Searching Services "on the Web": A Public Web Services Discovery Approach

Abstract

With the surge of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web services, service discovery has become increasingly crucial. Public Web services that are available "on the Web" provide unlimited values for a great number of online service consumers and developers. However, the public UDDI Business Registry - the primary service discovery mechanism over the Internet - has been shut down permanently since 2006. This has raised serious problems for public Web services discovery. In this paper, we propose a WSDL-based public Web service discovery approach. It provides a simple-to-use yet effective Web service discovery mechanism that can retrieve relevant Web services directly from the Internet to suffice various requirements. The major contributions of this paper include: (1) a review on the state-of-the-art WSDL-based Web services discovery approaches; (2) the unique WSDL crawling and manipulation algorithms catering for the Vector Space Model, and (3) a proof-of-concept prototype - an online Web services search engine - based on the proposed approach.