A quality-controlled logic-based clustering approach for web service composition and verification

Purpose Service-oriented architecture is an emerging software architecture, in which web service (WS) plays a crucial role. In this architecture, the task of WS composition and verification is required when handling complex requirement of services from users. When the number of WS becomes very huge in practice, the complexity of the composition and verification is also correspondingly high. In this paper, the authors aim to propose a logic-based clustering approach to solve this problem by separating the original repository of WS into clusters. Moreover, they also propose a so-called quality-controlled clustering approach to ensure the quality of generated clusters in a reasonable execution time. Design/methodology/approach The approach represents WSs as logical formulas on which the authors conduct the clustering task. They also combine two most popular clustering approaches of hierarchical agglomerative clustering (HAC) and k-means to ensure the quality of generated clusters. Findings This logic-based clustering approach really helps to increase the performance of the WS composition and verification significantly. Furthermore, the logic-based approach helps us to maintain the soundness and completeness of the composition solution. Eventually, the quality-controlled strategy can ensure the quality of generated clusters in low complexity time. Research limitations/implications The work discussed in this paper is just implemented as a research tool known as WSCOVER. More work is needed to make it a practical and usable system for real life applications. Originality/value In this paper, the authors propose a logic-based paradigm to represent and cluster WSs. Moreover, they also propose an approach of quality-controlled clustering which combines and takes advantages of two most popular clustering approaches of HAC and k-means.