Alternative Approaches for Workflow Similarity

Service discovery of state dependent services has to take workflow aspects into account. To increase the usability of a service discovery, the result list of services should be ordered with regard to the relevance of the services. Means of ordering a list of workflows is a similarity measure of the workflow and a query. In this paper different similarity measures facilitating structured workflows and higher level change operations are presented and evaluated based on a pilot of an empirical study. In particular the different measures are compared with the study results. It turns out that the quality of the different measures differ significantly. The best results can be achieved by facilitating n-gram multisets as a workflow as a basis for the similarity measure calculations.