External Service Sensing in an Uncertain World

The flourish of web-based service has led to an increasing number of user requirements that can be satisfied by an increasing variety of ways. To study how services can better satisfy user requirements, a research area called service computing was born. An obvious fact is that in an uncertain world, most services evolve constantly in order to adapt to various types of internal and external changes in a timely manner. However, traditional services computing techniques do not systematically consider the significant implications of service changes and many widely-accepted models/approaches do not work well in uncertain world. Sensing various types of service changes is of great significance to the practicability and rationality of services computing research. In this paper, a new research problem External Service Sensing (ESS) is defined to cope with various changes in services, and a research framework of ESS is presented to elaborate the scope and boundary of ESS. This framework is composed of four orthogonal dimensions: sensing objects, sensing contents, sensing channels, and sensing techniques. Each concrete ESS problem is defined by combining different values in these dimensions, and existing research work related to service changes can be well adapted to this framework. Real-world case studies demonstrate the soundness of ESS and its framework. Finally, some challenges and opportunities in ESS research are listed for researchers in the services computing community. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time to systematically define service change-related research as a standard services computing problem, and thus broadening the research scope of services computing.