Ontologies: A Review of Web Service Discovery Techniques

Web service discovery has been a challenging activity since a long time and is still a problem area to find the right service as per user’s criteria. Web service discovery process entails finding the most relevant service according to the user’s requirements. With the proliferation of web services, demand for automatic web service discovery framework has increased to provide services highly relevant to user requirements. Discovery of web services is an important step from user’s perspective, since it is the first activity in service consumption. If web services cannot be discovered, they will become useless. Though this area has been the attention of research community since long, still the web services discovery remains a challenge for organizations using SOA (service oriented architecture). In this paper, we focus on various discovery processes of the web services and its related challenges. Human intervention is often needed to interpret the meaning in order to select and invoke web services. This leads to error-prone and time consuming processes. So, the process of service selection is not fully automated and requires researcher’s attention to address the problem. There exist various approaches to address this problem with majority of the approaches using syntax based techniques. With the maturity of semantic technology, current trend is towards applying semantic based approaches. These approaches uses variant of techniques and ontology is one of the prominent techniques. There have been many literature surveys covering both semantic and syntactic based approaches. It has been observed that there is lack of study on ontology based approaches for the web services discovery. This paper provides an extensive survey on purely ontology based techniques, highlighting the state-of-the-art approaches. The objective of this survey is to help new researchers, who are interested to study and contribute into this research domain.