Reformulating User's Queries for Intentional Services Discovery Using an Ontology-Based Approach

The increasing growth in popularity of Web services has made it difficult for business users to fully benefit from these services if they remain specified at the software level. The introduction of intentional services is an alternative for bridging the gap between low level, technical software-service descriptions and high level, strategic expressions of business needs for services. The current Web services technology based on UDDI and WSDL does not reflect this "business intention", and therefore fails to address the problem of matching between capabilities of services and business user needs. The work presented in this paper is built on earlier research in which the Intentional Services Model (ISM) has been developed for modeling and describing services in business terms. In this paper, we present an ontological based solution to help matching user's needs formulated in business terms as goals with the intentions of services published in an extended registry. The idea is simple: reformulating the user queries using ontologies to enrich them with more concepts, which will increase the possibility of matching relevant intentional services that could satisfy user's business needs.