Examining Usage Protocols for Service Discovery

To date, research on web-service discovery has followed the tradition of signature matching based on the interface description captured in WSDL. WSDL specifications, however, can be information poor, with basic data types, and unintuitive identifiers for data, messages and operations. The nature of the usage of the WSDL component in the context of a BPEL composition can be an extremely useful source of information in the context of service discovery. In this paper, we discuss our method for service discovery based on both interface and usage matching, exploiting the information captured in the WSDL and BPEL specifications. Our approach views both WSDL and BPEL as hierarchical structures and uses tree alignment to compare them. We illustrate our method with an example scenario.