An indexation and discovery architecture for semantic web services and its application in bioinformatics

Abstract

Recently much research effort has been devoted to the discovery of relevant Web services. It is also widely recognized that adding semantics to Web service description is the solution to this challenge. Web services with explicit semantic annotation are called Semantic Web Services (SWS). In this paper, we propose an indexation and discovery architecture for semantic Web services, together with an application example in the area of bioinformatics. In our approach, a SWS repository is created and maintained by crawling both the ontology-oriented UDDI registries and the Web sites that hosting SWS. When presented with a service request, the proposed system will invoke the matching algorithm and a candidate set will be returned with different degree of matching being considered. We believe this approach can add more flexibility to the current industry standards by offering more choices to both the service requesters and publishers. Also, the framework in this approach is extensible: different matching algorithms can be easily added, and necessary QoS models can be built on top of the matching algorithms.