An ontological approach for dynamic functionality-based web services discovery using expert systems

With the evolution of Web services and their increasing widespread, searching for them based on what they provide has become a real challenge, a functionality-based Web service discovery mechanism is then necessary since the functionalities are the heart of Web services and they are what the clients really look for in Web services. This paper presents an approach that targets the publication and discovery of Web services according to what they provide to users using a functionality-based model. The proposed model attempts to express without ambiguity the functionalities of the Web services operations by using an ontology. Moreover, the proposed approach exploits expert systems that aim at adding new functionalities to Web services according to their rule-base defined by the knowledge engineer or the system administrator. We have also added a semantic layer between the ontology and the expert systems to make them more ontology-aware. A JAVA implementation has been done to validate our proposal.