Discovering composable web services using functional semantics and service dependencies based on natural language requests

Abstract

The processes of service discovery, selection and composition are crucial tasks in web service based application development. Most web service-driven applications are complex and are composed of more than one service, so, it becomes important for application designers to identify the best service to perform the next task in the intended application’s workflow. In this paper, a framework for discovering composable service sets as per user’s complex requirements is proposed. The proposed approach uses natural language processing and semantics based techniques to extract the functional semantics of the service dataset and also to understand user context. In case of simple queries, basic services may be enough to satisfy the user request, however, in case of complex queries, several basic services may have to be identified to serve all the requirements, in the correct sequence. For this, the service dependencies of all the services are used for constructing a service interface graph for finding suitable composable services. Experiments showed that the proposed approach was effective towards finding relevant services for simple & complex queries and achieved an average accuracy rate of 75.09 % in finding correct composable service templates. © 2017, Springer Science+Business Media New York.