Discovery of Web Services in a Multi-Ontology and Federated Registry Environment

The potential of a large-scale growth of private and semi-private registries is creating the need for an infrastructure that can support discovery and publication over a group of autonomous registries. Recent versions of UDDI have made changes to accommodate interactions between distributed registries. In this paper, we discuss an ontology-based Web service discovery infrastructure (METEOR-S Web Service Discovery Infrastructure), to provide access to registries that are divided based on business domains and grouped into federations. In addition, we discuss how Web service discovery is carried out within a federation. We provide a novel discovery algorithm, which addresses semantic heterogeneity with respect to multiple ontologies from the same domain. We also show through preliminary results of our empirical evaluation that even when services are annotated with different ontologies, our algorithm is able to find good matches and eliminate false matches by considering the context and the coverage information of the annotated concepts.