Leveraging Web Services Discovery with Customizable Hybrid Matching

Improving web service discovery constitutes a vital step for making a reality the Service Oriented Computing (SOC) vision of dynamic service selection, composition and deployment. Matching allows for comparing user requests with descriptions of available service implementations, and sits at the heart of the service discovery process. This paper firstly evaluates the efficacy of several key similarity metrics for matching syntactic, semantic and structural information from service interface descriptions, using a uniform corpus of web services. Secondly, it experiments with a hybrid style of matching that allows for blending various matching approaches and makes them configurable to cater service discovery given domain-specific constraints and requirements. © 2006 Springer-Verlag.