Enhanced matching engine for improving the performance of semantic web service discovery

Web services are the means to realize the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm. One of the key tasks of the Web services is discovery also known as matchmaking. This is the act of locating suitable Web services to fulfill a specific goal and adding semantic descriptions to the Web services is the key to enabling an automated, intelligent discovery process. Current Semantic Web service discovery approaches are primarily classified into logic-based, non-logic-based and hybrid categories. An important challenge yet to be addressed by the current approaches is the use of the available constructs in Web service descriptions to achieve a better performance in matchmaking. Performance is defined in terms of precision and recall as well-known metrics in the information retrieval field. Moreover, when matchmaking a large number of Web services, maintaining a reasonable execution time becomes a crucial challenge. In this research, to address these challenges, a matching engine is proposed. The engine comprises a new logic-based and nonlogic- based matchmaker to improve the performance of Semantic Web service discovery. The proposed logic-based and non-logic-based matchmakers are also combined as a hybrid matchmaker for further improvement of performance. In addition, a pre-matching filter is used in the matching engine to enhance the execution time of matchmaking. The components of the matching engine were developed as prototypes and evaluated by benchmarking the results against data from the standard repository of Web services. The comparative evaluations in terms of performance and execution time highlighted the superiority of the proposed matching engine over the existing and prominent matchmakers. The proposed matching engine has been proven to enhance both the performance and execution time of the Semantic Web service discovery

Using information visualization techniques to support web service discovery

The increasing number of web services published over the Web highlights the need for an effective method for users to find appropriate web services. Existing web service discovery methods do not effectively aid a user in finding suitable web services. The current methods provide textual lists of web services that the user is required to explore and manually evaluate. Thus, these methods lead to time-consuming and ineffective web service discovery. The aim of this research was to investigate using information visualization (IV) techniques to effectively support web service discovery. The node-and-link network IV technique was selected as the most appropriate IV technique to visualize web service collections. A prototype, called SerViz, was developed as a tool for interactive visualization of web service collections incorporating the node-and-link IV technique and an alphabetical list-based technique. SerViz used the Programmable Web web service collection as the sample web service collection. A usability evaluation was conducted to compare these techniques. Ninety percent of participants preferred the network IV technique for visualizing web service collections. The network IV technique was also faster for browsing. Several usability problems were identified with the network IV technique. This motivated a need for implementing an alternative IV technique in SerViz. The node-and-link tree IV technique was selected as it was more structured than the network IV technique. A usability evaluation was conducted to compare the network and tree IV techniques. Participants slightly preferred the tree IV technique as the technique to visualize web service collections. The tree IV technique was faster for browsing the web service collection while the network IV technique was faster for searching and filtering. This research has determined that IV techniques can be used to effectively support web service discovery. Future work will involve using IV techniques to support collaborative web service discovery. Keywords: Web Service Discovery, Information Visualization, Web Service Collections, Information Visualization Techniques