Supporting Interoperability among Web Services Through Efficient Matching

With the advent of Web services, service interoperability has always been an active research issue. In recent years, many approaches have been proposed. However, how to achieve fast composition and guarantee correct and executable composite service remains an open issue. For this problem, this paper presents a three-phase framework for accurate and efficient service interoperability. Since service collaborations should follow certain constraints for success invocation, the goal of the first phase is to automatically clarify constraints on Web services. And then the second phase utilizes constraints acquired in previous phase to check Web services' constraint compatibility for accurate collaborations. In order to reduce the time on exhaustive analysis of service matching, the concept of expanded parameters is proposed, thus the problem of semantic matching is transformed into set operation. Subsequently, the third phase achieves interoperability among Web services by constructing initial composite services on the basis of collaborations, optimizing initial compositions to generate minimal composition alternatives with no redundant Web services, and executing final composition services. Experimental results show that our framework can dramatically reduce the time spending on service matching and effectively generate minimal composition alternatives in a rather short time.