Enhanced Service Discovery via Shared Context in a Distributed Architecture

The objective of this paper is to demonstrate that sharing the vocabulary for service description enhances the service discovery mechanism. The proposed solution is a distributed architecture for enhanced context-aware web services. The starting point is a motivation scenario in which university students are trying to share a solution about a specific problem in a campus environment. The proposed solution includes an ontology-based context model for describing service vocabulary. This model is shared among users to facilitate the description of their petitions. The Devices Profile for Web Services (DPWS) was integrated in the architecture as a framework for sending, describing and discovering web services. The adopted validation methodology consisted in comparing scenarios with the context ontology as vocabulary source and others that use synonyms from Word net. A series of discrete-event simulations were set up by specifying performance metrics related to the discovery mechanism, control parameters and user behavior models. The results have shown that using the context ontology enhances the discovery ratio as well as the mean discovered services per request.