Enhancing the Discovery of Web Services: A Keyword-oriented Multiontology Reconciliation

The success of Web Services as a tool to decouple and distribute different processes is beyond any doubt. On the one hand, their distributed nature makes them perfect to deploy our applications in a network. On the other hand, the service abstraction provides an easy way to develop large scale solutions by using other’s software components. However, to reach the full potential of Web Services, the need for an accurate search approach arises. Semantic ones use ontologies to describe what services do, but, what does happen when providers and requesters of services do not use the same ontologies, i.e., the same semantic vocabulary? In this paper, we propose an approach to enhance the discovery of Web Services based on the semantic reconciliation of providers and requesters before the discovery process itself. Our system reuses and integrates ontological information extracted from several online pools of ontologies to make possible to: 1) add semantics easily to existing non-semantic services; and, 2) perform a semantic keywordbased search independently of the ontologies used by the provider. Thus, our proposal bridges the semantic gap between requesters and providers.