WSXplorer: Searching for desired web services

Abstract

With the rapid development of e-commerce over Internet, web services have attracted much attention in recent years. Nowadays, enterprises are able to outsource their internal business processes as services and make them accessible via the Web. Then they can dynamically combine individual services to provide new value-added services. A main problem that remains is how to discover desired web services. In this paper, we propose WSXplorer, a novel scheme for identifying potentially relevant web services given a textual description of services. In particular, we propose a new schema matching algorithm for supporting web-service operations matching. The matching algorithm catches not only structures, but even better semantic information of schemas. Based on service operations matching, the concept of attribute closure is introduced to identify associations between web-service operations. We also propose a ranking strategy to satisfy a user's top-k requirements. Experimental evaluation shows that our approach can achieve high precision and recall ratio. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.