A Context-Aware Service Matchmaking method using Description Logic ∗ Hai Wang, Zengzhi Li, Bo Yang, Hong Xia School of Electronics & Information Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an Shaanxi 710049, PR China hwang@mailst.xjtu.edu.cn, lzz@mail.xjtu.edu.cn, yangbo@mail.xjtu.edu.cn, hxiaxjtu@tom.com Abstract The current trend of Web Service research is towards au- tomatic service composition. Undoubtedly, service match- making is one of the critical problem to achieve the inten- tion. Previous methods concerns service matchmaking con- siders the problem in a context free manner , in another word, they are domain independent. Obviously, without the consideration of context information, the degree of recall and precision regarding service matchmaking can be sig- nificantly declined. In this paper, we formally analyzed the problem using Description Logic and present a complete solution to resolve it. 1. Introduction In recent years Web Services have become the predom- inant way with which distributed computer programs com- municate over the internet. It provides a new model of the Web in which business sites exchange dynamic information on demand. The initial promise of web services is to enable a distributed environment in which applications, or applica- tion components, can be seamlessly integrated between or- ganizations in a platform-neutral and language-neutral fash- ion. Along with the evolution of techniques, the objective of web services also evolved. The automatic discovery and composition of Web services now become possible and at- tracts more and more attentions. Undoubtedly, matchmak- ing as the key technique to make these from ideality to re- ality turns into a significant challenge. Matchmaking considers the relationship between two different services. Its objective is to answer whether the advertised service could satisfy the request. The matchmak- ing of Web services is actually the matchmaking of the ser- vice description. The description of Web services includes both the syntactic and semantic information. The syntactic * This work is supported by NSFC (60673170) of Peoples Republic of China. description denotes the signature of services while the se- mantic information describes the functional capabilities of the services. From this point of view, we could say the IO actually describes the syntactic part of the services and the IOPE as a whole describes the semantics of the services where the IOPE means the inputs, outputs, preconditions and effects. In other word, the whole IOPE conditions comprises the capability description of Web services. The inputs and outputs description reflects the signature of the services. Quite a number of work [14, 16] has been done to cope with the matchmaking of the IO description of the services. While the preconditions describe under which conditions the service could be executed and the effects re- flects the changes of the world caused by execution of the service, in other words, it is the goal of the service. In [4], the author proposed a formalism to describe web services by their PE based on Description Logic [2]. The formalism is firmly grounded on the research in the reasoning about ac- tion community. The formalism is designed to deal with the problem of service reasoning. [19] modified the formal- ism to make it as a base doing the PE matchmaking of the services. Context denotes any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity. An entity is a person, place, or object that is considered relevant to the interaction between a user and an application, including the user and applications themselves. [1] Previous methods consider the matchmaking problem in a context free manner. In another words, these methods do not take the context information into account when doing the matchmaking, or saying they are domain independent. This kind of fashion can signifi- cantly depress the recall and precision with regarding to the matchmaking. The reason is not complex. Provided that we just considers the monotonic case. Without the context information, certain assertions are not known to be satisfi- able. On the other hand, if the particular context are taken into account, their truth can be inferred. As a result, some failed match will become success. In this paper, we propose a capability matchmaking method concerning Web service that work in a context- 2007 IEEE Asia-Pacific Services Computing Conference 0-7695-3051-6/07 $25.00 © 2007 IEEE DOI 10.1109/APSCC.2007.48 26