WSDATool: A Novel Web Service Developer Assistance Tool Using a New Complementary Service Publishing Method

Abstract

Web service technology (WST) is a service-oriented architecture implementation framework that makes designing component-based internet applications possible. At present, many providers offer their services as web services. Current WST suffers from the lack of an integrated tool to assist web service developers. In WST, the services are published publicly, and their descriptions are stored in service directories. These descriptions contain valuable information about the work of different software teams throughout the world. However, with the increasing number of web services, searching for services is difficult and time-consuming. Furthermore, in current service directories, there is a little knowledge about the services, and extraction of useful information to be utilised by developers is not easy. In this paper, in order to increase the knowledge of what is available in service directories, a structure is presented by interlinking WST entities by using some defined semantic relations. The proposed structure provides a framework and a tool named WSDATool to develop new web services using information from published services or to refine current published web service descriptions. In experiments, services designed with the assistance of the WSDATool are more coherent and well designed.