Int. J. of Information Technology and Web Engineering, 2(4), 21-40, October-December 2007 21
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ABSTrACT
The Web services paradigm has enabled an increasing number of providers to host remotely
accessible services. However, the true potential of such a distributed infrastructure can only be
reached when such autonomic services can be combined together as parts of a workfow, in order
to collectively achieve combined functionality. In this article, we present our work in the area of
automatic workfow composition among Web services with semantically described functionality
capabilities. For this purpose, we use a set of heuristics derived from the connectivity structure
of the service repository in order to effectively guide the composition process. The methodologies
presented in this article have been inspired by research in areas such as graph network analysis,
social network analysis, and bibliometrics. In addition, we present comparative experimentation
results in order to evaluate the presented techniques.
Keywords: heuristics; information network; semantic data model; semantic matching; Web
applications; Web technologies
Employing Graph Network
Analysis for Web Service
Composition
John Gekas, University of Essex, UK
Maria Fasli, University of Essex, UK
INTrODUCTION
The increasing popularity the Web Service
paradigm and the Semantic Web have
gained recently shows clearly the overall
need for unifed access to semantically
meaningful Web-based resources, whether
these resources are data sources (such as
Web sites) or functionality providers (in
the form of Web applications and Web
services). Numerous and valuable efforts
have been presented in these research areas,
coming both from industrial and academic
colleagues. Furthermore, the notion of
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)
has arisen, referring to any decentralised
software platform that allows the develop-
ment, deployment, and integrated access to
Web service applications. It has also been
strongly argued that the full potential of
such a service-oriented infrastructure can
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