Implementation of Mining Techniques to Enhance Discovery in Service-Oriented Computing

Web services have become the de facto platform for developing enterprise applications using existing interoperable and reusable services that are accessible over networks. Development of any service-based application involves the process of discovering and combining one or more required services (i.e. service discovery) from the available services, which are quite large in number. With the availability of several services, manually discovering required services becomes impractical and time consuming. In applications having composition or dynamic needs, manual discovery even prohibits the usage of services itself. Therefore, effective techniques which extract relevant services from huge service repositories in relatively short intervals of time are crucial. Discovery of service usage patterns and associations/relationships among atomic services would facilitate efficient service composition. Further, with availability of several services, it is more likely to find many matched services for a given query, and hence, efficient methods are required to present the results in useful form to enable the client to choose the best one. Data mining provides well known exploratory techniques to extract relevant and useful information from huge data repositories. In this chapter, an overview of various issues of service discovery and composition and how they can be resolved using data mining methods are presented. Various research works that employ data mining methods for discovery and composition are reviewed and classified. A case study is presented that serves as a proof of concept for how data mining techniques can enhance semantic service discovery.