Distributed matchmaking and ranking of Web APIs exploiting descriptions from Web sources

Semantic Web service (SWS) technology promotes the definition of Web service descriptions with semantic annotations to better support Web service selection. Unfortunately, SWS descriptions tend to be huge and complex and their evaluation is characterized by limited scalability. The result is that very few descriptions exist in reality. Web service providers prefer to publish functional and non-functional properties (NFPs) of their RESTful services, also called Web APIs, by means of structured data (e.g., XML, JSON) or textual descriptions. In this paper we define an effective and efficient distributed matchmaking for Web API ranking based on: (i) techniques for the extraction of property descriptions from heterogeneous, dynamic and distributed information on the Web and (ii) a distributed architecture to improve the performance of the Web API matchmaking processes.