A Semantic P2P Overlay Network for Web Service Discovery

In service-oriented environments the service discovery mechanisms adopting a key-word based and centralised approach are not able to provide the users' requests with accurate results, nor are any longer able to scale against the increasing number of Web Services provided by service providers. Distributed, semantics-enabled infrastructures for service discovery promise to fulfill these requirements, even though the ambitious goal of a dynamic selection and automated integration of web services has not been accomplished yet. In this paper we present a P2P-based infrastructure supporting a scalable service discovery process. Overlay groups are formed by clustering together peers offering services which are semantically related: a search request for a service (query) will be handled by the group where it has the highest chance to be satisfied. The main focus of the paper is on the groups creation and maintenance strategy, and on the query routing mechanism. A system prototype has been implemented and validated through a case study.