Web Service Matching by Ontology Instance Categorization

Identifying similar Web services is becoming increasingly important to ensure the success of dynamically integrated Web-service-based applications. We propose a categorization-based scheme to match equivalent Web services that can operate on heterogeneous domain ontologies. Given the upper ontology for services and domain ontologies, our service matching scheme determines whether a given Web service is a possible replacement using a categorization utility called OnExCat. OnExCat categorizes ontology instances extracted from the service descriptions by a probabilistic categorization measurement that incorporates the concept relationships in the upper ontology for services. In addition to tackling the issue of heterogeneity of domain ontology in service descriptions using categorization, our matching scheme also adapts itself by enhancing the known ontologies with newly discovered ontology instances. Experiments on service matching using our matching scheme based on the OnExCat utility have been performed with promising results, a correct matching rate of over 85%.