Toward intention-aware services provision

A novel approach is proposed to cope with problems of how to interpret the service request intention from the user´s entered string and how to integrate the internal software functions implemented in the system and external services distributed on the Internet to satisfy the user´s request. We identify these two problems as user intention extraction problem and user intention satisfaction problem, respectively. If a service-oriented system with the abilities of user´s intention extraction and satisfaction, we call it an intention-aware service-oriented system (IASOS). An IASOS can provide a richer way for services provision. We start the system design from the view of system requirements engineering. In system construction phase, the requirements specification is generated by the goal-based requirements analysis in which the functional and nonfunctional requirements will be extended with goal models. The designer designs the system capabilities based on the requirements specification. A set of computable goal models that represents the user requirements is selected and refined as the basis for representing the user´s imprecise and vague service requests intentions. Based on the proposed intention extraction approach, the user´s vague and imprecise intention will be extracted and mapped to computer understandable and computable goal models which used to represent the intention. In our implementation, a case-based method is developed to implement the intention extraction process. Based on the hierarchical task network (HTN) planning, a plan could be automatically generated from a plan library to satisfy the extracted goal models.