Discovering semantic associations between Web services based on the electrostatic force theory

摘要

Web service has become a well accepted technology for e-commerce, heterogeneous application integration, e-science and cloud computing. Discovering and representing inherent semantic associations between Web services has attracted much attention due to the wide applications of automatic service discovery and composition. In this paper, we look upon the operations in a WSDL document as service components. An analogy is made between service components and electrons, between Web service and charged body of electrons. First, we are to measure the semantic associations between service components based on the Coulomb force formula in the electrostatic force theory. For this purpose, by statistical computations on the historical logs of service invocations, we give a PageRank-based method for measuring the importance of a service component and define a distance measure between them. Then, by adopting the basic idea of evidence superposition, we give the method for measuring the semantic association between WSDL-described Web services based on those of concerned service components. Our proposal in this paper is intuitively established on the electrostatic force theory, and thus it is physically interpretable. Experimental results show the efficiency, feasibility and effectiveness of our methods.