Web services discovery and rank: An information retrieval approach

With the rapid development of e-commerce over the internet, web services have attracted much attention in recent years. Nowadays, enterprises are able to outsource their internal business processes as services and make them accessible via the Web. They can then dynamically combine individual services to provide new value-added services. A main problem that remains is how to discover desired web services. In this paper, we propose a novel IR-Style mechanism for discovering and ranking web services automatically, given a textual description of desired services. In particular, we introduce the notion of preference degree for web services and then we define service relevance and service importance as two desired properties for measuring the preference degree. Furthermore, various algorithms are given for computing the relevance and importance of services, respectively. At the same time, we also develop a new schema tree matching algorithm to measure service connectivity, which is a novel metric to evaluate the importance of services. Experimental results show the proposed IR-style search strategy is efficient and practical.