Searching and Selecting Web Services Using Case Based Reasoning

Web services are currently one of the main technologies employed to create a systematic and extensible framework for application development. This is done by means of allowing the interaction among the applications of an organization. However, due to the large number of web services that may exist nowadays, locating one or several web services to fulfill the functional requirements of a user, an organization or a business entity, is a complex and time consuming activity for application developers. It also reduces their productivity. One possible solution for this problem is the implementation of a semantic component, structured as a library and populated with cases represented by web services in such a way that it may extend the functionality of the existing web services directories. The semantic component must provide a mechanism for classifying and selecting web services based on their functionality and supporting the search of WSDL description files of selected web services in a non sequential order within the directories. This paper describes a model for searching and selecting web services in UDDI directories supported by case based reasoning. Advantages and limitations of the model are also described.