Geospatial Web Service Sub-chain Ranking and Recommendation

Nowadays, an increasing number of geospatial Web services (GWSs) are built and being available on the Web for the accessibility and processing of geospatial information. Given the requirement specified by certain users, normally a composition of GWSs, rather than a single GWS, can fulfill this requirement. Consequently, retrieving and recommending sub-chains of possible service invocations is an important research challenge. Leveraging the semantic similarity between the name and text description of parameters, the degree that represents the invocation possibility between operations in GWSs is calculated. The service network model is constructed to capture the possible invocations between operations. Given a user´s requirement which is represented in terms of the initial and ending operations, possible sub-chains of operations are retrieved, ranked and recommended. Thereafter, the user can select the most appropriate sub-chain with respect to her specific requirement. The evaluation result based on real GWSs set shows that our technique is applicable in real applications.