A Service Search Engine for the Industrial Digital Ecosystems

Digital ecosystem (DE) is comprised of heterogeneous and distributed species which can play the dual role of service provider and service requester. Nowadays, DE lacks semantic search support, which means it cannot provide a reliable and trustworthy link between service providers and service requesters. To solve this issue, we design a conceptual framework of a service-ontology-based semantic service search engine. Apart from the function of service search with a novel search model, this framework also provides a quality-of-services-based service evaluation and ranking methodology. To evaluate the feasibility of our framework, we implement a prototype in the transport service domain, and compare the performance of the search model with three traditional information retrieval models. The conclusion to this evaluation and suggestions for future works are provided in the final section.