BF*: Web services discovery and composition as graph search problem

When there are a large number of Web services available (e.g., in the range of 1,000-10,000), it is non-trivial to quickly find Web services satisfying the given request. Furthermore, when no single Web service satisfies the given request fully, one needs to "compose" multiple Web services to fulfill the goal. Since the search space for such a composition problem is in general exponentially increasing, it is important to have wise decision on underlying data structures and search algorithms. Toward this problem, in this paper, we present a novel solution, named as BF* (BF-Star), that adopts the competitive A* as a search algorithm while utilizing the Bloom Filter as a succinct data structure.