Discovering Web Services over the Semantic Web

This paper describes a framework for ontology-based flexible discovery of Semantic Web services. The pro-posed approach relies on user-supplied, context-specific mappings from an user ontology to relevant domain ontologies used to specify Web services. We show how a user’s query for a Web service that meets certain selection criteria can be transformed into queries that can be processed by a matchmaking engine that is aware of the relevant domain ontologies and Web services. We also describe how user-specified preferences for Web services in terms of non-functional requirements (e.g., QoS) can be incorporated into the Web service discovery mechanism to generate a partially ordered list of services that meet user-specified functional requirements