A BIDIRECTIONAL SEARCH TECHNIQUE FOR WEB SERVICE COMPOSITION

Abstract

The World. Wide Web has seen a movement from being a human-centric web to an application-centric web i.e. from web pages to web services. With the increase in the number of web services over the past few years, efficient web service composition mechanisms to search for composite services are becoming important parameters for businesses to succeed. Web service composition means providing new services that do not exist on their own, using only the existing web services. Therefore, in order to have a more complex service, we can use some semantically related simpler web services and integrate them in such a way that the whole set provides the desired service. In essence, web service composition can be viewed as the problem where the output parameters of a web service can be used as the input parameters of another web service. A number of web service composition schemes have been proposed. However, the performance time of these schemes is still a matter of concern due to the large number of web services. There are web service specification languages that specify semantic properties of web services; instead of these we use these semantic properties to create an abstract model of web service dependencies. In this work we present a model of web service dependencies. For this model we adapt and implement an existing heuristic search technique to generate composite web services. The effectiveness of our approach is validated by comparing our technique with existing techniques. We have implemented our framework in JAVA using NetBeans IDE 6.1.