A new service matching definition and algorithm with SAWSDL

Semantic Web service (or briefly ldquoSWSrdquo) matching is a potential solution for automatic service discovery in various applications such as dynamic and automatic Web service composition. A number of approaches for SWS matching have been proposed. Most of them solely relied on concept subsumption relationship to improve the precision of Web service matching result from lexical-based methods. However such approaches suffer from several limitations such as not providing a fine-grained service matching degree, not supporting many-to-many matching between operation parameters, and not deriving data mappings between them. In this paper, we introduce a novel method for SWS matching based on SAWSDL, a semantic annotation specification for WSDL. We first define a fine-grained service matching result and then develop a corresponding service matching algorithm which can facilitate many-to-many matching of operation parameters as well as deriving concrete data mappings between them. Semantic techniques are used to infer and match data elements of operation parameters between a request and a service. The proposed algorithm was implemented and applied in the SeTEF - an automatic task-oriented business process execution system.