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A structural-semantic web service selection approach to improve retrievability of web services

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Abstract

Service-Oriented Computing promotes building applications by consuming and reusing Web Services. However, the selection of adequate Web Services given a client application is still a major challenge. The effort of assessing and adapting candidate services could be overwhelming due to the “impedance” of Web Service interfaces expected by clients versus the actual interfaces of retrieved Web Services. In this work, we present a novel structural-semantic approach to help developers in the retrieval and selection of services from a service registry. The approach is based on a comprehensive structural scheme for service Interface Compatibility analysis, and WordNet as the semantic support to assess identifiers of operations and parameters. We also empirically analyze, compare and contrast the performance of three service selection methods: a pure structural approach, a pure semantic approach, and the structural-semantic (hybrid) approach proposed in this work. The experimental analysis was performed with two data-sets of real-world Web Services and a service discovery support already published in the literature. Results show that our hybrid service selection approach improved effectiveness in terms of retrievability of Web Services compared to the other approaches.

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Notes

  1. Web Service Description Language - http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl

  2. http://membrane-soa.org/soa-model-doc/1.4/java-api/parse-wsdl-java-api.htm

  3. http://axis.apache.org/axis2/java/core/

  4. http://easywsdl.com/

  5. http://microformats.org/

  6. https://www.w3.org/RDF/

  7. Ontology Web Language for Services

  8. Web Service Modeling Ontology

  9. http://grid.deis.unical.it/similarity

  10. http://lucene.apache.org

  11. http://projects.csail.mit.edu/jwi/

  12. https://github.com/paul-hammant/paranamer

  13. http://www.mashape.com

  14. http://code.google.com/p/querymutator/

  15. http://www.refactoring.com/catalog/introduceParameterObject.html

  16. http://www.refactoring.com/catalog/encapsulateDowncast.html

  17. http://martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/layerSupertype.html

  18. https://goo.gl/qY5dkb

  19. https://goo.gl/ClZ4ko

  20. https://market.mashape.com/

  21. https://goo.gl/eSl6ZW

  22. http://code.google.com/p/querymutator/

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by grants ANPCyT PICT 2012-0045 and UNCo–Reuse (04-F001). We would like to thank to the anonymous reviewers that contributed to improve the quality of this work with their helpful comments. Also, to Ph.D. Giuseppe Pirró who gently provided the articles and the JWSL library that depict and implement the semantic similarity metric, respectively. Finally, we thank to student Marcos Trotti for the implementation of the query mutator.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. GiiSCo Research Group, Faculty of Informatics, Universidad Nacional del Comahue (UNComa), Buenos Aires, 1400, Neuquen, Argentina

    Martin Garriga, Alan De Renzis, Andres Flores & Alejandra Cechich

  2. ISISTAN Research Institute, Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires (UNPCBA), Tandil, Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Ignacio Lizarralde, Cristian Mateos & Alejandro Zunino

  3. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, (CONICET), Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Martin Garriga, Alan De Renzis, Ignacio Lizarralde, Andres Flores, Cristian Mateos & Alejandro Zunino

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  1. Martin Garriga
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Correspondence to Martin Garriga.

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Garriga, M., Renzis, A.D., Lizarralde, I. et al. A structural-semantic web service selection approach to improve retrievability of web services. Inf Syst Front 20, 1319–1344 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-016-9731-1

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