Similarity Search for Web Services

Abstract

This chapter proposes a set of similarity search primitives for Web service operations, and describes algorithms for effectively implementing the searches. Web services are loosely coupled software components, published, located, and invoked across the Web. The growing number of Web services available within an organization and on the Web raises a new and challenging search problem—locating desired Web services. Traditional keyword search is insufficient in this context—the specific types of queries users require are not captured, the very small text fragments in Web services are unsuitable for keyword search, and the underlying structure and semantics of the Web services are not exploited. The chapter describes the algorithms underlying the Woogle search engine for Web services. Woogle supports similarity search for Web services such as finding similar Web-service operations and finding operations that compose with a given one. The novel techniques are described to support these types of searches and investigations on a collection of over 1500 Web-service operations that shows the high recall and precision of the algorithms.