A Conceptual Service Discovery Architecture for Semantic Web Services in Dynamic Environments

Web Services technology is being used for increasingly different environments than it was designed for. To facilitate discovery of Web Services in dynamic environments, both service description and distribution of descriptions must be improved. Several research efforts target semantic description of services. However, Semantic Web Service discovery in peer-to-peer-like, dynamic environments where services and registries are transient cannot be based on current mechanisms for distribution of Web Service descriptions. Based on a set of generic requirements, we introduce a conceptual architecture that aims to solve many of the problems related to Semantic Web Service discovery in dynamic environments. The architecture is based on a distributed multi-registry topology and aliveness information. We present several research problems we have identified during our initial work on this architecture.