Semantic Web Service Discovery and Selection in B2B Integration Scenarios

There are various B2B scenarios where many candidate services with the same or similar capability (provided by the same or even different service providers) can be used for enterprise application integration. Hence, a requester driving a B2B integration scenario can choose among several candidate services offering a capability satisfying its requests. However, the optimal choice of the service to be invoked often depends on the parameters of the request at run-time and preferences of the requester. This article describes an approach for a dynamic (at run-time) web service selection based on semantic interpretation of offered service capabilities and the parameters specifying the run-time request. The proposed solution takes into account special conditions on service usage either contractually agreed between requester and provider or specified by the requester without the knowledge of the provider. In general, those conditions restrict the interpretation of the original service capabilities as offered by a service provider (and discovered by the service requester) and influence the choice of a service. The approach is illustrated on an example from the shippercarrier domain.