Evaluating Similarity and Difference in Service

Abstract. Recently, enterprise interoperability has been improved by the Web Service technology, making available an ever-growing number of services. Service discovery is considered a crucial issue; in particular, flexibility of the discovery process, that is, the ability of recognizing not only exact matches between the requests and offers, but also partial ones, should be enhanced. We propose a composite approach to flexible ser-vice matchmaking focused on different matching models that are able to evaluate similarity and difference between offers and requests. The ap-proach is based on an ontological framework adding semantics to service descriptions. Optimization and ranking techniques are provided.