Towards Practical Semantic Web Service Discovery

Service orientation is a promising paradigm for offering and consuming functionalities within and across organizations. Ever increasing acceptance of service oriented architectures in combination with the acceptance of the Web as a platform for carrying out electronic business triggers a need for automated methods to find appropriate Web services. Various formalisms for discovery of semantically described services with varying expressivity and complexity have been proposed in the past. However, they are difficult to use since they apply the same formalisms to service descriptions and requests. Furthermore, an intersection-based matchmaking is insufficient to ensure applicability of Web services for a given request. In this paper we show that, although most of prior approaches provide a formal semantics, their pragmatics to describe requests is improper since it differs from the user intention. We introduce distinct formalisms to describe functionalities and service requests. We also provide the formal underpinning and implementation of a matching algorithm.