Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Introducing web service accessibility assessment techniques through a unified quality of service context

  • Original Research Paper
  • Published:
Service Oriented Computing and Applications Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

This paper introduces novel web service (WS) accessibility assessment techniques through a unified Quality of Services (QoS) context. The goal is to enable future QoS-aware service selection systems to select and provide accessible web services, ones that are properly designed so as to allow their consumption from end-user applications, used from people with disabilities. In this line, a WS accessibility assessment Framework (WSaaF) has been developed, on the basis of WS accessibility guidelines, dealing with accessibility issues that can appear both on the presentation level of content delivered through WSs and on the content level itself. The WSaaF and its guidelines follow the rationale behind W3C WCAG 2.0-based accessibility standardization of web content. It provides the basis toward building future accessible WSs, a task that can be further facilitated by the use of an appropriate Tool (WSaaT), developed with the aim to provide automatic assessment of services, against guidelines of the proposed framework. Then, the WS accessibility attribute is introduced, as a metric that can be used in conjunction to ones typically utilized so far, within QoS-aware service selection systems. As a result, a novel unified QoS framework is proposed, incorporating the notion of accessibility in the service selection process. The proposed unified QoS framework can eventually lead to the provision of services, which are selected from appropriate repositories and better suit the special needs of people with disabilities.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10
Fig. 11

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. The full set of our proposed guidelines can be found at http://www.accessible-project.eu/index.php/ontology.html, under the WebService1.owl link.

  2. http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/places/.

References

  1. Abascal J, Arrue M, Fajardo I, Garay N, Toms J (2004) The use of guidelines to automatically verify web accessibility. Univers Access Inf Soc 3:71–79

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Alrifai M, Risse T (2009) Combining global optimization with local selection for efficient qos-aware service composition. In: Proceedings of the 18th international conference on world wide web, WWW ’09. ACM, New York, pp 881–890

  3. Ardagna D, Pernici B (2006) Global and local qos guarantee in web service selection. In: Bussler C, Haller A (eds) Business process management workshops, lecture notes in computer science, vol 3812. Springer, Berlin, pp 32–46

  4. Burkard R, Dell’Amico M, Martello S (2009) Assignment problems. Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Philadelphia

    Book  MATH  Google Scholar 

  5. Dietze S, Gugliotta A, Domingue J, Yu H, Mrissa M (2010) An automated approach to semantic web services mediation. Serv Oriented Comput Appl 4:261–275

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. D’Mello DA, Ananthanarayana VS (2010) Dynamic selection mechanism for quality of service aware web services. Enterp Inf Syst 4:23–60

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Giakoumis D, Votis K, Tzovaras D, Likothanassis S, Hassapis, G (2010) Introducing accessibility in the web services domain. In: Computer science and information technology (ICCSIT), 2010 3rd IEEE International Conference on, vol. 2, pp 18–22

  8. Internet Engineering Task Force rfc 2119. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt

  9. Kehagias DD, Giannoutakis KM, Gravvanis GA, Tzovaras D (2012) An ontology-based mechanism for automatic categorization of web services. Concurr Comput Pract Exper 24(3):214–236

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Lazar J, Dudley-Sponaugle A, Greenidge KD (2004) Improving web accessibility: a study of webmaster perceptions. Comput Hum Behav 20(2):269–288

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Liu Y, Ngu AH, Zeng LZ (2004) Qos computation and policing in dynamic web service selection. In: Proceedings of the 13th international World Wide Web conference on Alternate track papers & posters, WWW Alt. ’04, pp 66–73. ACM, New York

  12. Martin D, Paolucci M, McIlraith S, Burstein M, McDermott D, McGuinness D, Parsia B, Payne T, Sabou M, Solanki M, Srinivasan N, Sycara K (2005) Bringing semantics to web services: the owl-s approach. In: Cardoso J, Sheth A (eds) Semantic web services and web process composition, lecture notes in computer science, vol 3387. Springer, Berlin, pp 26–42

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  13. Ma H, Schewe KD, Thalheim B, Wang Q: A formal model for the interoperability of service clouds. Service Oriented Computing and Applications pp 1–17

  14. Menasce D (2002) Qos issues in web services. IEEE Internet Comput 6(6):72–75

    Google Scholar 

  15. Mobedpour D, Ding C: User-centered design of a qos-based web service selection system. Service Oriented Computing and Applications pp 1–11

  16. OWL-S: Semantic markup for web services. http://www.w3.org/Submission/OWL-S/

  17. Pedersen T, Patwardhan S, Michelizzi J (2004) Wordnet:similarity: measuring the relatedness of concepts. Demonstration papers at HLT-NAACL 2004, HLT-NAACL-demonstrations ’04. Association for Computational Linguistics, Stroudsburg, PA, USA, pp 38–41

  18. Roman D, Keller U, Lausen H, de Bruijn J, Lara R, Stollberg M, Polleres A, Feier C, Bussler C, Fensel D (2005) Web service modeling ontology. Appl Ontol 1(1):77–106

    Google Scholar 

  19. Sierkowski B (2002) Achieving web accessibility. In: Proceedings of the 30th annual ACM SIGUCCS conference on user services, SIGUCCS ’02. ACM, New York, pp 288–291

  20. Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) W3C Specifications. http://www.w3.org/TR/soap/

  21. Soydan Bilgin A, Singh M (2004) A daml-based repository for qos-aware semantic web service selection. In: Web Services, 2004. Proceedings IEEE International Conference on, pp 368–375

  22. Thatcher J, Waddell C (2003) Constructing accessible websites. APress L.P.

  23. W3C Evaluation and Report Language (EARL) Schema. http://www.w3.org/TR/EARL10-Schema/

  24. W3C Web Accessibility Initiative, Conformance Evaluation of Web Sites for Accessibility. http://www.w3.org/WAI/eval/conformance.html

  25. Web Application Description Language (WADL). http://www.w3.org/Submission/wadl/

  26. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (w3c wcag 2.0). http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG/

  27. Web Services Description Language (WSDL). http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl/

  28. Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology 1.0, W3C Working Draft. http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG-EM/

  29. Yu T, Lin KJ (2005) Service selection algorithms for composing complex services with multiple qos constraints vol. 3826. In: Benatallah B, Casati F, Traverso P (eds) Service-oriented computing—ICSOC 2005, lecture notes in computer science. Springer, Berlin, pp 130–143

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  30. Yu T, Lin KJ (2005) Service selection algorithms for web services with end-to-end qos constraints. Inf Syst E-Bus Manag 3:103–126

    Article  Google Scholar 

  31. Zeng L, Benatallah B, Ngu A, Dumas M, Kalagnanam J, Chang H (2004) Qos-aware middleware for web services composition. IEEE Trans Softw Eng 30(5):311–327

    Article  Google Scholar 

  32. Zeng L, Benatallah B, Dumas M, Kalagnanam J, Sheng QZ (2003) Quality-driven web services composition. 12th international conference on the World Wide Web (WWW). ACM Press, Budapest, pp 411–421

Download references

Acknowledgments

This work was partially funded by the EC FP7 project ACCESSIBLE—Accessibility Assessment Simulation Environment for New Applications Design and Development, Grant Agreement No. 224145 (www.accessible-eu.org).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Informatics and Telematics Institute, 6th km Charilaou-Thermi Road, 57001 , Thessaloniki, Greece

    Dimitris Giakoumis, Konstantinos Votis & Dimitrios Tzovaras

  2. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Dimitris Giakoumis

Authors
  1. Dimitris Giakoumis
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Konstantinos Votis
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Dimitrios Tzovaras
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dimitris Giakoumis.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Giakoumis, D., Votis, K. & Tzovaras, D. Introducing web service accessibility assessment techniques through a unified quality of service context. SOCA 8, 159–174 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11761-013-0135-5

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11761-013-0135-5

Keywords

Search

Navigation