Search Algorithms for Discovery of Web Services

Web services are designed to standardize interactions between heterogeneous applications using Internet technologies. Within the framework of Internet search technologies, web services provide structured channels to access search engines and web-accessible databases. Our work involves research in methods to discover web service description language (WSDL) documents, which provide interface formats, expected data-types, supported protocols and precise service endpoints. This project extends current discovery research through use of the Google web service, UDDI category searching, and private registry querying with preliminary experiments resulting in a very high percentage of success. The goal is to find WSDL documents for a given domain name, parse the desired service document to obtain invocation formats, and automatically invoke the web service. Contributions of this research will support enhancements of HTML-dependent search tools by providing access to data inaccessible through surface HTML interfaces.