A united approach to discover multimedia Web services

Web services technology has been making steady progress since its initial emergence in the beginning of this century. Since multimedia data have become ubiquitous on the Internet, it is not surprising that multimedia Web services have been receiving attention by the Web services community. On the Web services platform, UDDI is the current de facto service discovery approach. However, researchers have noticed that the UDDI business model has not really achieved its designated goal. We have proposed an approach to complement UDDI with WSIL in the Web services discovery. The idea behind Unified Web Service Discovery (UWSD) is to use both the brokering-based approach and the trust-based approach in Web services discovery. Further, UWSD is designed for handling multimedia service discovery with specific QoS considerations. The services discovered by UWSD are separated into two groups. The first group contains a relatively limited number of services that are trustworthy and guaranteed. The second group contains a large number of services, but the content is not guaranteed to be trustworthy. A markup language is also designed to facilitate the discovery process. We believe that the UWSD approach can better meet the current demand of multimedia Web services discovery.