An Approach of Service Discovery Based on Service Goal Clustering

The increasing amount of services published on the Web makes it difficult to discover relevant services for users. Unlike the SOAP-based services that are described by structural WSDL documents, RESTful services, the most popular type of services, are mainly described using short texts. The keyword-based discovery technology for RESTful services adopted by existing service registries is insufficient to obtain accurate services according to user requirements. Moreover, it remains a difficult task for users to specify queries that perfectly reflect their requirements due to the lack of knowledge of their expected service functionalities. In this paper, we propose a goal-oriented service discovery approach, which aims to obtain accurate RESTful services for user functional goals. The approach first groups existing services into clusters using topic models. It then clusters the service goals extracted from the textual descriptions of services by leveraging the topic model trained for services. Based on the service goal clusters, our approach can help users refine their initial queries by recommending similar service goals. Finally, relevant services are obtained by matching the service goals selected by users with those of existing services. Experiments conducted on a real-world service dataset crawled from ProgrammableWeb show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.