Web Service Description, Discovery And Selection Based On Ontology

Web services are a new distributed technology that enables software systems developed in multiple languages or platform environments to seamlessly interact with each other through the Internet. It is also the corner stone in the Service Oriented Architecture due to its loose-coupling feature. Meanwhile, the web services technology has also brought lots of business chances to enterprises. However, there are still some hard issues to be solved in the implementations of web services, such as how to describe web services more accurately, how to search the required web services more quickly, and how to select the most suitable web services among the candidate services more efficiently.In this dissertation, the ontology technology is utilized to describe the semantics of web services and their functions. Based on the semantic descriptions, we present a framework for discovering web services. In this framework, business requirements and web services are described formally, and the qualified web services are discovered through ontology reasoning. In addition, how to discover web services in a multi-ontology environment is also investigated. The factors considered in the web services selection procedure include users'feedback, users'expectation and enterprise credit. The QoS (quality of service) issue is properly solved as well. A new model is proposed to calculate the values of the service related QoS metrics and the QoS values of the entire web services. With this model, the most suitable web services can be effectively selected.