Reaching consensus: A moderated fuzzy web services discovery method

Abstract

Web services are used for developing and integrating highly distributed and heterogeneous systems in different domains such as e-business, grid services, and e-government systems. Web services discovery is a key to dynamically locating desired web services across the Internet. Prevailing research trend is to dynamically discover and compose web services in order to develop composite services that provide enhanced functionality. Existing discovery techniques do not take into account the diverse preferences and expectations of service consumers and providers which are generally used for searching or advertising web services. This paper presents a moderated fuzzy web service discovery approach to model subjective and fuzzy opinions, and to assist service consumers and providers in reaching a consensus. The method achieves a common consensus on the distinct opinions and expectations of service consumers and providers. This process is iterative such that further fuzzy opinions and preferences can be added to improve the precision of web service discovery. The proposed method is implemented as a prototype system and is tested through various experiments. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.