Prefiltering Strategy to Improve Performance of Semantic Web Service Discovery

Discovery of semantic Web services is a heavyweight task when the number of Web services or the complexity of ontologies increases. In this paper, we present a new logical discovery framework based on semantic description of the capability of Web services and user goals using F-logic. Our framework tackles the scalability problem and improves discovery performance by adding two prefiltering stages to the discovery engine. The first stage is based on ontology comparison of user request and Web service categories. In the second stage, yet more Web services are eliminated based upon a decomposition and analysis of concept and instance attributes used in Web service capabilities and the requested capabilities of the client, resulting in a much smaller pool of Web services that need to be matched against the client request. Our prefiltering approach is evaluated using a new Web service repository, called WSMO-FL test collection. The recall rate of the filtering process is 100% by design, since no relevant Web services are ever eliminated by the two prefiltering stages, and experimental results show that the precision rate is more than 53%.