ERGOT: A Semantic-Based System for Service Discovery in Distributed Infrastructures

The increasing number of available online services demands distributed architectures to promote scalability as well as semantics to enable their precise and efficient retrieval. Two common approaches toward this goal are Semantic Overlay Networks (SONs) and Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) with semantic extensions. This paper presents ERGOT, a system that combines DHTs and SONs to enable semantic-based service discovery in distributed infrastructures such as Grids and Clouds. ERGOT takes advantage of semantic annotations that enrich service specifications in two ways: (i) services are advertised in the DHT on the basis of their annotations, thus allowing to establish a SON among service providers, (ii) annotations enable semantic-based service matchmaking, using a novel similarity measure between service requests and descriptions. Experimental evaluations confirmed the efficiency of ERGOT in terms of accuracy of search and network traffic.