Entity-Centric Search for Enterprise Services

The consumption of APIs, such as Enterprise Services (ESs) in an enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture (eSOA), has largely been a task for experienced developers. With the rapidly growing number of such (Web)APIs, users with little or no experience in a given API face the problem of finding relevant API operations – e.g., mashups developers. However, building an effective search has been a challenge: Information Retrieval (IR) methods struggle with the brevity of text in API descriptions, whereas semantic search technologies require domain ontologies and formal queries. Motivated by the search behavior of users, we propose an iterative keyword search based on entities. The entities are part of a knowledge base, whose content stems from model-driven engineering. We implemented our approach and conducted a user study showing significant improvements in search effectiveness.