A Semantic-Based Web Service Registry Filtering Mechanism

One of the major challenges of Service-Oriented Computing (SoC) paradigm is the Web service discovery, also known as matchmaking. Yet the mechanisms used to match Web services can be improved. However, considering the semantics of the Web service descriptions is a must for automating the process of discovery Web services. Current Web service matchmaking approaches check the capabilities of the requested Web service against the capabilities of all advertised Web service advertisements in the registry. As the number of advertised Web services in the registry can be huge, the process of checking all advertised Web services against a single client query can be time consuming. In this paper, we propose a semantic-based Web service registry filtering mechanism that takes the responsibility of narrowing down the number of Web service descriptions to be checked in detail to the number of only the relevant advertisements to the client request. Our proposed filtering mechanism picks the advertisements that are relevant to the client request and ignore, from an early stage and before checking the details of the descriptions, the advertisements that are not able to satisfy the client request. We also propose an extension to Web Ontology Language for Services (OWL-S). With this extension, filtering the Web service registry based on the semantics of the available descriptions is possible.