The Concept of Parametric Index for Ranked Web Service Retrieval

Abstract

Finding relevant services from a service collection which satisfy potential user query is crucial problem in Service–Oriented Computing. Parametric searching seem to be one of the basic features of Service Retrieval however there is lack of methods supporting this possibility. In this chapter we suggest a new approach to Service Retrieval of both SOAP and RESTful Web services. The usage of parametric index enables users to retrieve ranked results in accordance with specific parameters of a service. In our approach we distinguish components based on service structure which are later considered as index parameters. Because the size of such a indices is significantly big our approach uses the method of conceptual indexing which allows to reduce index size by grouping relevant service components. Additionally, for the purpose of search performance improvement for parametric index we introduce merged weight vector. Our research is supported with implementations of proposed approach by which we conducted preliminary experiments. Experimental results confirm that the proposed approach significantly reduces the index size and improves search performance of parametric service retrieval.