Context-based web service discovery framework with QoS considerations

Abstract

Hiking a relevant web service in the current environment full of various options is similar to looking for a needle in a haystack. The best possible web service is the one that completely fulfills the required functions while satisfying the QoS requested by a user. In this paper, we introduce a new context-based solution based on QoS (Quality of Service) exploiting both functional and non-functional user's requirements and providing the user ability to control and proceed the discovery of web services, i.e. the main aim of this work is to locate the appropriate web service correspondence with the context of the user. To this end, we present a two-stage web service discovery framework. The first stage is a functional matching approach that assesses the similarity across given sets of web services and provides relevant services according to the functional requirements of the user. After that and based on non-functional requirements representing the user's contexts and contexts of relevant services produced from the first stage, we compute the similarity degree between the contextual information of both of them. Based on the computed similarity, we return a set of recommended services that fulfill both functional and non-functional requirements according to user needs. To validate the proposed approach, a real dataset is used and the results show that our proposed approach can accurately provide services that a user needs.