Decision Support Web Service

Currently, UDDI (Universal Description Discovery and Integration) is a standard for publishing and discovery of Web services. The UDDI search mechanism is based on functional properties and the consumer chooses a web service based on these properties. When functional properties are identical, additional distinguishing characteristics are needed to choose a service. Towards this, we propose to associate non functional properties, referred to as criteria, with a web service. A web service that has a list of criteria associated with it is termed as Decision Support Web Service (DSWS). In order to associate criteria, the UDDI is extended to X-UDDI which includes a new orange page containing the list of criteria and their description. We also add one more bag, criteria bag, which is used to define the attributes of the criteria. In order to publish and invoke a service on both, the functional properties and the criteria, we define new APIs.