Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Combining query-by-example and query expansion for simplifying web service discovery

  • Published:
Information Systems Frontiers Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The vision of a worldwide computing network of services that Service Oriented Computing paradigm and its most popular materialization, namely Web Service technologies, promote is a victim of its own success. As the number of publicly available services grows, discovering proper services is similar to finding a needle in a haystack. Different approaches aim at making discovery more accurate and even automatic. However they impose heavy modifications over current Web Service infrastructures and require developers to invest much effort into publishing and describing their services and needs. So far, the acceptance of this paradigm is mainly limited by the high costs associated with connecting service providers and consumers. This paper presents WSQBE+, an approach to make Web Service publication and discovery easier. WSQBE+ combines open standards and popular best practices for using external Web services with text-mining and machine learning techniques. We describe our approach and empirically evaluate it in terms of retrieval effectiveness and processing time, by using a data-set of 391 public services.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. WSDL, http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl

  2. UDDI, http://uddi.xml.org/

  3. UNSPSC, http://www.unspsc.org/

  4. NAICS, http://www.naics.com

  5. CXF, http://incubator.apache.org/cxf

  6. Eclipse SDK, http://www.eclipse.org/

  7. Java Web Services Development Pack, http://java.sun.com/webservices/jwsdp/index.jsp

  8. Java Reflection API, http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/reflect/

  9. Javadoc Tool Home, http://java.sun.com/j2se/javadoc

  10. Eclipse Java Development Tools (JDT) Subproject, www.eclipse.org/jdt/

  11. Java2WSDL, http://ws.apache.org/axis/

  12. jUDDI, http://ws.apache.org/juddi/

References

  • Agichtein, E., Brill, E., Dumais, S., & Ragno, R. (2006). Learning user interaction models for predicting web search result preferences. In 29th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information retrieval (pp. 3–10).

  • Al-Masri, E., & Mahmoud, Q. H. (2007). Qos-based discovery and ranking of web services. In International conference on computer communications and networks (pp. 529–534).

  • Baeza-Yates, R., & Ribeiro-Neto, B. (1999). Modern information retrieval. Reading: Addition Wesley.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bai, J., Nie, J.-Y., Cao, G., & Bouchard, H. (2007). Using query contexts in information retrieval. In SIGIR ’07: Proceedings of the 30th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information retrieval (pp. 15–22).

  • Birukou, A., Blanzieri, E., D’Andrea, V., Giorgini, P., & Kokash, N. (2007). Improving web service discovery with usage data. IEEE Software, 24(6), 47–54.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Blake, B., Kahan, D., & Nowlan, M. (2007). Context-aware agents for user-oriented web services discovery and execution. Distributed and Parallel Databases, 21(1), 39–58.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Blake, B., Nowlan, M., & Kahan, D. (2008). Taming web services from the wild. IEEE Internet Computing, 12(5), 62–69.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bollmann, P. (1983). The normalized recall and related measures. In Proceedings of the 6th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information retrieval (pp. 122–128).

  • Buckley, C., Salton, G., & Allan, J. (1994). The effect of adding relevance information in a relevance feedback environment. In SIGIR ’94: Proceedings of the 17th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information retrieval.

  • Burstein, M., Bussler, C., Zaremba, M., Finin, T., Huhns, M. N., Paolucci, M., et al. (2005). A semantic web services architecture. IEEE Internet Computing, 9(5), 72–81.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cibrán, M. A., Verheecke, B., Vanderperren, W., Suvée, D., & Jonckers, V. (2007). Aspect-oriented programming for dynamic web service selection, integration and management. World Wide Web, 10(3), 211–242.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Crasso, M., Zunino, A., & Campo, M. (2008a). AWSC: An approach to web service classification based on machine learning techniques. Inteligencia Artificial, Revista Iberoamericana de IA, 37(12), 25–36.

    Google Scholar 

  • Crasso, M., Zunino, A., & Campo, M. (2008b). Easy Web Service discovery: A query-by-example approach. Science of Computer Programming, 71(2), 144–164.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dong, X., Halevy, A. Y., Madhavan, J., Nemes, E., & Zhang, J. (2004). Similarity search for web services. In (e)Proceedings of the thirtieth international conference on very large data bases (pp. 372–383).

  • Duftler, M., Mukhi, N., Slominski, A., & Weerawarana, S. (2001). Web services invocation framework (WSIF). In Workshop on object-oriented web services (OOWS ’01), ACM conference on object-oriented programming, systems, languages and applications (OOPSLA ’01). Tampa, Florida.

  • Erl, T. (2005). Service-oriented architecture (SOA): Concepts, technology, and design. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fellbaum, C. (1989). WordNet: An electronic lexical database. Scituate: Bradford Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fensel, D., Lausen, H., de Bruijn, J., Stollberg, M., Roman, D., & Polleres, A. (2006). Enabling semantic web services: The web service modelling ontology. New York: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Garofalakis, J., Panagis, Y., Sakkopoulos, E., & Tsakalidis, A. (2006). Contemporary web service discovery mechanisms. Journal of Web Engineering, 5(3), 265–290.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gomez-Pérez, A., Corcho-García, O., & Fernández-López, M. (2003). Ontological engineering. New York: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gotthelf, P., Zunino, A., Mateos, C., & Campo, M. (2008). GMAC: An overlay multicast network for mobile agent platforms. Journal of Parallel Distributed Computing, 68(8), 1081–1096.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hatcher, E., & Gospodnetic, O. (2004). Lucene in action (in action series). Bellows Falls: Manning.

    Google Scholar 

  • Heß, A., Johnston, E., & Kushmerick, N. (2004). ASSAM: A tool for semi-automatically annotating semantic web services. In International semantic web conference. Lecture notes in computer science (LNCS) (Vol. 3298, pp. 320–334).

  • Huhns, M., & Singh, M. (2005). Service-oriented computing: Key concepts and principles. IEEE Internet Computing, 9(1), 75–81.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jennings, N., & Wooldridge, M. (1996). Software agents. IEE Review, 42(1), 17–20.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Joachims, T. (1997). A probabilistic analysis of the Rocchio algorithm with TFIDF for text categorization. In International conference on machine learning (pp. 143–151).

  • Johnson, R. (2005). J2EE development frameworks. Computer, 38(1), 107–110.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kim, M.-C., & Choi, K.-S. (1999). A comparison of collocation-based similarity measures in query expansion. Information Processing & Management, 35(1), 19–30.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kittredge, R. I. (1982). Sublanguages. American Journal of Computational Linguistics, 8(2), 79–84.

    Google Scholar 

  • Korfhage, R. (1997). Information storage and retrieval. New York: Wiley.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kozlenkov, A., Spanoudakis, G., Zisman, A., Fasoulas, V., & Cid, F. S. (2007). Architecture-driven service discovery for service centric systems. International Journal of Web Services research, 4(2), 82–113.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Losee, R. (1995). Sublanguage terms: Dictionaries, usage, and automatic classification. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 46(7), 519–529.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mateos, C., Crasso, M., Zunino, A., & Campo, M. (2006). Supporting ontology-based semantic matching of web services in MoviLog. In Advances in artificial intelligence, 2nd international joint conference: 10th Ibero-American conference on AI, 18th Brazilian AI symposium (IBERAMIA-SBIA 2006). Lecture notes in computer science (LNCS) (Vol. 4140).

  • McConnell, S. (2006). Software estimation: Demystifying the black art. Redmond: Microsoft.

    Google Scholar 

  • McCool, R. (2005). Rethinking the semantic web. Part I. IEEE Internet Computing, 9(6), 88, 86–87.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McIlraith, S., & Martin, D. (2003) Bringing semantics to web services. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 18(1), 90–93.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Paolucci, M., & Sycara, K. (2003) Autonomous semantic web services. IEEE Internet Computing, 7(5), 34–41.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Papazoglou, M., Traverso, P., Dustdar, S., & Leymann, F. (2007). Service-oriented computing: State of the art and research challenges. Computer, 40(11), 38–45.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Papazoglou, M., & Heuvel, W.-J. (2007). Service oriented architectures: Approaches, technologies and research issues. The VLDB Journal, 16(3), 389–415.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Porter, M. (1997). An algorithm for suffix stripping. Readings in information retrieval (pp. 313–316).

  • Pu, K., Hristidis, V., & Koudas, N. (2006) Syntactic rule based approach toweb service composition. In ICDE ’06: Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on data engineering (p. 31).

  • Rocchio, J. (1971). Relevance feedback in information retrieval. In The smart retrieval system—experiments in automatic document processing (pp. 313–323).

  • Salton, G., & Buckley, C. (1988). Term-weighting approaches in automatic text retrieval. Information Processing & Management, 24(5), 513–523.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Schmidt, C., & Parashar, M. (2004) A peer-to-peer approach to web service discovery. World Wide Web, 7(2), 211–229.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shadbolt, N., Berners-Lee, T., & Hall, W. (2006). The semantic web revisited. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 21(3), 96–101.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shamsfard, M., & Barforoush, A. A. (2004). Learning ontologies from natural language texts. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 60, 17–63.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sivashanmugam, K., Verma, K., Sheth, A., & Miller, J. A. (2003). Adding semantics to web services standards. In The 2003 international conference on web services (pp. 395–401).

  • Spinellis, D. (2008). The way we program. IEEE Software, 25(4), 89–91.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stairmand, M. (1997). Textual context analysis for information retrieval. SIGIR Forum, 31(SI), 140–147.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stroulia, E., & Wang, Y. (2005). Structural and semantic matching for assessing web service similarity. International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems, 14(4), 407–438.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Vinoski, S. (2005). A time for reflection [software reflection]. IEEE Internet Computing, 9(1), 86–89.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Voorhees, E. (1993). Using WordNet to disambiguate word senses for text retrieval. In Proceedings of the 16th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information retrieval (pp. 171–180).

  • Wang, H., Huang, J. Z., Qu, Y., & Xie, J. (2004). Web services: Problems and future directions. Journal of Web Semantics, 1(3), 309–320.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Weerawarana, S., Curbera, F., Leymann, F., Storey, T., & Ferguson, D. F. (2005). Web services platform architecture: SOAP, WSDL, WS-policy, WS-addressing, WS-BPEL, WS-reliable messaging, and more. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.

    Google Scholar 

  • Whang, K.-Y., Ammann, A., Bolmarcich, A., Hanrahan, M., Hochgesang, G., Huang, K.-T., et al. (1987). Office-by-example: An integrated office system and database manager. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 5(4), 393–427.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Witte, R., Li, Q., Zhang, Y., & Rilling, J. (2008). Text mining and software engineering: An integrated source code and document analysis approach. IET Software Journal, 2, 3–16.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zhuge, H., & Liu, J. (2004). Flexible retrieval of web services. Journal of Systems and Software, 70(1–2), 107–116.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

We thank Mariano Fischer and Matías Martinez for helping us implementing the query expansion techniques, the plug-in for Eclipse and structural matching techniques. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions to improve the quality of the paper.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. ISISTAN Research Institute, Universidad Nacional del Centro de la provincia de Buenos Aires (UNCPBA), Campus Universitario, Tandil (B7001BBO), Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Marco Crasso, Alejandro Zunino & Marcelo Campo

  2. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Marco Crasso, Alejandro Zunino & Marcelo Campo

Authors
  1. Marco Crasso
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Alejandro Zunino
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Marcelo Campo
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marco Crasso.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Crasso, M., Zunino, A. & Campo, M. Combining query-by-example and query expansion for simplifying web service discovery. Inf Syst Front 13, 407–428 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-009-9221-9

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-009-9221-9

Keywords

Search

Navigation