DISSERTATION Vector Space-driven Service Discovery

The main topic of this thesis includes a large section of the Web service paradigm and its application in todays distributed systems. The main focus lies on the very specific issues of searching and discovering those services. The arising problems are of various nature. On the one hand, there is no universal approach or established method for discovering existing services to date. On the other hand, software developers are confronted with the problem where to publish services they implemented. Due to the fact that Web service technologies are not a new facet of the Internet or the service-oriented infrastructure respectively, many approaches to find a common ground for those issues have already been proposed. They all aim to create a common platform, where both, developers and service consumer can find a common contact point. Many of those approaches failed simply because their concepts where not mature enough, but others failed, because even though the concept was sound and feasible, they lack the acceptance in the service-oriented community. In the course of this thesis, these problems were analyzed to produce a concept that provides a solution for the problems mentioned above. Furthermore, VUSE is presented, a prototype developed and implemented at the Vienna University of Technology, which is designed to realize these concepts and finally, to evaluate the produced results. The principal conclusion of VUSE can be seen as a search engine which is based on the vectorspace model to rate similarities with angle distances and create high-performance results for search queries while still maintaining the ability to be separated into several physical locations. In the final chapters, an evaluation of the research results is given, together with an outlook on related research fields and ongoing work.