Interface- and Usage-aware Service Discovery

To date, research on web-service discovery has followed the traditional component-discovery methodology and has examined signature matching, specification matching and information retrieval approaches, based on the interface description and documentation captured in WSDL. WSDL specifications, however, can be information poor, with standard data types, unintuitive identifiers for data, messages and operations and little naturallanguage documentation. The nature of the usage of the WSDL elements 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 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 in order to assess their similarity and to recognize the correspondences between their elements. We illustrate our method with two example scenarios.