Effective web service description and dynamic discovery mechanism based on the functional semantics

Abstract

The service-oriented architecture (SOA) has become a popular architecture for modern distributed systems. Web services form one of the central technologies to realise service-oriented architecture. The ability to discover, select and compose inter-organisational and heterogeneous services available on the web at runtime to facilitate application reuse is an interesting problem in web services. The efficient and effective mechanism for discovery, selection and composition of web services, based on the requester’s complex functional and non-functional requirements is still an issue of open research. The research work described in this paper, mainly aims at discovery mechanism for web services. To realise the dynamic lookup mechanism, the broker-based architecture is defined for web services which is a crux of the web service discovery mechanism. This paper defines functional semantics which describe web service operation functionality in a natural form using action and object(s). A tree structure is proposed for quick discovery which is a compact representation of advertised web services (service registry) and their operations. The use of functional semantics and a tree structure representation of web services improve the effectiveness of the web service description and discovery mechanism.