As part of this renewed research and development focus, we now have available a position for a PhD student at the Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University, UK (see general information). We are currently offering a fully-funded studentship commencing January 2013. Applications are invited from UK, EU and international students for full-time, 3-year study on the following PhD project:

Mining Services on the Web

As the role of the Web has become central within ICT and our society in general, it is increasingly apparent that although services are widely used, current practices are largely driven by less traditional factors than those initially anticipated and prescribed by software engineering methodologies. In this PhD Studentship we would like to carry out research on services from a fundamentally different perspective from the one commonly adopted in Computer Science. Notably, rather than focusing on defining new theoretical principles and frameworks for supporting the development of service-oriented systems, we would like to exploit the plethora of information that exists on the Web to figure out what current practices are, gain a better understanding on how service providers and service consumers are behaving, and use this knowledge to better support their practices. By doing so we expect to gather a richer understanding on current development processes in the Web era, so that we can determine the main factors driving services successes and failures, produce models that could predict the popularity or determine the simplicity of usage of a given service, etc. It is only then that we will be able to devise adequate technologies for supporting service providers and consumers, as well as identify and propose means for bridging the gap between current practices and best principles that could lead us towards a more sustainable future.

Deadline for applications: 16th November 2012.

Further information: http://kmi.open.ac.uk/studentships/mining-services-on-the-web.php

[1] Lin, C., He, Y., Pedrinaci, C. and Domingue, J. (2012) Feature LDA: a Supervised Topic Model for Automatic Detection of Web API Documentations from the Web, The 11th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), Boston, USA.

[2] Ly, A., Pedrinaci, C. and Domingue, J. (2012) Automated Information Extraction from Web APIs Documentation, The 13th International Conference on Web Information System Engineering (WISE 2012), Paphos, Cyprus, Springer

Indeed, as you may be aware locating Web APIs is nowadays not very well supported on the Web. The best option is perhaps ProgrammableWeb but it sometimes is out of date and its search facilities, although useful, are not particularly advanced. We have recently been working towards improving this situation with a first step devoted to actually locating Web APIs out there. Although we are far from having finished the work, we already have some promising results with a new solution we have devised that has allowed us to reach an accuracy of about 80% while trying to discern between a normal Web page and one documenting a Web API. More exciting features are on the way and we shall soon provide access to some of them… until then, find at [1] some details on this research and see below the slides of the presentation we gave at the AAAI symposium last March.

[1] Pedrinaci, Carlos; Liu, Dong; Lin, Chenghua and Domingue, John (2012). Harnessing the crowds for automating the identification of Web APIs. In: AAAI Spring Symposium 2012, 26-28 March 2012, Stanford, California, USA.

Find below the slides that were used which you can directly obtain from Slideshare.