A caching mechanism for Semantic Web service discovery

Abstract

The discovery of suitable Web services for a given task is one of the central operations in Service-oriented Architectures (SOA), and research on Semantic Web services (SWS) aims at automating this step. For the large amount of available Web services that can be expected in real-world settings, the computational costs of automated discovery based on semantic matchmaking become important. To make a discovery engine a reliable software component, we must thus aim at minimizing both the mean and the variance of the duration of the discovery task. For this, we present an extension for discovery engines in SWS environments that exploits structural knowledge and previous discovery results for reducing the search space of consequent discovery operations. Our prototype implementation shows significant improvements when applied to the Stanford SWS Challenge scenario and dataset. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.