A semantic web services discovery algorithm based on QoS ontology

Abstract

Discovery of web services has gained great research attention due to great numbers of web services. However, many functionally-equivalent web services are returned by semantic web services registry. So it is necessary to rank the web services which have similar functionality. We often uses Quality of Service (QoS) to filter the semantic web services discovery results based on user constraints of QoS descriptions. But different service providers and petitioners may use different QoS concepts and measurement methods for describing service quality. This leads to the issues of semantic interoperability of QoS. In this paper, we firstly analyze the classes, attributes and relationships from QoS vocabulary, then we design and build a general and flexible QoS ontology to support web services non-functional requirements(NFRs). Finally, we propose a semantic web services discovery algorithm based on QoS ontology. The algorithm supports the automatic discovery of web services and it can improve the efficiency for users to find the best services. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.