Abstract

As the number of publicly available services grows, discovering proper services becomes an important issue and has attracted amount of attempts. This paper presents a new customizable and effective matchmaker, called SAWSDL-iMatcher. It supports a matchmaking mechanism, named iXQuery, which extends XQuery with various similarity joins for SAWSDL service discovery. Using SAWSDL-iMatcher, users can flexibly customize their preferred matching strategies according to different application requirements. SAWSDL-iMatcher currently supports several matching strategies, including syntactic and semantic matching strategies as well as several statistical-model-based matching strategies which can effectively aggregate similarity values from matching on various types of service description information such as service name, description text, and semantic annotation. Besides, we propose a semantic matching strategy to measure the similarity among SAWSDL semantic annotations. These matching strategies have been evaluated in SAWSDL-iMatcher on SAWSDL-TC2 and Jena Geography Dataset (JGD). The evaluation shows that different matching strategies are suitable for different tasks and contexts, which implies the necessity of a customizable matchmaker. In addition, it also provides evidence for the claim that the effectiveness of SAWSDL service matching can be significantly improved by statistical-model-based matching strategies. Our matchmaker is competitive with other matchmakers on benchmark tests at S3 contest 2009.