Capability Matching and Similarity Reasoning in Service Discovery

Ontologies play a relevant role to support service matchmaking in the discovery process. In fact, the elements used for service capability description refer to concepts that can be properly defined and semantically related in domain ontologies. Semantic relationships between concepts are then exploited to establish the type of matching between advertisements and requests. In this paper we propose an ontologybased approach to service discovery characterized by a hybrid multimode matching, that is, a deductive capability matching extended with a flexible similarity evaluation scheme. In the approach, the semantic service description results from the cooperation of several components: a UDDI registry is responsible for managing offered service descriptions, a Domain Ontology provides the general knowledge about concepts from the business domain in which services are used, a Service Ontology organizes services at different levels of abstraction. The proposed approach provides service advice at multiple levels of granularity and rates adviced services according to different kinds of comparison strategies.