Department of Informatics, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
Software Engineering Group
Department of Informatics, University of Fribourg, SwitzerlandSoftware Engineering Group |
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This thesis is taking place as part of the SOCRADES project, and is thus a collaboration between SAP Research (Zürich - Switzerland) and the Software Engineering Group (Dept of Informatics - Universtiy of Fribourg - Switzerland). The work takes place in the context of a six months internship at SAP Research Zürich spanning from May to November 2008.
Production facilities still have to become more efficient and more effective. The automation and total integration of software in the operations management is necessary to be able to fully accommodate the customers’ demand for flexibility. The trend towards the Internet of Things contains potential for solving that problem by integrating Smart Objects over strategic, tactical and operational business level. Smart Objects in this context is a general term for a web service enabled devices, sensor networks, RFID devices and their applications.
The EU research project SOCRADES is pursuing exactly these goals, so that sophisticated production and monitoring processes can be modelled with it. SOCRADES proposes an entire service oriented production system consisting of Smart Objects integrated into the businesses software. The SOCRADES integration architecture integrates Smart Objects via web services.
We do not treat the whole SOCRADES integration architecture in this master thesis but we present one central question of the project: How can one find the right service that meets the specific needs of the current enterprise application or current user? – Web service directories following the UDDI standard do not offer advanced search functionalities for the end users. Therefore we propose a new query method based on a number of collaborating components in order to provide a way of searching for functionalities on devices. The main component involved is the Application Service Catalogue, which gives assistance to the users’ search. It consists of several subcomponents, amongst others the Query Augmentation Module. The query augmentation is the first step of the search for a web service and consists, in a nutshell, of enriching a simple user query.
The main topic of this master thesis is the development of this Query Augmentation Module and in particular the definition of enrichment strategies, the creation of the component architecture, the first implementation and its evaluation. With strategies we mean methods of query expansion. The strategies of the Query Augmentation Module are consuming available web resources, which are analyzed, evaluated and then used for the query expansion. Possible bases for the query expansion are analysed Wikipedia articles or evaluated search results from common search engines. The strategies that are discussed in this report are kept simple, but the Query Augmentation Module consists of a very flexible design and more sophisticated strategies can be added easily at any time.
Furthermore, we present the benefit of using the Query Augmentation Module within the SOCRADES integration architecture.
| Patrik Fuhrer |  |
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