Template-type: ReDif-Paper 1.0 Author-Name: Muller, Rudolf Author-Name: Muller, Stefan Author-workplace-name: MERIT Title: Retrieval of Service Descriptions using Structured Service Models Abstract: The Application Service Provider (ASP) market leads to rapidly increasing numbers of sites that offer software as an online service, rather than for download and installation. This creates a demand for intelligent solutions to retrieve the best service to resolve the user''s problem. This paper introduces Structured Service Models to represent software services and explores a retrieval mechanism on repositories of structured service models. The mechanism is based on computing graph similarity on a special class of directed acyclic graphs. Finding most similar models is NP-complete, however the special structure of the graphs can be exploited for exact and heuristic algorithms. The paper also presents a prototype system designed as a three-tier client-server application where the client is implemented in Java. The system provides facilities for stating queries on a remote repository by drawing a structured service model in a Java applet. The paper concludes with an initial evaluation of the system. Keywords: economics of technology ; Series: Research Memoranda Creation-Date: 2001 Number: 014 File-URL: https://unu-merit.nl/publications/rmpdf/2001/rm2001-014.pdf File-Format: application/pdf File-Size: 104032 Handle: RePEc:unm:umamer:2001014