Ontology-based semantic matchmaking approach

As a greater number of Web Services are made available, support for service discovery mechanisms become essential. Services can have quite different Quality of Service characteristics (such as their response time when given a particular set of data). A service requestor therefore requires more sophisticated approaches to find a service that meets a particular behavior, because supporting matching between a service request and properties is not straightforward. Matchmaking plays a vital role in this discovery process. We propose a novel matchmaking algorithm to effectively compute the semantic distance of concepts in an ontology. It is based on description logic formalization and reasoning, extends simple subsumption matching found in other approaches and allows match ranking. We have implemented the proposed approach and used the developed prototype in the context of service discovery in the visualization domain. (C) 2006 Elsevier Ltd, All rights reserved.