Mining Services on the Web

Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
3 year fully-funded PhD Studentship (January 2013 - December 2015)
Stipend: £40,770 (£13,590/year)

This project is inherently interdisciplinary and the successful candidate will contribute to our established research in one or more areas, including Web Services, Semantic Web, Internet of Things, Web Systems Engineering, Data Mining, and Data Integration technologies.

Project Description

Research on services in computer science has traditionally focused on the technical and engineering aspects that are, in theory, most relevant for the effective and sustainable development and management of complex service-oriented systems [1]. A number of technologies for describing services e.g., WSDL, for discovering services e.g., UDDI, or even broader principles e.g., REST, and engineering methodologies have been proposed in order to support the life-cycle of service-oriented applications.

However, as the role of the Web has become central within ICT and our society in general, it is increasingly apparent that although services are widely used nowadays [2], current practices are largely driven by less traditional factors than those initially anticipated and prescribed by software engineering methodologies [3, 4]. For instance, from a service provider perspective, de-facto there is hardly any standard technology stack established: some people use WSDL, some people use RPC methods over HTTP, some strictly follow REST principles, some use hybrid approaches. Service documentation is also highly heterogeneous and, in the case of Web APIs, hardly structured which hampers the development of automated supporting infrastructure that could help developers in creating new composite systems [4, 5]. Finally, and perhaps partly as a consequence, usage practices have also evolved and led us to a situation where, for instance, the choice of a service over another is increasingly driven by factors other than those current services research and infrastructure tackles, e.g., the technology used (e.g., RPC vs REST), the response time, etc. [3].

In this thesis we would like to carry out research on services from a fundamentally different perspective from the one commonly adopted. Notably, rather than focusing on defining new theoretical principles and frameworks for supporting the development of service-oriented systems, we would like to exploit the plethora of information that exists on the Web to figure out what current practices are, gain a better understanding on how service providers and service consumers are behaving, and use this knowledge to better support their practices. By doing so we expect to gather a richer understanding on current development processes in the Web era, so that we can determine the main factors driving services successes and failures, produce models that could predict the popularity or determine the simplicity of usage of a given service, etc. It is only then that we will be able to devise adequate technologies for supporting service providers and consumers, as well as identify and propose means for bridging the gap between current practices and best engineering principles that could lead us towards a more sustainable future.

Context

The student will carry out the PhD in the context of the 3 years European Integrating Project COMPOSE, which is an international research project involving 12 partners including among others IBM (coordinator), CREATE-NET, Fraunhofer FOKUS, Barcelona Supercomputing Center and the World-Wide Web consortium. The student will thus have the opportunity to work in a highly stimulating environment hand in hand with some of the world's leading institutions and researchers in IT.

COMPOSE will advance the state-of-the-art in a number of fields (scalable communications, semantic web, event processing, services and data security, service-oriented technologies, etc.) to give birth to an innovative integrated platform, enabling people and organisations to develop dynamic added-value services that seamlessly exploit data, sensors, and services on the Web. The project will build upon an innovative combination of the opportunities offered by current open data trends to design, implement, and deploy an open, scalable marketplace, in which sensors can be seamlessly turned into standardized services, combined with existing Linked Data sources and Web APIs, managed, and integrated into innovative applications.

Person Specification

PhD research is about generating new knowledge, hence we are looking for creative individuals, able to generate and pursue original ideas. Candidates are expected to have an MSc or a first class/2:1 honours degree in computing or a closely related subject and a strong interest in web, software engineering, machine learning, and semantic technologies. Strong numerical, programming, and communication skills are also essential.

Contact

For further information on this PhD project please contact:

Dr Carlos Pedrinaci
Research Fellow

+44 (0)1908 654773

References

[1] M. P. Papazoglou, P. Traverso, S. Dustdar, and F. Leymann, "Service-Oriented Computing: State of the Art and Research Challenges," Computer, vol. 40, no. 11, pp. 38–45, 2007.

[2] Pedrinaci, C. and Domingue, J. (2010) Toward the Next Wave of Services: Linked Services for the Web of Data, Journal of Universal Computer Science.

[3] Maleshkova, M., Pedrinaci, C. and Domingue, J. (2010) Investigating Web APIs on the World Wide Web, European Conference on Web Services (ECOWS), Ayia Napa, Cyprus

[4] Ly, A., Pedrinaci, C. and Domingue, J. (2012) Automated Information Extraction from Web APIs Documentation, The 13th International Conference on Web Information System Engineering (WISE 2012), Paphos, Cyprus, Springer

[5] Lin, C., He, Y., Pedrinaci, C. and Domingue, J. (2012) Feature LDA: a Supervised Topic Model for Automatic Detection of Web API Documentations from the Web, The 11th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), Boston, USA.

Applications

The relevant application form can be found at http://www.open.ac.uk/research/research-degrees/overview.php.

It is essential that you include both a proposal and a CV with your application. These are central to our judging of applications, both at shortlisting time and afterwards.

Application submissions can be directed to KMi Recruitment Coordinator at the Knowledge Media Institute, Open University, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK, Tel. +44 (0)1908 654774, Fax +44 (0)1908 653169.

Application Deadline

16th November 2012