Consumer-Centric Web Services Discovery and Subscription

Nowadays, there are a number of similar Web services over the Internet or intranet. They provide consumers with more choices according to their personalized QoS requirements. However, in current web service discovery and subscription, it takes consumers too much time on manual selection and cannot easily benefit from the wide QoS spectrum brought by the proliferating services. In this paper, we propose a QoS-aware discovery and subscription approach to free consumers from time-consuming human computer interactions as well as help them negotiate QoS with multiple service providers. The core idea of this approach is to build up a "virtual service" grouping function similar services together (called service pool) and dispatching consumer requests to the proper service in terms of QoS requirements. This paper makes contributions for the aggregation and usage of similar web services in a "consumer-centric" manner. Such manner is on-demand, user-friendly and efficient. On-demand means the aggregate is driven by consumers instead of providers. User-friendly means consumers do not select services, handle different WSDL of similar services and switch between services at runtime any longer. Efficient means it integrates an efficient service search engine, reduces the incorrect services by some filter, discover the aggregate by a polynomial complex algorithm.