Web Services Operation and Parameter Matchmaking Based on Free-Form User Queries

Service-oriented architectures (SOA), based on Web services as the underlying architecture, have the potential to facilitate dynamic evolution of business processes. However, to fully realize the benefit of the SOA vision, it is critical to shield application developers from the complexity of Web services and related XML-based formats. In the currently available toolkits, users often play an informed role in the mapping of XML based specifications, operation names, message structures, and parameter types. The focus of our work is to design and develop an elegant, intuitive, simple, and powerful free-form query based system that allows interaction with Web services, without requiring the end-user to understand the operation names, parameters types, and other XML-based information in a WSDL document. Our system uses semantic Web concepts, ontologies, and WordNet in the process of automating Web services matchmaking. In this paper we focus on presenting techniques for matching free-form queries with appropriate Web service operations and extracting parameter values from user queries. We quantify the accuracy of our methodologies in terms of precision and recall.