Enriching Descriptions for Public Web Services Using Information Captured from Related Web Pages on the Internet

Abstract

With the popularization of Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) and web services technology, more and more developers have become accustomed to searching and utilizing the public web services on the Internet. In order to identify, understand, and utilize needed web services efficiently, service consumers need useful descriptions of the web services. However, existing methods for services discovery could not provide enough descriptions for web services, because they usually try to get descriptions only from services’ WSDL files. But according to our investigation, currently a large number of web services do not contain enough available description information in their WSDL files. So, enriching descriptions for public web services using the information outside of WSDL files becomes a great challenge. In this paper, we propose an approach to enrich descriptions for public web services using the information captured from services’ related web pages on the Internet. Using our approach, considerable descriptions for web services could be enriched. An experimental study based on the real data acquired from the Internet has been carried out to verify the applicability of our approach.