Functionality evaluation of ubiquitous service ontology for dynamic service composition

Abstract

Effective service description and modeling methodologies for dynamic service composition are essential techniques for providing autonomous services in ubiquitous computing environments. In our previous paper, we proposed "u-Service" as an abstract and structured concept for operations of devices in ubiquitous environments. In addition, we established the mechanism to structure u-Services in ontology and the description specification to represent the attributes of u-Services. However, we did not present methods or standards that are sufficient to analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of the u-Service ontology during the design time. Since the existing quality models for software products or computing systems cannot consider the characteristics of u-Services, they are not suitable for a u-Service ontology. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an evaluation model to assess the functionality of u-Service ontologies, based on our u-Service ontology building process. We extract a modeling goal and evaluation indicators according to characteristics of u-Service ontology and establish quality metrics to quantify them. The experimental results for u-Service ontologies that were constructed in our previous studies show that we can comprehensively analyze the design of u-Service ontology. Further, on the basis of the evaluation results, improvement in design quality can be achieved. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.