a series of human computer interactions to service consumers. However, the lack of relevant service domain knowledge and the wrong service queries could prevent the semantic service matchmakers from seeking the service concepts that can be used to correctly represent service requests. To resolve this issue, in this paper, we propose the framework of a service concept recommendation system, which is built upon a semantic similarity model. This system can be employed to seek the concepts used to correctly represent service consumers’ requests, when a semantic service matchmaker finds that the service concepts that are eventually retrieved cannot match the service requests. Whilst many similar semantic similarity models have been developed to date, most of them focus on distance-based measures for the semantic network environment and ignore content-based measures for the ontology environment. For the ontology environment in which concepts are defined with sufficient datatype properties, object properties, and restrictions etc., the content of concepts should be regarded as an important factor in concept similarity measures. Hence, we present a novel semantic similarity model for the service ontology environment. The technical details and evaluation details of the framework are discussed in this paper.