Title: A semantic matching engine for web service composition

Authors: Ahmed Abid; Mohsen Rouached; Nizar Messai; Mohamed Abid; Thomas Devogele

Addresses: LI Laboratory, Francois Rabelais University, 64, Avenue Jean Portalis, 37200 TOURS, France ' Sultan Qaboos University, P.O. Box 20, AlKhod, PC: 123, Muscat, Oman ' LI Laboratory, Francois Rabelais University, 64, Avenue Jean Portalis, 37200 TOURS, France ' CES Research Unit, National School of Engineers of Sfax, P.O. Box 1173, 3000, Sfax, Tunisia ' LI Laboratory, Francois Rabelais University, 64, Avenue Jean Portalis, 37200 TOURS, France

Abstract: One of the main assets of service-orientation is composition, which consists of developing higher-level services by re-using well-known functionality provided by other services in a low-cost and rapid development process. However, considerable differences on structural, semantic and technical levels along with the growing number of available web services makes their discovery a significant challenging task. Therefore, services compatibility is an essential pre-requisite to service composition. Measuring the similarity of services is an important and valuable task to get useful information about their compatibility. Similarity measure can be considered as an optimisation step before composing services since it enables to reduce the search time by functionally classifying similar services. This paper presents a practical approach to measure the similarity of web services. Both semantic and syntactic descriptions are integrated through specific techniques for computing similarity measures between services. Formal concept analysis (FCA) is then used to classify web services into concept lattices, and therefore generate a hierarchy of classes of similar web services. Service clustering is used to narrow down the search space and to enable rapid semantic matching of a service request against a large size pool of services. Following this step, a composition engine takes as inputs the set of similar services and the specification of the required service, and generates the candidate composition plans that realise the goal. To determine the composition plan, the composition is reduced to a planning problem.

Keywords: semantic similarity; formal concept analysis; FCA; web services; composition.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIS.2019.097049

International Journal of Business Information Systems, 2019 Vol.30 No.1, pp.92 - 108

Received: 14 Jan 2017
Accepted: 10 Apr 2017
Published online: 17 Dec 2018 *

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