Web Service Search: Who, When, What, and How

Web service search is an important problem in service oriented architecture that has attracted widespread attention from academia as well as industry. Web service searching can be performed by various stakeholders, in different situations, using different forms of queries. All those combinations result in radically different ways of implementation. Using a real world web service composition example, this paper describes when, what, and how to search web services from service assemblers’ point of view, where the semantics of web services are not explicitly described. This example outlines the approach to implement a web service broker that can recommend useful services to service assemblers.