Multi-Level Web Service Clustering to Bootstrap the Web Service Discovery and Selection

Existing technologies for web services have been extended to give the value-added customized services to users through the service composition. Service composition consists of four major stages: planning, discovery, selection, and execution. However, with the proliferation of web services, service discovery and selection are becoming challenging and time-consuming tasks. Organizing services into similar clusters is a very efficient approach. Existing clustering approaches have problems that include discovering semantic characteristics, loss of semantic information, and a shortage of high-quality ontologies. Thus, the authors proposed hybrid term similarity-based clustering approach in their previous work. Further, the current clustering approaches do not consider the sub-clusters within a cluster. In this chapter, the authors propose a multi-level clustering approach to prune the search space further in discovery process. Empirical study of the prototyping system has proved the effectiveness of the proposed multi-level clustering approach.