Experimental Study of Web Service Availability Based on WSDL Documents

The WSDL document is an XML-based interface that is used for describing the abstract functionality offered by a service and the concrete details of how a service can be called. It thus serves the most important factor of Web service availability over the Internet for that´s the only way in which potential clients could search, discover and interact with the described service. In this paper, based on the analytical investigation on current status of Web services that exist on the Web today, we propose a tool which can detect Web service availability and repair some errors in the WSDL document. According to the different types of errors we collected and analyzed, our tool can automatically correct or prompt user interactively to patch the WSDL file. The experiment with more than 17000 Web services in real world indicates that our tool produces a high error detection rate with great repair rate. It would be a useful assistant to service provider to publish their WSDL file, and improve the service retrieval and employ process.