Goal-Based Visualization and Browsing for Semantic Web Services

We present a goal-based approach for visualizing and browsing the search space of available Web services. A goal describes an objective that a client wants to solve by using Web services, abstracting from the technical details. Our visualization technique is based on a graph structure that organizes goal templates – i.e. generic and reusable objective descriptions – with respect to their semantic similarity, and keeps the relevant knowledge on the available Web services for solving them. This graph is generated automatically from the results of semantically enabled Web service discovery. In contrast to existing tools that categorize the available Web services on the basis of certain description elements, our tool allows clients to browse available Web services on the level of problems that can be solved by them and therewith to better understand the structure as well as the available resources in a domain. This paper explains the theoretic foundations of the approach and presents the prototypical implementation within the Web Service Modeling Toolkit WSMT, an Integrated Development Environment for Semantic Web services.