WSXplorer: Searching for Desired Web Services Yanan Hao 1 , Yanchun Zhang 1 , and Jinli Cao 2 1 School of Computer Science and Mathematics, Victoria University PO Box 14428, Melbourne, VIC 8001, Australia {haoyn, yzhang}@csm.vu.edu.au 2 Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering, La Trobe University Bundoora, VIC 3086, Australia j.cao@latrobe.edu.au Abstract. With the rapid development of e-commerce over Internet, web services have attracted much attention in recent years. Nowadays, enterprises are able to outsource their internal business processes as ser- vices and make them accessible via the Web. Then they can dynami- cally combine individual services to provide new value-added services. A main problem that remains is how to discover desired web services. In this paper, we propose WSXplorer, a novel scheme for identifying po- tentially relevant web services given a textual description of services. In particular, we propose a new schema matching algorithm for supporting web-service operations matching. The matching algorithm catches not only structures, but even better semantic information of schemas. Based on service operations matching, the concept of attribute closure is intro- duced to identify associations between web-service operations. We also propose a ranking strategy to satisfy a user’s top-k requirements. Exper- imental evaluation shows that our approach can achieve high precision and recall ratio. 1 Introduction A web service is programmatically available application logic exposed over Internet. It has a set of operations and data types. The current set of web ser- vice specifications defines how to specify reusable operations through the Web- Service Description Language(WSDL), how these operations can be discovered and reused through the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration(UDDI) API, and how the requests to and responses from web-service operations can be transmitted through the Simple Object Access Protocol API(SOAP). With the rapid development of e-commerce over Internet, web services have attracted much attention in recent years. Nowadays, enterprises are able to out- source their internal business processes as services and make them accessible via the Web (see, e.g.,[1,2,3,4,5]). Then they can combine individual services into more complex, orchestrated services. A main problem that remains is how to discover desired web services. To find a service in UDDI, a user needs to input some keywords about the required service and then to browse the rele- vant UDDI category to locate relevant web services. Considering a large amount J. Krogstie, A.L. Opdahl, and G. Sindre (Eds.): CAiSE 2007, LNCS 4495, pp. 173–187, 2007. c  Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007