A service composition approach based on sequence mining for migrating e-learning legacy system to SOA

With the fast development of business logic and information technology, today's best solutions are tomorrow's legacy systems. In China, the situation in the education domain follows the same path. Currently, there exists a number of e-learning legacy assets with accumulated practical business experience, such as program resource, usage behaviour data resource, and so on. In order to use these legacy assets adequately and efficiently, we should not only utilize the explicit assets but also discover the hidden assets. The usage behaviour data resource is the set of practical operation sequences requested by all users. The hidden patterns in this data resource will provide users' practical experiences, which can benefit the service composition in service-oriented architecture (SOA) migration. Namely, these discovered patterns will be the candidate composite services (coarse-grained) in SOA systems. Although data mining techniques have been used for software engineering tasks, little is known about how they can be used for service composition of migrating an e-learning legacy system (MELS) to SOA. In this paper, we propose a service composition approach based on sequence mining techniques for MELS. Composite services found by this approach will be the complementation of business logic analysis results of MELS. The core of this approach is to develop an appropriate sequence mining algorithm for mining related data collected from an e-learning legacy system. According to the features of execution trace data on usage behaviour from this e-learning legacy system and needs of further pattern analysis, we propose a sequential mining algorithm to mine this kind of data of the legacy system. For validation, this approach has been applied to the corresponding real data, which was collected from the e-learning legacy system; meanwhile, some investigation questionnaires were set up to collect satisfaction data. The investigation result is 90% the same with the result obtained through our approach.