Combining query-by-example and query expansion for simplifying web service discovery

Abstract

The vision of a worldwide computing network of services that Service Oriented Computing paradigm and its most popular materialization, namely Web Service technologies, promote is a victim of its own success. As the number of publicly available services grows, discovering proper services is similar to finding a needle in a haystack. Different approaches aim at making discovery more accurate and even automatic. However they impose heavy modifications over current Web Service infrastructures and require developers to invest much effort into publishing and describing their services and needs. So far, the acceptance of this paradigm is mainly limited by the high costs associated with connecting service providers and consumers. This paper presents WSQBE+, an approach to make Web Service publication and discovery easier. WSQBE+ combines open standards and popular best practices for using external Web services with textmining and machine learning techniques. We describe our approach and empirically evaluate it in terms of retrieval effectiveness and processing time, by using a data-set of 391 public services.

Best practices for describing, consuming, and discovering web services: a comprehensive toolset

“…Although the example is rather simple, it allows us to show that the way an interface is defined directly impacts in the quantity and quality of keywords that can be gathered from it, which was empirically confirmed in [18]. Thus, the guidelines for performing service queries propose a third step for checking that a defined interface conveys in its source code as more explanatory keywords as possible.…”

“…We have empirically proved that those keywords included in the source code can be automatically gathered and used as queries when some steps upon building applications are followed [18]. In this line, best practices for constructing an application such that it contains useful keywords about the external services it needs comprise:…”

“…The idea of defining a functional interface before knowing the actual exposed interface of a service that fulfills an expected functionality aligns with the Query-by-Example approach to create queries [18]. This approach allows a consumer to search for an entire piece of information based on an example in the form of a selected part of that information.…”

“…The second step bases on an approach for automatically augmenting the quantity of relevant keywords within queries, called Query Expansion. This approach relies on the expansion of extracted examples by gathering keywords from the source code representing internal components that directly interact with the interfaces representing external services [18]. The reasoning that supports this mechanism is that expanding queries based upon components with strongly-related and 6 } highly-cohesive operations should not only preserve, but also improve the meaning of the original request or query.…”

“…Here, and throughout the paper, the term "application" refers to software that consumes one or more third-party services. EasySOC is based on extensive previous research carried out by the authors in the subareas of WSDL-based technical contract design and specification [17], Web Service discovery [18], applications development and maintenance [19], and developers' acceptance of these guidelines [20].…”