Using Domain Ontology for Service Replacement Tasks: An Empirical Evaluation

Organizations increasingly use information technology (IT) to integrate their business processes into the processes of their suppliers, customers, and other third parties. An important IT approach is the realization of composite services that organize elementary software services under a shared workflow. Any failure of an elementary service can severely impact the process. The failed service must be examined and, ultimately, be replaced. In solving that task, the process designer must consider the quality-of-service (QoS) of the process. However, the heterogeneity of service descriptions puts the burden on the designer. This research empirically evaluates how designers can use a domain ontology, namely the QoS aggregation ontology, for the replacement task. We report on a laboratory experiment to compare the effectiveness and efficiency of using the ontology vis-à-vis an aggregation table. The results provide evidence for the usefulness of the domain ontology that specifies problem-solving knowledge required for a time-critical task