Meaningful Service Classifications for Flexible Service Descriptions

We present a formal underpinning for Web service classes by viewing them as a set of services that fulfill a logical combination of constraints on functional and non-functional properties. A hierarchy of service classes is automatically derived by their formal definition and can be exploited for an efficient service retrieval. In addition, we show in this paper how service classes can be used (i) to create service descriptions without specifying precise property values and (ii) to create service requests that can use service classes to express ranges of desired property values.