Specifying Search Queries for Web Service Discovery

Web services are meant to be easily accessible software systems. With the emergence of Web service technologies and the presence of thousands, or perhaps millions, of Web services in the coming years, the challenge is searching for a Web service that meets a specified requirement. In this paper, we propose methods and models for effectively spec-ifying the search queries in a Web service discovery sys-tem. We show that while search queries should be speci-fied precisely enough to contain information for appropri-ate matching, they should not be too detailed. Users often do not have a clear vision of their desired Web service and a search query should be at a high enough level of abstrac-tion. We propose two models and show how they are appro-priate for capturing search queries.