2017 IEEE 24th International Conference on Web Services
Social-Sensor Cloud Service Selection
Tooba Aamir Athman Bouguettaya
School of Science School of Information Technologies School of Science
RMIT University The University of Sydney RMIT University
Melbourne, Australia Sydney, Australia Melbourne, Australia
tooba.aamir@rmit.edu.au athman.bouguettaya@sydney.edu.au hai.dong@rmit.edu.au
Abstract—We propose a new framework for social-sensor
cloud services selection based on spatio-textual correlation
between user’s query and service. The proposed research
defines a formal social-sensor cloud service model that abstracts
the functional and non-functional aspects of social-sensor data
on the cloud in terms of spatio-temporal, textual and quality of
service parameters. Proposed framework is a 4-stage filtering
algorithm, to select social-sensor cloud services based on user
query and quality of service demands. 4-stage filtering is based
on spatial correlation, textual correlation, visual features and
quality of service parameters. Analytical results are presented
to show the performance of the proposed approach.
Keywords-Social-Sensor; Social-Sensor Cloud; Social-Sensor
Cloud Service
I. I NTRODUCTION
Rapid advancement of online social media, such as Twit-
ter, Instagram, Flicker and Facebook etc., in conjunction
with devices like smartphones or tablet, is providing unique
opportunities for addressing major economic, scientific and
social challenges. The user-base of multiple social networks
is getting wider and more active in producing content about
real world events, almost in real-time [1]. Posts related
to public events, especially multimedia content along with
quality and coverage parameters, may contain critical in-
formation that describes a situation [2]. This dramatically
increases the value of the information generated by social
networks.Thus, social media provides a convenient platform
to collect various types of context sensitive information
related to almost real-time events. Monitoring such events or
scenarios over social streams can assists concerned officials
in analyzing an unfolding situation, such as in crisis man-
agement, urban management and scene analysis. Utilizing
these streams available over social networks (also called
social clouds[3]) can significantly facilitate the task of scene
detection and aid in comprehending evolving situations as
per the user requests[4]. These requests have both func-
tional and non-functional constraints. Functional constraints
include (but not limited to) time, location, mentions etc., and
non-functional constraints refer to the desired quality, i.e.,
data quality, resolution, availability etc.
The users contributing their individual ’data’ that express
978-1-5386-0752-7/17 $31.00 © 2017 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ICWS.2017.59
Hai Dong Abdelkarim Erradi
& Rachid Hadjidj
College of Engineering
Qatar University
Doha, Qatar
{erradi,rhadjidj}@qu.edu.qa
some situations or facts can be regarded as social-sensors[5].
Therefore, social-sensors are considered as a promising and
emerging domain for the application of crowd-sourced sen-
sors. Similarly, social-sensor clouds are cloud-based social
networks (e.g., facebook, twitter, google+ etc.) also known
as social-clouds[3], hosting and processing data from the
social-sensors.
The challenge here is the efficient and real-time delivery
of social-sensor data, i.e., data shared by social-sensors,
to the end users as requested, without exposing the com-
plexities of data collection and management. To overcome
this challenge, the proposed research uses Service Oriented
Architecture (SOA), i.e., sensor-data-as-a-service[6] for dif-
ferent clients over a Social-Sensor Cloud. Transforming
the social-sensor data as a function of services provides
improved information flow and flexible organization of data.
Social-sensor data is generated from multiple sources in
multiple formats. SOA abstracts Social-sensor data seam-
lessly as a service without exposing internal data structure
and how data can be accessed. This results in a uniform
and ubiquitous delivery of social-sensor data as a service,
making it easy to access and reuse in multiple applications
over different platforms, thus reducing the complexity of
social-sensor data collection. The functionality of social-
sensor data (e.g., time and location) is abstracted as a
services and qualitative features (e.g., price, trust, coverage)
are abstracted as non-functional properties of service. So
if users require a slightly different data structure or have
specific functional or non-functional requirements, the im-
plementation and access is easy because the changes are
minimal. SOA breaks down the service into independent
service(s), namely atomic services, making integration with
other services easy. Therefore, social-sensor data abstracted
as a service is easy to manage because of ease in integration
and collaboration of atomic services. Other benefits include
higher availability, better scalability, dynamic deployment
and greater testability. Therefore, social-sensor cloud service
is the solution for efficient transformation of social-sensors
data stored over social-sensor clouds into actionable infor-
mation.
As depicted in Fig.1, the Social-Sensor Cloud Service
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architecture consists of four conceptual layers: (i) social-
sensors; (ii) social-sensor clouds (online social networks);
Fig. 1: Social-Sensors Cloud Service Architecture
(iii) social-sensor cloud services and (iv) sensor data con-
sumers. In Fig. 1, the arrows show the flow of infor-
mation between these layers. Take the example of scene
reconstruction, social-sensors publish a large amount of
data (images, videos and texts) over the social networks
(Facebook, twitter, etc.), regarded as social-sensor clouds in
this case. Social-sensor cloud service describes the whole
situation from various aspects, e.g., what is happening,
where it is happening, who are involved and what the effects
on surrounding are. In addition, social-sensor cloud services
have different qualitative attributes (e.g., quality, direction
reference, etc). Therefore, social-sensor cloud service can
help in detecting and constructing scenes in the physical
world. Urban Management, for example, can use these
social-sensor cloud services, as per their requirement, in
day-to-day planning or in case of any crisis or emergency.
Social-sensor cloud service delivers required information
as per the users requirement, without concerning where
the data is gained from and what format it is. How-
ever, information from social-sensor cloud services may
be different in terms of information context (e.g., at same
geographical location, one service covers an accident that
happened and other covers reaction of by-standers). The
geo-tagged location information only provides the longitude
and latitude of the camera position, correct within 10m
radius. For better utilization and selection of social-sensor
cloud service, as per user requirement, it is important to
get appropriate context of visual information. The accurate
information regarding the context and user required quality
parameters (e.g., trust, price, direction reference etc.) are
central for social-sensor cloud service selection. However,
social-sensor cloud services are significantly different from
standard web services due to their extremely large number,
location dependency, dynamic and unreliable nature. There-
fore, most of the existing techniques developed for standard
web service selection are not directly applicable to sensor
services[7]. The aim is to design an efficient method for
selecting the social-sensor cloud services that are in the same
information context, i.e., covering same event or segment of
area at any given time, required by the user and also meet
user’s quality of service demands.
The key contribution of this research is a novel social-
sensor cloud service model and QoS-aware service selec-
tion approach based on spatio-textual parameters of the
service. Proposed research focuses on a social-sensor cloud
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service selection framework that comprises an atomic ser-
vice model and 4-stage filtering approach. The novelty of
this research is abstracting social media users as social-
sensors and using SoA to abstract social-sensor data as
a service, i.e., social-sensor cloud services for efficient
and real-time access of social-sensor data. To the best of
our knowledge, existing approaches to use social media
data are mainly data centric, built upon data mining and
information retrieval techniques. Proposed service model
abstracts social-sensor data as social-sensor cloud service
by conceptualizing the spatio-temporal and textual aspect
as its functional attributes, and the qualitative aspects as
its non-functional attributes. Proposed new framework is
capable of context-aware selection of a social-sensor cloud
service by using functional properties such as spatio-textual
context, visual data, i.e., images, and quality of service
requirements (e.g., image quality, direction reference etc.).
The rest of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2
reviews the related background work. Section 3 describes the
motivating scenario. Section 4 formally defines model for a
social-sensor cloud service along with functional and quality
model. Section 5 details the proposed selection approach.
Section 6 describes the experiments and evaluation of the
approach. Section 7 concludes the work.
II. R ELATED W ORK
Our social-sensor cloud service selection approach draws
background work from three main areas: social sensing,
crowd-sourcing and sensing-as-a-service and service selec-
tion [1][2][3][5][6][9][10][15].
A. Social Sensing
Social sensing assists in almost real-time visualization
of life events via photos, audios, videos, views and blogs
shared on various social media sites such as Flickr, Twitter
and Facebook [11][12]. Images and videos are especially
important because they can be used to build a visual sum-
mary of an event and further used in other applications
e.g., area monitoring and scene analysis. Spatio-temporal
social media analysis for event detection is discussed in
numerous researches [8][9][10][14]. Abnormal topics and
events within various social media data sources examined
on the basis of visual analysis is discussed in [8]. Another
research proposes an approach towards multi-scale event
detection using social media data, which takes into account
different temporal and spatial scales of events in the data [9].
A location-based event detection approach using Locality-
Sensitive Hashing is proposed in [10]. This approach is used
to detect real-world events by clustering micro-blogs with
high similarities. Similarity measurement is considered using
content, location, and time between messages to improve
the precision of event detection. A framework to detect
composite social events over streams using graphical model
called location-time constrained topic (LTT) is proposed in
[14]. This framework fully exploits the information of social
data over multiple dimensions and the similarity between
two messages is measured by the distance between their
distributions.
Most of these approaches are data centric, built upon data
mining and analysis techniques. This require considerable
amount of expertise and time. Moreover, transition of tradi-
tional cloud systems to the SOA-based sensor-cloud raises
need to consider spatio-temporal aspects of sensor data with
better performance and faster access to new services. Thus,
using SOA and social-sensors for scene analysis is far better
than using image processing over the batch of images or
traditional cloud computing to build the scene.
B. Crowd-sourcing and Sensing-as-a-Service
Crowd-sourcing and Sensing-as-a-Service is a large-scale
sensing paradigm based on the power of IoT devices, includ-
ing smart phones, smart vehicles and wearable devices etc.
[5][13]. This allows the increasing number of mobile phone
users to share local knowledge (e.g., local information,
event coverage, and traffic conditions) acquired by their
sensor-enhanced devices and the information can be further
aggregated in the cloud for large-scale sensing [16]. The
mobility of large-scale mobile users makes sensing-as-a-
service a versatile platform that can often replace static
sensing infrastructures [18]. A broad range of applications
are thus enabled, including traffic planning [5], environment
monitoring [20], mobile social recommendation [25], public
safety [26], and so on.
C. Service selection and composition
Service Selection and Composition is one of the
hottest research problems in service-oriented computing
[6][17][19][15]. The service composition has been applied
in a number of domains including scene analysis and visual
surveillance [19]. The service composition problem can be
categorized into two areas. The first area focuses on the
functional composability among component services. The
second area aims to do optimal service composition based
on non-functional properties (QoS). In [17], service compo-
sition from media service perspective has been discussed.
Authors of [6] and [15] propose a composition approach for
Sensor-Cloud and crowd sourced services based on dynamic
features such as spatio-temporal aspects. Algorithms are
presented in both papers to support the proposed approaches.
Analytical and simulation results are presented to show the
performance of the proposed. However, Social-sensor cloud
service selection using functional/non-functional attributes
through social-sensor is yet to be explored.
III. M OTIVATING S CENARIO
Lets assume that scene reconstruction of the accident is
required by urban management to determine the cause(s) or
aftermath(s) of the accident to prevent further incidents of
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a similar kind. It is assumed that the surveillance of the
road segment through the conventional sensors is minimal.
In such case scene reconstruction may be performed in
traditional way by a range of experts, including forensic
scientists, forensic engineers or health and safety advisers,
etc. However, evidence or witnesses available can be quite
limited in their value and reliability [1]. The urban man-
agement (i.e., the user) might require specific direction and
information context that is not available through conven-
tional means. Moreover, the user might have various quality
requirements too (e.g., resolution, colour etc). The advent of
smart-phones provides unique opportunities to address this
problem.
The wide deployment and availability of smart-phones
users and their connectivity with social networks might pro-
vide extra visual coverage by either sharing images or posts.
The idea is to leverage this freely available information
over social network clouds to help investigators to analyse
the accidents scene. The process of providing investigators
extra visual coverage can be considered as service selection
problem. The commuters on the road can be regarded as
social-sensors sharing their image data over social-sensor
clouds, i.e., social networks. Using social media image
(social-sensor data) as-a-service, i.e., social-sensor cloud
service, can help to fulfil the urban management’s need
of required coverage and direction. Social-sensor cloud
services have multiple functional and non-functional prop-
erties involved, adding value to unstructured social-sensors
data. The functional properties of such services include
(but not limited to) visual, spatio-temporal, textual and
context information of the image. If the temporal, spatial
and context information of the accident event is provided,
it will be very helpful for detecting and building the scene
using images or videos available through social-sensor cloud
services. Moreover, users might demand different sets of
non-functional properties for different query sets (e.g., image
quality, trust in service, price of service etc). The challenge
is to make sure these services are in the same information
context, i.e., covering same event or segment of area required
by the user. Visual information context is essential to make
sure that images belong to same scene and determining the
information and location context of a social-sensor cloud
service is a task of particular interest.
The aim is to select the social-sensor cloud services
which are in the same spatial and visual context based on
the functional properties of the service as required by the
user and users quality of service requirements (i.e., non-
functional requirements). As shown in Fig. 2, proposed
solution is to filter and select the best available Social-Sensor
Cloud Service, according to the users requirement, from the
pool of Social-Sensor Cloud Services available over Social-
Sensor Cloud. This is done on the basis of spatial correlation,
textual correlation, visual features of image and quality of
service parameters specified by user.

Fig. 2: Social-Sensor Cloud Service Selection
Let us assume that the user’s query q is defined as (l,d,Q),
giving the location, description and quality parameters of
the required service(s). l < x, y > is a two-dimensional
geographical space, i.e., decimal longitude and latitude po-
sition. d is a phrase describing the query (e.g., ’Melbourne
Central, CBD’). Q is a set of non-functional attributes (e.g.,
direction reference DRef ). Functional attributes associated
with Service Serv are time T of the service at which the
image is taken, special mentions and keywords M providing
additional information regarding image or service, service
location L < x, y > i.e., longitude and latitude position of
the service and VisF i.e., a set of key points and associated
visual features of image extracted through image processing
service. For any location of query q, all services available in
the area of radius r (e.g., 7m) are selected. The value of r is
set arbitrarily and improved with evaluation of experiments.
It is assumed that a circular area AREAq of radius r encloses
S  , a set of services, relevant to query q. The services
outside this area are assumed to have little probability of
being relevant to the query. Further, textual correlation, i.e.,
similarity between d and M, of nearby services outside
radius r is considered. These nearby services are selected
within radius r , where r is set arbitrarily and improved
with evaluation of experiments. For example, the service is
located outside the radius r of the query area but special
mention M (e.g., Melbourne Central station) of the service
is related to description d (e.g., Melbourne center) of the
query. The relatedness of the two descriptions is measured
between 0.0 (the lowest) to 1.0 (the highest) and denoted
as θ. Textual correlation filtering gives S”, i.e., set of
services textually correlated to query. Next, the location
context of all filtered services, i.e., S  and S”, is extracted
using their VisF. The VisF is a set of the key-points feature
vector representation of an image, assigned to the service
by external image processing service. Further filtering is
done by similarity analysis between SIFT features of image
set I, i.e., 360o structured image dataset of event area
AREAq captured through Google street view, and VisF of
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filtered services in S  and S”. Finally, user defined quality
parameters (e.g., direction reference DRef = 60o from True
North) are considered in selection of best suited services.
The threshold values of QoS parameters are adjusted by
user of the service at time of query generation. The selected
services can assist in building a visual summary of a required
scene in given space and time.
IV. M ODEL FOR S OCIAL -S ENSOR C LOUD S ERVICE
In this section, we have defined several concepts to select
a social-sensor cloud service effectively and efficiently.
A. Model for an Atomic Social-Sensor Cloud Service
Here we discuss the key concepts to model an atomic
social-sensor cloud.
Definition 1: Scene S is defined as an observation on a
real world happening. This observation is a collection of
connected images in same spatial and temporal dimension.
Definition 2: Visual summary VisSum is defined by a set of
2D images that are highly relevant to the scene S. VisSum
gives viewer an accurate impression of what a particular
scene S looks like. Any two images are considered highly
relevant if at least one feature of the images is common.
Next we define the model of social-sensor cloud service, in
terms of spatio-temporal features of social-sensor.
Definition 3: Social-sensor SocSen is the user of a social
media. A sensor posts content related to scene S, on social
media, i.e., Social-sensor cloud. It is assumed that the data
shared by a social-sensor contains a visual, textual reference,
time and location of the scene.
Definition 4: Social-sensor Cloud SocSenCl is a social
media hosting data from the social-sensors. It is defined by
• Social-sensor Cloud ID SocSenCl id, i.e., a unique
sensor id
• Sensor Set SenSet = {SocSen idi , 1≤i≤m} represents
a finite set of sensors SocSen that collect and host
sensor data in the respective cloud. It is assumed that
each cloud hosts data from at least one sensor.
Definition 5: Atomic Social-Sensor Cloud service Serv is
defined by
• Serv id is a unique service id of the service provider
SocSen.
• SocSenCl id i.e ID of the cloud where the service is
available.
• F describes a set of functional properties of service
Serv. For each Serv, F = {T, M, L, VisF}.
• nF describes a set of non-functional properties of
service Serv.
B. Functional Model of an Atomic Social-sensor Cloud
Service
Functional requirements capture the intended behaviour
of the service and forms the baseline functionality necessary
from an Atomic Service. The following propose the minimal along with the quality measures of service are used to
functional requirements associated with an atomic service: select the best available service(s). The selection approach
• T is time of the service at which the image is taken is implemented in following steps:
• M is special mentions and keywords, providing addi-
tional information regarding image.
• L  x,y  is service location where x,y is longitude
and latitude position of the service
• VisF is a set of key points and associated visual features
of image extracted through image processing service.
C. Quality Model of an Atomic Social-sensor Cloud Service
Discovering and selecting the best available service sat-
isfying user’s requirements is an important challenge. For
this some baseline QoS attributes for Social-sensor Cloud
services are introduced. The proposed QoS criteria of an
atomic services includes:
• Qserv is a tuple  Q1 , Q2 ... Qn , where each Qi denotes
a Quality of service (QoS) of Serv. The QoS criteria
include:
– Pricing is the price of the service, i.e., does the
service need any sort of financial incentive for Fig. 3: Social-Sensor Cloud Service Selection Framework
service provider or not
– Direction Reference is the direction of the service A. Service filtering with respect to spatial correlation
coverage, e.g., 60o from True North. The first step is to reduce the search space (Algorithm 1).
– Resolution is the minimum requirement of image It is assumed that all available services are associated to a
resolution to be provided by service two-dimensional geo-tagged location. For the effective area
– Colour Quality is image’s definition, i.e., grey of the query q, we define a circular event area AREAq of
scale or high definition radius r that encloses a set of services relevant to q. The ser-
vices outside this area are assumed to have little probability
V. Q O S- AWARE S OCIAL - SENSOR C LOUD S ERVICE
of being relevant to the query. Haversine formula [22] is used
S ELECTION
to calculate the distance between service location and query
We propose a framework to filter and localise the best location. The Haversine formula is an equation in navigation,
available Social-sensor Cloud Service according to the user’s giving great-circle distances between two points on a sphere
query. The query q can be defined as a tuple q  l,d,Q (i.e., earth) from their longitudes and latitudes. For a service
, giving the location, description and quality parameters Serv < lon1 , lat1 > and query q.l < lon2 , lat2 >, formulas
of the required service(s). The entry lx,y is the two- used for distance calculation are [22]:
dimensional geographical space, i.e., decimal longitude and
latitude position, while d is a phrase describing the query a = (sin(Δlat /2))2 + cos(lat1 ) ∗ cos(lat2 ) ∗ (sin(Δlon /2))2
(e.g., Melbourne Central). Q is a set of non-functional √ √ (1)
attributes direction reference DRef, resolution R, price P and c = 2 ∗ arctan 2( a, 1 − a) (2)
colour quality CQ.
dist = Radiusearth ∗ c
Fig. 3 shows the proposed selection framework for social-
sensor cloud services. The aim of our approach is to find Where, Δlon = lon2 − lon1 , Δlat = lat2 − lat1 and dist
the available services that match with users’ requirements is the distance between service and query. If the distance is
by constructing the information and location context of the less than r it is deduced that the service and the query are
service with the functional and non-functional properties spatially correlated.
of the service. Initially we reduce the search space using
the user’s query location and textual description. For any B. Service filtering with respect to textual correlation
location of query q, all services available in the area of radius To improve the efficiency of the proposed approach,
r are selected. Further, textual correlation, i.e., similarity textual correlation is also considered. It might happen that
between d and M, of nearby services outside radius r is the service does not lie spatially in the query area AREAq ,
considered. Next, the location context of all filtered services but has textual relation with query q. For example, the
is extracted using their VisF, by mapping on the visual service is located outside the radius r of the query area but
features of available map(s). Finally, this extracted context special mention M of the service is related to description

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Algorithm 1 Spatial Correlation Filtering
Input: S is the collection of services - each service is
associated with its geo-tagged location < x, y >; a query q
with location l < x, y >; a query area’s radius threshold r
Output: The set S  of all services which lie in query area
such that distance (Serv < x, y > to q.l < x, y >) ≤ r
1: for Each Serv in S do
2: Calculate the dist between serv and q.l using
Haversine formula
3: if dist ≤ r then
4: Serv ∈ S 
d of the query. In such cases textual correlation in terms
of spatio-textual similarity is used for service filtration. Fig.
4. illustrates the spatio-textual correlation between query q
and services. Although services Serv5 , Serv7 , and Serv8 do
not lie in the query area but are spatially close to query q.
Thus these services are further filtered for textual correlation.
Service filtering with respect to textual correlation shows
that services Serv7 and Serv8 are textually relevant to query
q.
Fig. 4: Example of Spatio-Textual correlation
WordNet-based approach LIN [22] is used to calculate the
textual similarity between textual description d and M of
service Serv. This approach measures semantic relatedness
of concepts based on the ratio of the amount of information
needed to state the commonality of the information content
of the d, i.e., IC(q.d), along with the information content of
Serv, i.e., IC(Serv.M), to the amount of information needed
to describe them.
The measure is determined by[23]:
2IC(lcs(q.d, Serv.M ))
relatedlin (q.d, Serv.M ) = (3)
IC(q.d) + IC(Serv.M )
Where, IC(description) =
−log(P robability(description)), and, lcs(q.d, Serv.M ),
i.e., least common subsumer is the quantity of information
common to two descriptions. It is determined by the
information content of the lowest concept in the hierarchy
that subsumes both q.d and Serv.M [22]. Equation (3)
measures the relatedness of the two descriptions and
can also be viewed as taking the information content
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Algorithm 2 Textual Correlation Filtering
Input: S is the collection of services - each service is
associated with its geo-tagged location < x, y > and
mention M ; a query q with location l < x, y > and textual
description d; a query area’s radius threshold r ; textual
similarity threshold θ
Output: The set S” of all spatio-textually correlated services
which lie in query area such that distance disg, q.l < x, y >
to Serv < x, y >, is r ≤ dist ≤ r and d is similar to M
1: for Each Serv in S do
2: Calculate the dist between Serv < x, y > and q.l <
x, y > using Haversine formula
3: if r ≤ dist ≤ r then
4: Serv ∈ S”temp  S”temp is temporary set to
hold filtered services
5: for Each Serv in S”temp do
6: Calculate θ between Serv.M and q.d using LIN
7: if θ ≥ θ then
8: Serv ∈ S”
of the intersection of the two concepts. The relatedness
score is between 0.0 (the lowest) to 1.0 (the highest).
For implementation Java based library, WS4J (WordNet
Similarity for Java) is used. The use of this library is
defined in an on-line documentation 1 . We have used θ to
define relatedlin (q.d, Serv.M ). Higher value of θ shows
higher textual correlation. Algorithm 2 shows the textual
correlation filtering.
C. Service Localisation using VisF
The VisF is a set of the key-points feature vector repre-
sentation of an image, assigned to the service by external
image processing service. In this research we have used
SIFT(Scale-invariant feature transform)[21] as the external
image processing service for visual features extraction. SIFT
transforms image data into scale-invariant coordinates rela-
tive to local features. To extract VisF the following four
stages are applied [21]:
1) Scale-space extrema detection, i.e., to search an image
to identify potential interest points that are invariant
to scale and orientation. It is implemented by using a
difference-of-Gaussian function.
2) Keypoint localization, i.e., at each candidate location,
a detailed model is fit to determine location and scale.
Keypoints are selected based on measures of their
stability.
3) Orientation(s) assignment to keypoints, i.e., direction
is assigned based on local image gradient. All future
operations are performed on image data that has been
transformed relative to the assigned orientation, scale,
1 JWNL - JavaWordNet Library - Dev Guide”,
http://jwordnet.sourceforge.net/handbook.html
Algorithm 3 Service Localisation using VisF
Input: S  and S” is the set of spatially and textually
correlated services - each service is associated with its VisF;
SIFT features I.F of structured 360o image dataset I, of event
area AREAq ; Visual dissimilarity threshold α
Output: The set SetServ of localised services related to
query.
1: for Each Serv in S  ∪ S” do
N o.of mKP
2: SimI = ( T otalN o.of KP ) ∗ 100
3: if SimI ≥ α then
4: Serv ∈ SetServ
and location for each feature, thus providing invariance
to these transformations.
4) Keypoint descriptors generation, i.e., descriptors com-
prising of the local image gradients are generated.
These gradients are measured at the selected scale in
the region around each keypoint.
To localise the filtered service set S  and S” we have used
a 360o structured image dataset, I, of event area AREAq .
The image set extracted from Google Map Street View is an
example of such dataset. Localisation is done by similarity
analysis between SIFT features of image set I and VisF of
services in S’ and S”, as shown in Algorithm 3. This is
done by individually comparing each feature from VisF of
services in S’ and S” to features of image set I and finding
candidate matching features based on Euclidean distance of
their feature vectors. To condense the matching keypoints
into a scalar quantity the percentage of keypoints that
match are calculated, i.e., the number of matching keypoints
(Number of mKP ) divided by the total number of keypoints
(Total number of KP ) for each image. Further, services are
localised and selected if the percentage of similarity, i.e.,
SimI is above the set threshold α.
D. QoS-Aware Service Selection
In the final stage of service selection (Algorithm 4), user
defined quality parameters are considered in selection of best
suited services. The threshold values of these parameters are
adjusted by user of the service at time of query generation.
VI. E XPERIMENTS AND R ESULTS
A set of experiments is conducted for evaluation and to
analyse and investigate the contribution of our proposed
framework . To the best of our knowledge, there is no real
spatio-temporal service test case to evaluate our approach.
Therefore, we focus on evaluating the proposed approach
real dataset. The set is a collection of 200 GPS tagged
user uploaded images downloaded from social networks
(flicker, twitter, google images, etc.). To create the services
based on images, we have extracted its geo-tagged location,
special mentions and tags as its textual description and time
when image was captured as the functional property values,
514
and quality features, i.e., colour quality and resolution,
and SIFT features as QoS property values. For the image
features similarity, we found that using a minimum similarity
threshold of 50% usually gives best results, i.e., VisF and
I.F need to be at least 50% match. For the simplicity of
our experiments we decided to keep this threshold fixed. In
Algorithm 4 QoS-Aware Service Selection
Input: Q , i.e., quality requirements of user and SetServ
is the set of localised services related to query
Output: The set SelServ of selected services related to
query.
1: for Each Serv in SetServ do
2: if Serv.Q ≥ Q for each parameter of quality then
 P,CQ,R are separately
3: Serv ∈ SelServ  compared. If all true then
condition satisfies
addition, QoS parameter of price is manually assigned to
all services. A set of experiments are conducted to evaluate
the significance of our proposed filtering steps and selection
approach in terms of precision and recall. The proposed
algorithms are implemented in Java and Matlab. All the
experiments are conducted on a Windows 7 desktop with
a 3.60 GHZ Intel Core i7 processor and 8 GB RAM.
We have conducted two set of experiments to evaluate
the effectiveness of the proposed approach. To evaluate the
service filtering w.r.t. spatial correlation, various values of
r are experimented. The minimum unit of r is 7 m., i.e.,
average least measurable increment in decimal longitude and
latitude values. Units of r are further increased in multiple
of 7m. For textual correlation, the value of r’ is set with
7m increment for respective r. In QoS-aware selection, for
simplicity purpose, in this study we are using only basic QoS
parameters, i.e., price P, color quality CQ and resolution R.
The threshold values of these parameters, i.e., Q’(P’,CQ’,R’)
are adjusted by user of the service. For the experiments
we generated 7 different queries based on locations in our
dataset. In these experiments we evaluate spatial correlation,
i.e., single filtering and proposed approach of spatio-textual
correlation. Precision, recall and f-measure matrices are used
for evaluating the experiments. They are computed by:
N o.of releventselectedservices
P recisionqueryresult =
N o.of selectedservices
(4)
N o.of releventselectedservices
Recallqueryresult =
N o.of releventservices
(5)
2 · precision · recall
F − score = (6)
(precision + recall)
We have investigated that how precision and recall of the
query result varies by applying the textual and spatial filters.
For spatial correlation, we have conducted the experi-
ments with the values of r respectively in 7m, 14m and
21m. In this part of experiment we have ignored textual
correlation. For each r, we have obtained the total numbers
of services, relevant services and relevant selected services.
Similarly, for spatio-textual correlation, we conducted the
experiments with r’ in conjunction with spatial correlation.
For textual similarity, using previous research as reference
we have set the value of threshold θ = 0.5 [24]. We con-
ducted these experiments with three pairs of r and r’. Values
used for (r,r’) are (7,14), (14,21) and (21,28). For each pair
of (r,r’), we have obtained the total number of services and
relevant selected services. The results show that for the both
approaches r=7 gives gives optimal performance. Moreover,
the proposed approach of spatio-textual correlation shows
best performance with the highest f-score for all 3 pairs of
(r,r’). Therefore, overall the proposed approach of spatio-
textual correlation show better performance than the single
filter, i.e., spatial correlation. The results are depicted in Fig.
5(a),(b) and (c).
Fig. 5 - Spatial Correlation Vs. Spatio-Textual correlation
VII. C ONCLUSION
In conclusion, this paper proposes a social-sensor cloud
service selection framework based on spatio-textual corre-
lation, visual features and QoS parameters. The proposed
framework evaluates service selection in terms of spatial and
spatio-textual correlation. Experimental results show that
our approach is better than the single filtering approach.
In future, we plan to focus on social-sensor clouds services
indexing for fast service discovery and composition for scene
building and event analysis.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This publication was made possible by NPRP grant 9-224-
1-049 from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of
Qatar Foundation) and DP160103595 from the Australian
Research Council. The findings achieved herein are solely
the responsibility of the authors.
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