Easy web service discovery: A query-by-example approach

Web services have acquired enormous popularity among software developers. This popularity has motivated developers to publish a large number of Web service descriptions in UDDI registries. Although these registries provide search facilities, they are still rather difficult to use and often require service consumers to spend too much time manually browsing and selecting service descriptions. This paper presents a novel search method for Web services called WSQBE that aims at both easing query specification and assisting discoverers by returning a short and accurate list of candidate services. In contrast with previous approaches, WSQBE discovery process is based on an automatic search space reduction mechanism that makes this approach more efficient. Empirical evaluations of WSQBE search space reduction mechanism, retrieval performance, processing time and memory usage, using a registry with 391 service descriptions, are presented. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.