A Semantic and Information Retrieval Based Approach to Service Contract Selection

Service contracts represent the agreement between the service provider and potential service consumers to use a specific service under given conditions; for each service multiple service contracts are available. In this paper we investigate a new approach to support the service contract selection by exploiting preferences both explicitly defined by a user and implicitly inferred from his/her context. The core of our approach is the use of multi-constraint queries expressed on punctual values and on textual descriptions. Both semantic-based and information retrieval (IR) techniques are applied. Experimental evaluations show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.