Semantic Web Services Discovery: A Survey and Research Challenges

This article describes how Web services play an important role in several fields such as e-commerce and e-health. As the number of Web services is increasing rapidly, finding the best Web service according to users' requirements becomes more challenging. The traditional method of Web service discovery is based on keyword match. Due to this, many Web services which are most relevant to the user request are left undiscoverable. Some other emergent approaches are based on semantics to improve the quality of the discovered Web services in terms of relevance and satisfaction of user's need. In this paper, the authors present a survey of existing semantic Web services discovery approaches giving priority to relevant ones. Furthermore, this paper provides a critical and comparative analysis of the studied approaches and stands out major challenges to be addressed to substantially enhance the semantic Web service discovery.