Interactive QoS browsing for web service selection

In most of the current research works on Quality of Service (QoS) based web service selection, searching is usually the dominant way to find the desired services. This approach comes with the potential problem of framing search queries properly due to requestor's lack of knowledge or vague requirement about QoS attribute values. In this thesis, we propose an interactive QoS browsing mechanism that uses the concept of clustering to present the QoS value distribution to requestors followed by finer views of service quality. By analyzing various QoS attributes, we believe that the symbolic interval data is a proper type of representation, compared with the single valued numerical data. Therefore, we use interval data clustering algorithms to implement our browsing system. We conducted experiments on simulated QoS datasets to compare the performance of using different distance measures and show the effectiveness of the interval data clustering algorithm used. The result of the experiments show that the proposed approach provides an effective, user guided QoS based service selection approach that can conceivably overcome the problems with current approaches.