An ontology matching approach to semantic Web Services discovery

In this paper we present an approach to semantic based Web Service discovery, and a prototypical tool, based on syntactic and structural schema matching, among an input ontology, describing a service request, and web services descriptions, at the "syntactic level" through WSDL, or at the semantic level, through service ontologies included in OWL-S, WSMO, SWSF and WSDL-S. The different input schema, WSDL descriptions, OWL ontologies, OWL-S, WSMO, SWSF and WSDL-S components, are represented in an uniform way by means of directed rooted graphs, where nodes represent schema elements, connected by directed links of different types, e.g. for containment and referential relationships. On this uniform internal representation a number of matching algorithms operate, including structural based algorithms (Children Matcher, Leaves Matcher, Graph and SubGraph Isomorphism) and syntactical ones (Edit Distance (Levenshtein Distance) and Synonym Matcher (through WordNet synonyms thesaurus).