Measuring the understandability of WSDL specifications, Web Service Understanding Degree Approach and System

Mario Marcelo Berón1, Hernán Bernardis1, Enrique Alfredo Miranda1, Daniel Edgardo Riesco1, Maria João Varanda Pereira2 and Pedro Rangel Henriques3

  1. Universidad Nacional de San Luis, Departamento de Informática
    San Luis, Argentina
    {mberon,hbernardis,eamiranda,driesco}@unsl.edu.ar
  2. Instituto Politécnico de Braganc¸a, Dep. de Informática e Comunicações/Centro Algoritmi
    Braganc¸a, Portugal
    mjoao@ipb.pt
  3. Universidade do Minho, Dep. de Informática/Centro Algoritmi
    Campus de Gualtar, Braga, Portugal
    prh@di.uminho.pt

Abstract

Web Services (WS) are fundamental software artifacts for building service oriented applications and they are usually reused by others. Therefore they must be analyzed and comprehended for maintenance tasks: identification of critical parts, bug fixing, adaptation and improvement. In this article, WSDLUD a method aimed at measuring a priori the understanding degree (UD) of WSDL (Web Service Description Language) descriptions is presented. In order to compute UD several criteria useful to measure the understanding’s complexity of WSDL descriptions must be defined. These criteria are used by LSP (Logic Scoring of Preference), a multicriteria evaluation method, for producing a Global Preference value that indicates the satisfaction level of the WSDL description regarding the evaluation focus, in this case, the understanding degree. All the criteria information required by LSP is extracted from WSDL descriptions by using static analysis techniques and processed by specific algorithms which allow gathering semantic information. This process allows to obtain a priori information about the comprehension difficulty which proves our research hypotheses that states that it is possible to compute the understanding degree of a WSDL description.

Key words

WSDL, Web Services Comprehension, LSP

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.2298/CSIS160124026B

Publication information

Volume 13, Issue 3 (November 2016)
Special issue on Trends in Software Technologies
Year of Publication: 2016
ISSN: 2406-1018 (Online)
Publisher: ComSIS Consortium

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How to cite

Berón, M. M., Bernardis, H., Miranda, E. A., Riesco, D. E., Pereira, M. J. V., Henriques, P. R.: Measuring the understandability of WSDL specifications, Web Service Understanding Degree Approach and System. Computer Science and Information Systems, Vol. 13, No. 3, 779–807. (2016), https://doi.org/10.2298/CSIS160124026B