Flexible interface matching for Web-service discovery

The Web-services stack of standards is designed to support the reuse and interoperation of software components on the Web. A critical step, to that end, is service discovery, i.e., the identification of existing Web services that can potentially be used in the context of a new Web application. UDDI, the standard API for publishing Web-services specifications, provides a simple browsing-by-business-category mechanism for developers to review and select published services. In our work, we have developed a flexible service discovery method, for identifying potentially useful services and assessing their relevance to the task at hand. Given a textual description of the desired service, a traditional information-retrieval method is used to identify the most similar service description files, and to order them according to their similarity. Next, given this set of likely candidates and a (potentially partial) specification of the desired service behavior, a structure-matching step further refines and assesses the quality of the candidate service set. In this paper, we describe and experimentally evaluate our Web-service discovery process.