An Intents-based approach for dynamic service discovery

Service discovery has been a very active research field attracting many researchers around the world. Most of the previous research efforts on service discovery have been based on the ternary classification of participant roles in web services, including service providers, brokers, and consumers. This classification is insufficient because it fails to make a difference between application developers and end users who both belong to service consumers. As a result, application developers usually take the responsibility of seeking services while end users who ultimately use the application are ignored. In order to address this issue, this paper presents an Intents-based approach for dynamic service discovery. The proposed approach is motivated from two industrial protocols: Android Intents and web Intents. It improves the two protocols by a generic model from the aspects of architecture, intent messages and their resolving process, Intents services, and user agents. It classifies the implicit intents into authoritative and naïve intents and is compatible with the current web service triangular architecture. This paper also illustrates a way of creating Intents services from SOAP and REST web services and presents two cases to demonstrate some benefits of the proposed approach.