Discovery of Web Service Flow based on Service Context

The growing number of services faces the need to combine them to create complex services and meet users’ requirements. Discovery based on the similarity evaluation only focuses on those services with similar functions. Techniques based on the conventional semantic Web offer many relations to connect services, but considerable time is spent on reasoning. This paper proposes an approach to discover associated service flows for the purpose of combination. The authors firstly obtain the text descriptions with rich semantics about the service functions from the Web to build the service contexts. They then create E-FCM representation for services based on the contexts to describe the functions of services because it can keep the semantic information and be automatically created. Furthermore, instead of reasoning, the association relations among services can be quickly found based on computation. Associated web service flows are generated from the association relations to recommend services with related functions to users. Thus, discovery effectiveness can be improved and facilitate the utilization of services.