A high-level functional matching for semantic Web services

Existing service matching techniques such as keyword-based and ontology-based, do not guarantee the correctness of the matching results (i.e. do not guarantee fulfilling user goals). This paper deals with this problem by capturing the high-level functional aspects (namely goals, contexts, and expected external behaviors) for both web services and users in a machine-processable format, then matching these aspects using the proposed functional substitutability matching scheme (FSMS). Based on FSMS, this paper describes a direct matching technique in which a user request is examined against one service description at a time, such that web services match users requests when they have substitutable goals, contexts and expected external behaviors. The substitutability semantics between the elements of application domains are captured via the proposed substitutability graphs, which are used during the matching process to mediate between users requests and web services descriptions. Simulation results show that the proposed matching approach succeeds in retrieving only the correct answers, while keyword-based and ontology-based retrieval techniques could not eliminate the appearance of false negatives and false positives.