Semantically Enhanced Discovery of Heterogeneous Services

Industrial application development approaches are striving for solutions that promote the rapid development of flexible and adaptable systems and the exploitation of legacy systems and resources. The Service-oriented Development (SOD) paradigm, a current trend in software development, could be beneficial to industrial application development approaches. However, the heterogeneity in existing standards and protocols for the discovery of the various service types is an obstacle for the use of SOD in industry. This paper addresses this issue by proposing a solution that supports the unified discovery of heterogeneous services and thus supporting the use of SOD in industry. The proposed solution comprises a generic service model (GeSMO), which facilitates the specification of heterogeneous services, a query language called Unified Service Query Language (USQL), based on GeSMO, which facilitates the unified discovery of heterogeneous services within heterogeneous service registries and a query engine called USQL Engine, that enables the execution of queries described in terms of the USQL, upon heterogeneous service registries.