Web Service Discovery Methods and Techniques: A Review

Abstract

Web Services are independent software systems which offer machine-to-machine interactions over the Internet to achieve well-described operations. With the advent of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web Services have gained tremendous popularity. As the number of Web Services is increased, finding the best service according to users requirements becomes a challenge. The Semantic Web Service discovery is the process of finding the most suitable service that satisfies the user request. A number of approaches to Web Service discovery have been proposed. In this paper, we classify them and determine the advantages and disadvantages of each group, to help researchers to implement a new or to select the most appropriate existing approach for Semantic Web Service discovery. We, also, provide a taxonomy which categorizes Web Service discovery systems from different points of view. There are three different views, namely, architectural view, automation view and matchmaking view. We focus on the matchmaking view which is further divided into semantic-based, syntax-based and context-aware. We explain each sub-group of it in detail, and then subsequently compare the sub-groups in terms of their merits and drawbacks.