In the application economy, digital business initiatives are at the forefront of the growth strategy of many companies. Cloud based solutions offer a significant competitive advantage for both large companies and SMEs, leading to a rapid increase in the number of Cloud Service Providers (CSP). An important CSP driver is the improvement of consumers’ experience through digital platforms that all...

Conventional means of selecting a service are predominantly based on the results returned from service discovery. Typically most approaches employ a matchmaker which works in tandem with a service registry and user preferences based on the functionality of services. Nonfunctional attributes of services, such as reliability, timeliness and other quality of service criteria are typically not addr...

The current infrastructure for Web services supports service discovery based on a common repository. However, the key challenge is not discovery but selection: ultimately, the service user must select one good provider. Whereas service descriptions are given from the perspective of providers, service selection must take the perspective of users. In this way, service selection involves pragmatic...