43. SCALABLE SEMANTIC SEARCH OF SERVICE CONTRACTS

Department: Computer Science & Engineering
Faculty Advisor(s): Alin Deutsch

Primary Student
Name: Elio Damaggio
Email: edamaggi@ucsd.edu
Phone: 858-534-9914
Grad Year: 2010

Abstract
Service contracts (construed broadly, beyond web services and software, e.g. airline tickets and insurance policies) exhibit behavior that is rarely modeled completely in IT systems. This prevents consumers from automatically finding the services they need as well as providers from publishing the services they perform. We believe that the source of difficulty resides in the fact that these contract agreements tend to contain a great deal of information regarding the temporal interaction among various events (e.g. "The life insurance amount can only be increased *after* approval, which requires *prior* health screening and filling out questionnaire U-850."). Such agreement clauses cannot be succinctly captured using a set of predefined attributes, ontology concepts or keywords, as one would need a name for each relevant sequence of events; and their natural language descriptions are not amenable to semantic search. In this talk we introduce a broker that enables providers to register service contracts and consumers to query them, in both cases based on the services' temporal behavior. We define what it means for a service to fulfill a query, and describe an algorithm for checking this fulfillment. We develop an indexing scheme for querying large collections of service contracts. We evaluate experimentally our broker implementation, showing that it scales well with both the number and the size of the contracts.

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