METEOR-S WSDI: A scalable P2P infrastructure of registries for semantic publication and discovery of web services

Web services are the new paradigm for distributed computing. They have much to offer towards interoperability of applications and integration of large scale distributed systems. To make Web services accessible to users, service providers use Web service registries to publish them. Current infrastructure of registries requires replication of all Web service publications in all Universal Business Registries. Large growth in number of Web services as well as the growth in the number of registries would make this replication impractical. In addition, the current Web service discovery mechanism is inefficient, as it does not support discovery based on the capabilities of the services, leading to a lot of irrelevant matches. Semantic discovery or matching of services is a promising approach to address this challenge. In this paper, we present a scalable, high performance environment for Web service publication and discovery among multiple registries. This work uses an ontology-based approach to organize registries into domains, enabling domain based classification of all Web services. Each of these registries supports semantic publication and discovery of Web services. We believe that the semantic approach suggested in this paper will significantly improve Web service publication and discovery involving a large number of registries. This paper describes the implementation and architecture of the METEOR-S Web Service Discovery Infrastructure, which leverages peer-to-peer computing as a scalable solution. © 2005 Springer Science + Business Media, Inc.