Enabling Rich Discovery of Web Services by Projecting Weak Semantics from Structural Specifications

Although we would prefer using defined ontologies that express the domains and specifications of web services, and thus more easily discover and compose these, we know that in the mainstream world represented by the US Department of Defense we will not have those ontologies available soon. In the meantime we have to ensure a transition from structural to semantic methods, including web service discovery methods. In this paper, we are proposing a different approach for dynamic web service discovery that takes advantage of the structure inherent in web services that are defined by WSDL documents. Since the structure is usually based on XML Schema, there is enough information present in these documents to develop a broadly applicable approach. Furthermore, if a consistent and detailed naming convention of schema artifacts is followed, then discovery can be made more precise. This paper describes our approach for projecting weak semantics from structural information for discovery of web services.