Flexible retrieval of Web Services

An important issue arising from Web Service applications is how to conveniently, accurately and efficiently retrieve services from large-scale and expanding service repositories. This paper proposes a flexible Web Service retrieval approach, which solves this issue by means of an orthogonal service space and establishing the multi-valued specialization relationships between services. The similarity degree between services is measured based on the specialization relationship between operations defined in services. An SQL-like flexible query language is used to support the flexible retrieval of services. The related programming environment and graphical user operation interface of the language have been implemented in the Service Grid environment. Compared with the current UDDI-based service retrieval approach, the proposed approach has the advantages of convenience, accuracy and efficiency. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.