Facilitating automated search for Web services

Recent advances in the area of Web services have enabled inter-organization sharing of data and data-oriented software services. The challenges of developing software in a service-oriented development environment include search, retrieval, and integration of services with client applications. Such applications can be dynamic in nature and may vary depending on current availability of services or on the current relationship between client and service organizations. As such, applications must be able to quickly locate and integrate different potential service components. In this paper we describe an approach for automating the process of searching for Web services using signature matching and describe a new signature match criteria called the contains match.