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More and more organizations make parts of their information systems available to their business partners and often face integration and interoperability issues. To counter these problems, web services appeared as a promising technology to bridge the gap between organizations and their partners. While web services generally focus on the implementation of functional concerns (FC) such as ordering of goods, the reservation of flights, etc. also non‐functional concerns (NFC) such as security, reliable messaging, performance, and availability have to be addressed appropriately. The purpose of this paper is to identify web services' requirements.

In this paper the authors provide a survey on works in the area of NFCs in web services. After presenting a common terminology, the most important requirements in that context are presented. Further, the authors assess these works against the requirements.

The evaluation reveals that there is no approach that supports the requirements to a satisfying degree. Based on that, the authors motivate the need for a novel holistic approach to NFCs in web services.

The paper presents an extended version of one of the papers presented at iiWAS2010.

The purpose of this paper is to address the Internet of Things (IoT) service discovery problem and investigate the existing solutions to tackle this problem in many aspects.

This paper presents an overview of IoT services aiming at providing a clear understanding about their features because this term is still ambiguous for the IoT service discovery approaches. Besides, a full comparison study of the most representative service discovery approaches in the literature is presented over four perspectives: the IoT information model, the mechanism of IoT service discovery, the adopted architecture and the context awareness. These perspectives allow classifying, comparing and giving a deeper understanding of the existing IoT service discovery solutions.

This paper presents a new definition and a new classification of IoT services and citation of their features comparing with the traditional Web services. This paper discusses the existing solutions, as well as the main challenges, that face the service discovery issue in the IoT domain. Besides, two classifications of the approaches are adopted on the basis of their service description model and their mechanism of discovery, and a set of requirements that need to be considered when defining an IoT service are proposed.

There are few number works that survey the service discovery approaches in the IoT domain, but none of these surveys discuss the service description models in the IoT or the impact of the context awareness aspect in the service discovery solution. There are also few works that give a comprehensive overview of IoT services to understand their nature to facilitate their description and discovery. This paper fills this gap by performing a full comparison study of multi-category and recent approaches for service discovery in the IoT over many aspects and also by performing a comprehensive study of the IoT service features.

In order for a software system to better serve the user, it should be able to adjust its behavior according to the changing needs in the environment. Oftentimes, selecting a particular action may depend upon various non‐functional requirements (NFRs) such as safety, cost, and so on. In the past, the many possible alternatives for an adaptation action by and large have not been considered systematically and rationally, keeping various NFRs in mind, hence, resulting in low‐level of confidence that such an action is indeed a best possible one that is really desirable. The purpose of this paper is to present a goal‐oriented approach to select alternative(s) based on a particular contextual event, while considering important NFRs.

The paper proposes a goal‐oriented approach in which various NFRs are treated as softgoals to be satisficed and used in exploring, analyzing and selecting among possible adaptation alternatives, in consideration of the particular contextual event.

Without the goal‐oriented methodology, which offers an ontology enriched with the notion of goals for contextual information and also integrates rules for triggering adaptation, the authors feel, through their scenario study applied to their smart‐phone application, that some critical issues might not have been considered in building a usable, useful system.

The concepts introduced in this paper provide a systematic and rational approach to select adaptation alternative(s), considering NFRs along with detecting a contextual event.

Based on appraisal theory and social response theory, this study aims to explore the mechanism of AI failure types on consumer recovery expectation from the perspective of service failure assessment and validate the moderate role of anthropomorphism level.

Three scenario-based experiments were conducted to validate the research model. First, to test the effect of robot service failure types on customer recovery expectation; second, to further test the mediating role of perceived controllability, perceived stability and perceived severity; finally, to verify the moderating effect of anthropomorphic level.

Non-functional failures reduce consumer recovery expectation compared to functional failures; perceived controllability and perceived severity play a mediating role in the impact of service failure types on recovery expectation; the influence of service failure types on perceived controllability and perceived severity is moderated by the anthropomorphism level.

The findings enrich the influence mechanism and boundary conditions of service failure types, and have implications for online enterprise follow-up service recovery and improvement of anthropomorphic design.

A web service is a software system designed to support interoperable machine‐to‐machine or application‐to‐application interactions over networks. Descriptions enable web services to be discovered, used by other web services, and composed into new web services. Web service composition is a mechanism for creating new web services by reusing existing ones. In order to compose a web service, the right primitive services have to be discovered. A matchmaking technique enables discovering these services. Web services have functional, non‐functional, behavioral, and semantic characteristics. These four aspects of web services provide different key information about the service; therefore they have to be considered for description, matching, and composition. The purpose of this paper is to propose a formal description framework and a formal matchmaking technique that allows describing and discovering web services by considering their four characteristics.

In this paper, the description framework combines two existing languages for functional, semantic, and behavioral description, along with a simple and new language for non‐functional description.

A case study is used to illustrate the description framework and the matchmaking technique. The implementation and performance evaluation of the matchmaking technique is presented. The framework formalizes and integrates the languages in a common semantic domain in order to match and manipulate the different aspects together and formally. Isabelle is used by the matchmaking technique for discovering the partially and fully matched services.

The contribution of this paper lies in the new description framework and the new matchmaking technique.

Automated composition of semantic web services has become one of the recent critical issues in today's web environment. Despite the importance of artificial intelligence (AI)‐planning techniques for web service composition, previous works in that area do not address security issues, which is the focus of this paper. The purpose of this paper is to propose an approach to achieve security conscious composition of semantic web services.

The proposed approach called security conscious composition of semantic web services (SCAIMO) is based on the prior work, i.e. AIMO. The AIMO is an effective approach for web service discovery and composition based on AI‐planning, web service modeling ontology (WSMO), and description logic (DL). In this paper, definitions of secure matchmaking and web service composition are formalized based on DLs. Moreover, security capabilities and constraint types in the proposed SCAIMO framework are presented.

This paper proposes a secure task matchmaker which is responsible for matching security conscious tasks with operators and methods based on WSMO and DL to support the proposed SCAIMO framework. In addition, the paper implements and evaluates the SCAIMO using a test case and the result shows that the approach can provide an applicable solution.

The key contribution of this paper encompasses the new framework to support security capabilities and constraints during composition of semantic web services as well as the new secure task matchmaker.

This study applies Tauber’s personal and social motives, as representative of Sheth’s non‐functional motives for shopping, to Internet shoppers. Two studies are conducted; in the first a sample of current online shoppers is surveyed on how well Tauber’s motives describe their motivation for Internet shopping. Projective technique is used in the second study, in which a group of consumers are asked to discuss how the motives may impact on online shoppers, as a means of explaining how the motives apply in the Internet setting. Results suggest that Tauber’s non‐functional motives can be adapted to the twenty‐first century mode of shopping. This leads to some strong implications for researchers and practitioners who so far have concentrated on the functional aspects of Internet shopping with respect to gaining shopping market share.

This paper aims to systematize the contextual factors that influence the intention to use citizens and governments-initiated platforms, presenting them as non-functional requirements (NFRs), to facilitate their understanding to implementers.

A systematic mapping of the literature was done to identify the contextual factors from citizens and governments (C2G) adoption, followed by a survey applied to 938 potential users of this type of technology. The results were analyzed through logistic regression to understand the impact of the contextual factors on the intention to use C2G platforms and then those contextual factors were formalized as NFRs represented by a Softgoal Interdependence Graph.

Among the results, the most prominent factors were the influence of the “users perceived contribution” and the “citizens concern about the city conditions”. Finally, some strategies are suggested to help public managers and developers to optimize the factors that have shown to be significant.

This study can support e-gov policies in the implementation of C2G platforms because several municipalities need assistance in taking actions to foster greater citizens’ engagement. An example of this type of contribution is the indication of the factors of greatest impact in the adoption of use and the indication of paths to be followed if the manager and developers decide to focus on each of them.

The identification of several contextual factors which influence C2G platforms adoption and their systematization with the purpose of jointly visualizing and evaluating them.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a novel quality of service (QoS)‐aware service composition approach, called SEQOIA, capable of defining at run‐time a service composition plan meeting both functional and non‐functional constraints and optimizing the overall quality of service.

SEQOIA is a semantic‐driven QoS‐aware dynamic composition approach leveraging on an integer linear programming technique (ILP). It exploits the expressiveness of an ontology‐based service profile model handling structural and semantic properties of service descriptions. It represents the service composition problem as a set of functional and non‐functional constraints and an objective function.

The authors developed a proof of concept implementing SEQOIA, as well as an alternative composition solution based on state‐of‐the‐art AI planning and ILP techniques. Results of testing activities show that SEQOIA performs better than the alternative solution over a limited set of candidate services. This behaviour was expected, as SEQOIA guarantees to find the service composition providing the optimal QoS value, while the alternative approach does not provide this guarantee, as it handles separately the specification of the functional service composition flow and the QoS‐based service selection step.

SEQOIA leverages on semantic annotations in order to make service composition feasible by coping with syntactic and structural differences typically existing across different, even similar, service implementations. To ease the adoption of SEQOIA in real enterprise scenarios, the authors chose to leverage on an XML‐based message model of services interfaces (including but not strictly requiring the use of WSDL).

The purpose of this paper is to present an innovative web-based eLearning platform called ICT-FLAG that provides e-assessment tools with general-purpose formative assessment services featuring learning analytics and gamification.

The paper reports on the technical development of the platform driven by the Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing software methodology, which guides the platform construction, including the analysis and design steps.

The ICT-FLAG platform is technically tested by integrating it into a real e-assessment tool. Results are positive in terms of functional and non-functional aspects as well as user’s satisfaction on usability, emotional state, thus validating the platform as a valuable educational tool.

Because of the chosen technical paper as article type, validation of the impact of the ICT-FLAG platform in the learning process is not provided. Ongoing research with this platform is to measure the learning outcomes of its use in a real context of eLearning.

The paper shows implications of the main technical issues and challenges encountered during the integration of the ICT-FLAG platform with external eLearning tools, involving relevant aspects of interoperability, security, modularity, scalability, portability and so on.

This platform can fill the gap of many e-assessment systems, which currently do not have built-in analytical and gamification tools for learning, thus providing them with the experience to improve the quality of education and learning.