A Rule-Based Approach for Availability of Web Service

Sustainable success of service oriented applications relies on capabilities to manage possible service failures. To substitute a failed service with some other equivalent service is unavoidable in recovering a suspended application due to failure of a constituent service. In this paper, we report a rule based approach to Web service substitution in order to secure availability of services. Availability provides delivery assurance for each Web service so that Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) messages cannot be lost undetectably, especially in a Web service composition. The rules are written in Semantic Web Rule Language. The rules are a formal representation of a categorization-based scheme to identify exchangeable Web services. This scheme not only tackles the issue of heterogeneity of domain ontology in describing the Web services, it also adapts itself by learning newly discovered ontology instances. A technical framework of Web service substitution using rule based deduction is demonstrated. Experiments on service substitution based on the proposed framework achieve a best precision of 85%.