A semantic-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) discovery and selection system

With the proliferation of Software-as-a-Service in the cloud environment, users find it tiresome and time consuming to search for the right service that satisfies all their requirements. In addition, services may provide the same functionality but differ in their characteristics or the Quality of Service attributes (QoS) they offer. In this paper, we propose a semantic-based system that facilitates the SaaS publication, discovery and selection processes. To achieve these goals, we developed a unified ontology that combines services domain knowledge, SaaS characteristics, QoS metrics and real SaaS offers. A hybrid service matchmaking algorithm is introduced based on the proposed ontology. It integrates semantic-based metadata and ontology-based matching. Prototypical implementation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system.