A semantic and QoS-aware broker for service discovery

As the Web is increasingly used not only to find answers to specific information needs but also to carry out various tasks by the means of Web services, enhancing the capabilities of current Web search engines with effective and efficient techniques for Web service discovery becomes an important issue. In this paper, we propose a semantic and QoS-aware broker, namely SemQoS, that enables users to discover Web services based on both functional and non-functional criteria. The SemQoS broker relies on a semantic canonical description meta-model that allows describing services in terms of functional and non-functional properties. First, SemQoS discovery approach selects a set of services matching a discovery query with different degrees of approximate matching. The approach relies on deductive reasoning to relax the discovery query's constraints based on semantic service descriptions and domain knowledge. As a second step, the SemQoS broker refines the set of selected services to generate a set of service clusters based on their QoS attributes values. This step allows to prune the search space of a discovery query and determine the best sub-set (cluster) of Web services satisfying user's constraints. We evaluate our approach experimentally using a real Web services dataset. Copyright © 2012, Australian Computer Society Inc.