Efficient Service Discovery Using Similarity-Distance-Based Relaxation

Web service discovery is the process of locating web services to satisfy the requirements of service requesters. It plays an important role in building loosely coupled service-oriented applications. Nowadays, although many service discovery mechanisms are available, a lot of efforts do not focus on linking actual business services in real world and most methods do not provide an appropriate relaxation mechanism. Therefore, this study proposes a systematic service discovery approach to address the above issues. The main features of the proposed approach include (1) retrieving services through multiple filters, including kernel property filter, provider constraint filter, and user constraint filter, (2) calculating service ranking scores based on QoS (Quality of Service) constraint values and setting of QoS importance rank, and (3) assisting users in locating appropriate services by using the proposed similarity-distance-based relaxation mechanism.