Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Supervisor

Weiming Shen

2nd Supervisor

Hamada Ghenniwa

Joint Supervisor

Abstract

With the proliferation of Web services, when developing a new application, it makes sense to seek and leverage existing Web services rather than implementing the corresponding components from scratch. Therefore, significant research efforts have been devoted to the techniques for service discovery and integration. However, most of the existing techniques are based on the ternary participant classification of the Web service architecture which only takes into consideration the involvement of service providers, service brokers, and application developers. The activities of application end users are usually ignored.

This thesis presents an Intents-based service discovery and integration approach at the conceptual level inspired by two industrial protocols: Android Intents and Web Intents. The proposed approach is characterized by allowing application end users to participate in the process of service seeking. Instead of directly binding with remote services, application developers can set an intent which semantically represents their service goal. An Intents user agent can resolve the intent and generate a list of candidate services. Then application end users can choose a service as the ultimate working service. This thesis classifies intents into explicit intents, authoritative intents, and naïve intents, and examines in depth the issue of naïve intent resolution analytically and empirically. Based on the empirical analysis, an adaptive intent resolution approach is devised. This thesis also presents a design for the Intents user agent and demonstrates its proof-of-concept prototype. Finally, Intents and the Intents user agent are applied to integrate Web applications and native applications on mobile devices.

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