A Novel Approach for Service Capabilities Representation Based on Statistical Study on WSDL

Web services (WS) are becoming more and more popular nowadays and service-oriented architecture (SOA) have been widely used in the construction of information systems. But most of the SOA applications are not brand new and usually evolved from legacy systems. Our research group is building a service identification framework used for the SOA reengineering of existing large-scale information applications. Service capabilities have become an important issue we care about which are the actions performed or the information delivered by a service. But the semantic description for service capabilities has not been fully addressed in the current approach. In this paper, we analyze the contributions and limitations of current approach. In order to find the practical features of existing web services, we conducted a statistical study on more than four hundred WSDL documents collected from XMethods.net, Amazon and Google. Then we propose a new approach for Semantic Web Services description. Service capabilities are represented by informative entities and standard actions are specified for each informative entity.