Advances in artificial intelligence, sensors and big data management have far-reaching societal impacts. As these systems augment our everyday lives, it becomes increasing-ly important for people to understand them and remain in control. We investigate how HCI researchers can help to develop accountable systems by performing a literature analysis of 289 core papers on explanations and explaina-ble systems, as well as 12,412 citing papers. Using topic modeling, co-occurrence and network analysis, we mapped the research space from diverse domains, such as algorith-mic accountability, interpretable machine learning, context-awareness, cognitive psychology, and software learnability. We reveal fading and burgeoning trends in explainable systems, and identify domains that are closely connected or mostly isolated. The time is ripe for the HCI community to ensure that the powerful new autonomous systems have intelligible interfaces built-in. From our results, we propose several implications and directions for future research to-wards this goal.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3173574.3174156

Trends and Trajectories for Explainable, Accountable and Intelligible Systems: An HCI Research Agenda

Many researchers propose that, not only functional but also non-functional properties, also known as quality of service (QoS), should be taken into consideration when consumers select services. Consumers need to make prediction on quality of unused web services before selecting. Usually, this prediction is based on other consumers' experiences. Being aware of different QoS experiences of consumers, this paper proposes a collaborative filtering based approach to making similarity mining and prediction from consumers' experiences. Experimental results demonstrate that this approach can make significant improvement on the effectiveness of QoS prediction for web services.

Personalized QoS Prediction forWeb Services via Collaborative Filtering

Web Services are the most famous implementation of service-oriented architectures that has brought some challenging research issues. One of these is the composition, i.e., the capability to recursively construct a composite Web service as a workflow of other existing Web services, which are developed by different organizations and offer diverse functionalities (e.g., ticket purchase, payment), transactional properties (e.g., compensatable or not), and Quality of Service (QoS) values (e.g., execution price, success rate). The selection of a Web service, for each activity of the workflow, meeting the user's requirements, is still an important challenge. Indeed, the selection of one Web service among a set of them that fulfill some functionalities is a critical task, generally depending on a combined evaluation of QoS. However, the conventional QoS-aware composition approaches do not consider the transactional constraints during the composition process. This paper addresses the issue of selecting and composing Web services not only according to their functional requirements but also to their transactional properties and QoS characteristics. We propose a selection algorithm that satisfies user's preferences, expressed as weights over QoS criteria and as risk levels defining semantically the transactional requirements. Proofs and experimental results are presented.

/pdf/tqos-transactional-and-qos-aware-selection-algorithm-for-35y7s8lzxq.pdf

TQoS: Transactional and QoS-Aware Selection Algorithm for Automatic Web Service Composition

Due to significant industrial demands toward software systems with increasing complexity and challenging quality requirements, software architecture design has become an important development activity and the research domain is rapidly evolving. In the last decades, software architecture optimization methods, which aim to automate the search for an optimal architecture design with respect to a (set of) quality attribute(s), have proliferated. However, the reported results are fragmented over different research communities, multiple system domains, and multiple quality attributes. To integrate the existing research results, we have performed a systematic literature review and analyzed the results of 188 research papers from the different research communities. Based on this survey, a taxonomy has been created which is used to classify the existing research. Furthermore, the systematic analysis of the research literature provided in this review aims to help the research community in consolidating the existing research efforts and deriving a research agenda for future developments.

/pdf/software-architecture-optimization-methods-a-systematic-410l1adk8z.pdf

Software Architecture Optimization Methods: A Systematic Literature Review

The increasing use of the Web for everyday tasks is making Web services an essential part of the Internet customer's daily life. Users query the Internet for a required Web service and get back a set of Web services that may or may not satisfy their request. To get the most relevant Web services that fulfill the user's request, the user has to construct the request using the keywords that best describe the user's objective and match correctly with the Web Service name or location. Clustering Web services based on function similarities would greatly boost the ability of Web services search engines to retrieve the most relevant Web services. This paper proposes a novel technique to mine Web Service Description Language (WSDL) documents and cluster them into functionally similar Web service groups. The application of our approach to real Web services description files has shown good performance for clustering Web services based on function similarity, as a predecessor step to retrieving the relevant Web services for a user request by search engines.

/pdf/clustering-wsdl-documents-to-bootstrap-the-discovery-of-web-jfpitj3qv0.pdf

Clustering WSDL Documents to Bootstrap the Discovery of Web Services

Web service technology allows access to advertised services despite of their location and implementation platform. However, considerable differences on structural, semantical and technical levels along with the growing number of available web services makes their discovery a significant challenge. Keyword-based matchmaking methods can help users to locate quickly the set of potentially useful services, but they are insufficient for automatic retrieval. On the other hand, the high cost of formal ontology-based methods alienates service designers from their use in practice. Several information retrieval approaches to assess the similarity of web services have been proposed. In this paper we proceed with such a study. In particular, we examine advantages of using Vector-Space Model, WordNet and semantic similarity metrics for this purpose. A matching algorithm relying on the above techniques is presented and an experimental study to choose the most effective approach is provided.

/pdf/a-comparison-of-web-service-interface-similarity-measures-ueei74hedz.pdf

A Comparison of Web Service Interface Similarity Measures

The paradigm of service-oriented computing revolutionized the field of software engineering. According to this paradigm, new systems are composed of existing stand-alone services to support complex cross-organizational business processes. Correct communication of these services is not possible without a proper coordination mechanism. The Reo coordination language is a channel-based modeling language that introduces various types of channels and their composition rules. By composing Reo channels, one can specify Reo connectors that realize arbitrary complex behavioral protocols. Several formalisms have been introduced to give semantics to Reo. In their most basic form, they reflect service synchronization and dataflow constraints imposed by connectors. To ensure that the composed system behaves as intended, we need a wide range of automated verification tools to assist service composition designers. In this paper, we present our framework for the verification of Reo using the $${{\tt mCRL2}}$$ toolset. We unify our previous work on mapping various semantic models for Reo, namely, constraint automata, timed constraint automata, coloring semantics and the newly developed action constraint automata, to the process algebraic specification language of $${{\tt mCRL2}}$$, address the correctness of this mapping, discuss tool support, and present a detailed example that illustrates the use of Reo empowered with $${{\tt mCRL2}}$$ for the analysis of dataflow in service-based process models.

/pdf/reo-tt-mcrl2-a-framework-for-model-checking-dataflow-in-20qwdz1s34.pdf

Reo + $${{\tt mCRL2}}$$: A framework for model-checking dataflow in service compositions

Business process modeling and implementation of process supporting infrastructures are two challenging tasks that are not fully aligned. On the one hand, languages such as Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) exist to capture business processes at the level of domain analysis. On the other hand, programming paradigms and technologies such as Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) and web services have emerged to simplify the development of distributed web systems that underly business processes. BPMN is the most recognized language for specifying process workflows at the early design steps. However, it is rather declarative and may lead to the executable models which are incomplete or semantically erroneous. Therefore, an approach for expressing and analyzing BPMN models in a formal setting is required. In this paper we describe how BPMN diagrams can be represented by means of a semantically precise channel-based coordination language called Reo which admits formal analysis using model checking and bisimulation techniques. Moreover, since additional requirements may come from various regulatory/legislative documents, we discuss the opportunities offered by Reo and its mathematical abstractions for expressing process-related constraints such as Quality of Service (QoS) or time-aware conditions on process states.

Towards Using Reo for Compliance-Aware Business Process Modeling

Web service technology provides a way for simplifying interoperability among different organizations. A piece of functionality available as a web service can be involved in a new business process. Given the steadily growing number of available web services, it is hard for developers to find services appropriate for their needs. The main research efforts in this area are oriented on developing a mechanism for semantic web service description and matching. In this paper, we present an alternative approach for supporting users in web service discovery. Our system implements the implicit culture approach for recommending web services to developers based on the history of decisions made by other developers with similar needs. We explain the main ideas underlying our approach and report on experimental results.

http://disi.unitn.it/~implicit/present/source/BIS2007.pdf

Web service discovery based on past user experience

Compliance management is essential for ensuring that organizational business processes and supporting information systems are in accordance with a set of prescribed requirements originating from laws, regulations, and various legislative or technical documents such as Sarbanes-Oxley Act or ISO 17799. As the violation of such requirements may lead to significant punishment for an organization, compliance management should be supported at the very early stages of business process development. In this paper, we present an integrated approach to compliance management that helps process designers to adhere to compliance requirements relevant for their processes. Firstly, we introduce a conceptual model for specifying compliance requirements originating from various compliance sources. Secondly, we propose a framework for augmenting business processes with reusable fragments to ensure process compliance to certain requirements by design. Furthermore, we discuss the formalization of compliance requirements using mathematical logics and integrate the framework for process reuse with automated software verification tools.

/pdf/business-process-compliance-through-reusable-units-of-4cejc7tti8.pdf

Natallia Kokash

Papers

A Comparison of Web Service Interface Similarity Measures

Reo + $${{\tt mCRL2}}$$: A framework for model-checking dataflow in service compositions

Towards Using Reo for Compliance-Aware Business Process Modeling

Web service discovery based on past user experience

Business process compliance through reusable units of compliant processes