A Pragmatic Methodology to Web Service Discovery

As in linguistics the semantics co-exist with pragmatics to provide complete and unambiguous meaning to utterances, in the same way the pragmatics should augment the semantics in intelligent applications. Service-oriented computing is an area where such intelligent applications are greatly facilitated. In this paper we propose a pragmatic methodology to Web service discovery which utilizes both the pragmatics and the semantics. This methodology aims to solve a very basic problem of existing semantic discovery approaches: the inability of selecting the most appropriate service among many semantically equivalent Web services.