Web Service Discovery Using Lexical and Semantic Query Expansion

Web service discovery is the process of locating web services to satisfy the requirements of service requesters, and as such, plays an important role to realize business-to-business interoperability. Today, many service discovery mechanisms are available, roughly classified into two categories: text-based service retrieval and ontology-based service matching. However, both kinds of service discovery approaches have their limitations in finding out suitable web services for users. Text-based approaches cannot reflect the semantics of the service capability. Ontology-based approaches are likely infeasible and non-scalable since service providers need to spend considerable efforts to annotate the service descriptions. This study proposes an approach to searching for web services, called LS3 (Lexical and Semantic Service Search) architecture. This proposed approach includes two main sub processes: query expansion and service ranking to enable the retrieval of relevant web services during the discovery process by considering lexical similarity and semantic similarity.