An Efficient Web Service Discovery Architecture

Abstract

There is been a continuous effort by the software developers to reduce cost and time to deliver the software and this has led to the advancements in service oriented paradigm. Organizations across all spectra have already deployed their main operations to the Web, which has brought about a fast growth of various Web services. This has dramatically increased the need to build a fundamental infrastructure for efficient deployment and access of the exponentially growing repository of Web services. Probably the most important aspect in dynamic web service access is the web service discovery. The challenge remains in handling and processing request queries and presenting the requester the most appropriate set of web service interfaces. Many approaches and frameworks have been proposed to discover web services. Some of the approaches assume that the requests are placed in SOAP compatible formats whereas some works are based on handling the plain text queries by their semantics while others focus on key word based query processing. We have tried to formulate an approach that uses the Principle of Compositionality of language to derive interface descriptions and aggregate or filter for their appropriateness. Going by lexical and syntactic structure of a language, a skeletally parsed corpus of a written piece of text has been used to resolve the plain text query. This paper also tries to propose an architecture based on x-SOA that the organizes the method of web service discovery in an efficient and structured manner using a intermediary, requester friendly layer called the Request Analyzer(abbreviated as RA) between the service provider and service requester via a service broker. We describe how the RA facilitates the processing of a plain text request query to finally being resolved to a most appropriate web service. We propose an algorithm for a complete cycle of web-service discovery. A cache based service broker approach has been proposed that consumes even lesser time towards discovery path. A reputation based mechanism has also been incorporated for keeping track of the trustworthiness and type of license of a web service being used and hence ensuring the authenticity for future use in terms of their past performances.