Understanding web service discovery goals

Articulating proper services search queries has been a challenging task for clients when searching for relevant Web services. Service discovery search results will not be improved unless we determine ways for correctly understanding client discovery goals. In this paper, we introduce a solution to this problem and perform a key study for understanding service discovery goals. We introduce the concept of quality of Web service (QWS) for our quality-driven ranking mechanism. Based on our study, we determine that service discovery goals can be defined as exploratory or informational. We further use these findings to demonstrate how the knowledge of service discovery goals are beneficial in improving the way clients perform service search queries. Results from our experiments are intriguing and show that the performance of informational service queries in terms of precision improves the querying process by 36.26% and 40.39% when compared to Google´s PageRank and Yahoo, respectively. We further use our findings to provide insights on improving the service retrieval process.