Incollection,
Discovery: Identifying Relevant Services
Semantic Web Services: Concepts, Technologies, and Applications, chapter 8, (2007)
DOI: 10.1007/3-540-70894-4_8
Abstract
Web Services expose machine-processable interfaces that provide flexible access to their functionality in network environments for realising application integration scenarios. As any other web resource, it is desirable to locate and get access to Web Services by specifying relevant properties in the form of a request, similar to how websites are located via search engines. When annotated with semantic information about their functionality, Web Services can be located based on their actual capabilities rather than on their interfaces only. Discovery is the task of locating Web Services by means of their semantic annotations. This typically involves matching of semantic capability descriptions for requested service against those for advertised services. This chapter discusses the notion of discovery of services in the Semantic Web. It gives an overview on approaches to realise discovery by different matching techniques and elaborates on matching of service annotations within the description logic formalism. This particular approach is illustrated by an example taken from the logistics domain.
