A software framework for automatic Web service discovery based on a hybrid matchmaker

As a large amount of Web services are made available today, the need for a sophisticated and fully automated discovery mechanism becomes a crucial task. Existing syntactic keywords based discovery techniques fail to recognize similarities between Web services capabilities and thus have a very limited search scope. To address this issue we propose in this paper a novel discovery framework based on logical, lexical and corpus reasoning. Our proposed framework employs some computational linguistics techniques to format and extract useful semantic information from user query expressed in natural English language. It also performs a hybrid matchmaking that combines several semantic similarity techniques to efficiently discover the most appropriate services to user requirements. We implemented our proposed approach in a prototype system called OWLS-LLCR.