On Describing and Ranking Services based on Non-Functional Properties

Service-oriented architectures are rapidly becoming the dominant computing paradigm. However, current SOA solutions are still restricted in their application context to being in-house solutions of companies. While service orientation is widely acknowledged for its potential to revolutionize the world of computing, its success depends on resolving a number of fundamental challenges, such as discovery, ranking and selection of services. Robust and automatic solutions for these challenges requires various services and user requests aspects, including functional and non-functional, to be semantically described. Non-functional properties especially are highly relevant especially during ranking and selection tasks. This paper introduces a semantically- enables approach for describing non-functional properties of services and further discusses how such descriptions can be used during in one service related task, namely ranking.