Enhanced Web Service Matchmaking: A Quality of Service Approach

With the increasing number of Web services, the Semantic Web research community is moving toward enhancing procedures so that clients may effectively discover appropriate Web services that maximally satisfy not only functional but also non-functional requirements. Using purely syntactic approaches to discover Web services has limited efficiency. Therefore, semantic matchmaking registries can play an important role in providing better results. However, most of the semantic registries make decisions based on only functional requirements. Due to the proliferation of Web services that have similar functionality, there is a need to further filter Web services according to Quality of Service (QoS) specifications. This work introduces a rich QoS ontology inspired from the World Wide Web Consortium that defines relationships among QoS attributes. The QoS attributes defined here are mainly used to define network related characteristics. However, the work can be extended by defining QoS ontologies for other domains. Additionally, we extend the test collection OWLS-TC according to the QoS ontology. The extension is intended to integrate quantified values for QoS attributes into Web service descriptions. A matchmaking algorithm based on similarity measurements is presented. Moreover, deterministic and adaptive parameter control techniques are introduced to guide the requester, when needed, to adjust QoS specifications so better similarity can be achieved. Parameter control algorithms integrate Pellet, an OWL reasoner, to reason about dependencies among QoS concepts in the QoS ontology.