Seamless Federation of Heterogeneous Service Registries

Web service technology extends the existing web infrastructure by transforming it from a repository of documents to a source of services. As the number of web services increases, the provision of the appropriate service publication and discovery framework is of paramount importance for exploiting the full potential of the web service technology. This paper presents the principles, the functionality and the design of PYRAMID-S, a scalable framework for unified publication and discovery of semantically enhanced services scattered around heterogeneous Registries. It uses a hybrid peer-to-peer topology to organize Registries based on domains. In such a topology, each Registry retains its autonomy, meaning that it can use the publication and discovery mechanisms as well as the ontology of its choice. Furthermore, the discovery of services is based on QoS characteristics in order to enable service selection.