PYRAMID-S: a scalable infrastructure for semantic Web service publication and discovery

Web services enhance current Web functionality by altering its nature from document to service-oriented. As the number of Web services increases, it becomes increasingly important to provide a scalable infrastructure of registries that allows both developers and end-users to perform discovery of semantic Web enabled services. The discovery of services needs to be based on QoS characteristics in order to enable result ranking and service selection. Current Web service publication and discovery mechanisms, such as UDDI, either address these issues partially or not at all. In this paper, we build on the enabling technologies of Web services, peer-to-peer and semantic Web in an attempt to address all these important dimensions of service publication and discovery. More specifically, we use a hybrid peer-to-peer topology to organize registries based on domains. In such a model, each registry retains its autonomy, meaning that it can use the publication and discovery mechanisms as well as the ontology of its choice.