A Survey of Context Aware Web Service Discovery: From User's Perspective

Web service is one of the fundamental technologies in implementing Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based applications. One of the essential challenges in web service based applications is how to find a set of suitable web service candidates with regard to a user's requirement. Currently most web service discovery systems have constrains on the content and format of submitted web service request. Therefore, during the information transformation from a user's real web service need to formalized request, some useful information is lost implicitly or explicitly. To understand the user's intention as much as possible, a lot of approaches have been proposed among them context aware methods have shown promising result. In this paper, we present an overview of the field of context aware web service discovery and try to classify current generation of those approaches into different categories. This paper also describes limitations of current context awareness in web service discovery and discusses possible applications that can enhance the overall discovery performance.