Effective and flexible NFP-based ranking of web services

Abstract

Service discovery is a key activity to actually identify the Web services (WSs) to be invoked and composed. Since it is likely that more than one service fulfill a set of user requirements, some ranking mechanisms based on non-functional properties (NFPs) are needed to support automatic or semi-automatic selection. This paper introduces an approach to NFP-based ranking of WSs providing support for semantic mediation, consideration of expressive NFP descriptions both on provider and client side, and novel matching functions for handling either quantitative or qualitative NFPs. The approach has been implemented in a ranker that integrates reasoning techniques with algorithmic ones in order to overcome current and intrinsic limitations of semantic Web technologies and to provide algorithmic techniques with more flexibility. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, this paper presents the first experimental results related to NFP-based ranking of WSs considering a significant number of expressive NFP descriptions, showing the effectiveness of the approach. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.