A Method for Semantically Enhancing the Service Discovery Capabilities of UDDI

The promise of dynamic selection of business services and automatic integration of applications written to Web Services standards is yet to be realized. This is partially attributable to the lack of semantics in the current Web Service standards. While efforts to develop markup languages , such as DAML-S, for semantic Web Services are a step in the right direction, more work needs to be done to investigate their applicability in an industry setting. In this work, we expand on previous work done on combining the semantic web with UDDI [Paolucci 2002-2], by presenting a method to improve the effectiveness of service discovery in UDDI, an industry initiated Web Service directory. Our contributions are three fold: First, we present an extension to the UDDI inquiry API specification to enable requesters to specify the required capabilities of a service. Second, we enhance the service discovery of UDDI by performing semantic matching and automatic service composition using planning algorithms . Third, we propose to present these service compositions in a business process execution language called BPEL4WS, an industry standard, to enable automatic execution of the services that are composed. We believe that our approach presents a viable method for significantly enhancing the automatic service discovery and execution of Web Services.