Improving Web Service descriptions for effective service discovery

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is a new paradigm that replaces the traditional way to develop distributed software with a combination of discovery, engagement and reuse of third-party services. Web Service technologies are currently the most adopted alternative for implementing the SOC paradigm. However, Web Service discovery presents many challenges that, in the end, hinder service reuse. This paper reports frequent practices present in a body of public services that attempt to prevent the discovery of any service. In addition, we have studied how to solve the discoverability problems that these bad practices cause. Accordingly, this paper presents a novel catalog of eight Web Service discoverability anti-patterns. We conducted a comparative analysis of the retrieval effectiveness of three discovery systems by using the original body of Web Services versus their corrected version. This experiment shows that the removal of the identified anti-patterns eases the discovery process by allowing the employed discovery systems to rank more relevant services before non-relevant ones, with the same queries. Moreover, we conducted a survey to collect the opinions from 26 individuals about whether the improved descriptions are more intelligible than the original ones. This experiment provides more evidence of the importance of correcting the observed problems.