Exploiting Metrics for Similarity-Based Semantic Web Service Discovery

Semantic Web services (SWS) aim at the automated discovery and orchestration of Web services on the basis of comprehensive, machine-interpretable semantic descriptions. However, heterogeneities between distinct SWS representations pose strong limitations w.r.t. interoperability and reusability. Hence, semantic level mediation, i.e. mediation between concurrent semantic representations, is a key requirement to allow SWS matchmaking algorithms to compare capabilities of distinct SWS. In that, semantic level mediation requires to identify similarities across distinct SWS representations. Since current approaches to mediate between distinct service annotations rely either on manual one-to-one mappings or on semi-automatic mappings based on the exploitation of linguistic or structural similarities, these are perceived to be costly and error-prone. We propose a mediation approach enabling the implicit representation of similarities across distinct SWS by grounding these in so-called mediation spaces (MS). Given a set of SWS and their respective MS grounding, a general-purpose mediator automatically computes similarities to identify the most appropriate SWS for a given request. A prototypical application illustrates our approach.