A multi-level matching framework for semantic web services in collaborative design

Semantic Web services, augmenting Web service descriptions using semantic Web technology, were introduced to facilitate the publication, discovery, and execution of Web services at the semantic level. Semantic matchmakers enhance the capability of UDDI service registries in the semantic Web services architecture by applying some matching algorithms between advertisements and requests described in OWL-S to recognize various degrees of matching for Web services. This paper proposes a novel semantics-enhanced Web service framework and a multi-level matching model for Web services. The matching process is achieved at five levels: syntactic, static semantic, dynamic semantic, qualitative service, and dependable service. A case study on collaborative design is used to demonstrate the proposed approach.