Estimating difference of Web services

To organize similar Web services for more precise service discovery and easy service composition, it is important to predict the difference of two Web services. Furthermore, to provide a quantified measure on the differences of Web service turns out to be a key enabler for understanding Web services. In this paper, we present a model designed to measure the difference of similar Web services and a way to calculate the distance of two Web services. The basis of the scheme is a tree model to model Web services and a decision tree to calculate the degree of matching between the paths of two trees. The matching relies on a term categorization technique against selected feature dimensions defined in standardized service description languages. The term categorization results are used to calculate the differences of corresponding paths of the trees, which are in turn used to derive the difference of the trees. We walk through an example scenario of service re-configuration and evolution to demonstrate the distance prediction mechanism we proposed.