Identifying Client Goals for Web Service Discovery

Web service discovery has become a daunting task primarily due to its inability for allowing clients to articulate proper service search queries. Improving the quality of service search results could not be achieved unless we determine ways for correctly identifying Web service query goals. In this paper, we identify client goals when performing a Web service search. As part of this work, we introduce the concept of Quality of Web Service (QWS) for our quality-driven discovery mechanism. We determine that client goals in service discovery can be defined as exploratory or informational. We use this information to demonstrate how the knowledge of client goals can become beneficial in improving the way clients conduct service search queries. Results from our experiments are intriguing and show that the performance of informational service queries in terms of precision improve the querying process by 36.26% and 40.39% when compared to Google´s PageRank and Yahoo, respectively. We further use our findings to provide insights on improving the service retrieval process.