METEOR–S WSDI: A Scalable Infrastructure of Registries for Semantic Publication and Discovery of Web Services

Web services are the new paradigm for distributed computing. They have much to offer towards interoperability of applications and integration of large scale distributed systems. To make Web services accessible to users, service providers use Web service registries to publish them. Current infrastructure of registries requires replication of all Web service publications in all Universal Business Registries (UBR) which provide text and taxonomy based search capabilities. Large growth in number of Web services as well as the growth in the number of registries would make this replication impractical. In addition, the current Web service discovery mechanism is inefficient, as it does not support discovery based on the capability of the services and thus leading to a lot of irrelevant matches. Semantic discovery or matching of services is a promising approach to address this challenge. In this paper, we present a scalable, high performance environment for Web service discovery among multiple registries. This work uses an ontology-based approach to organize registries, enabling semantic classification of all Web services based on domains. Each of these registries supports semantic annotation of the Web services, which is used during discovery process. We have implemented two algorithms each for semantic publication and discovery of Web services. We believe that the semantic approach suggested in this paper will significantly improve Web services publication and discovery involving a large number of registries. As a part of the METEOR-S we have leveraged the peer-to-peer networking as a scalable infrastructure for registries that can support automated and semi-automated Web service publication and discovery.