The ability to rapidly locate useful on-line services (e.g. software applications, software components, process models, or service organizations), as opposed to simply useful documents, is becoming increasingly critical in many domains. Current service retrieval technology is, however, notoriously prone to low precision. This paper describes a novel service retrieval approached based on the sophisticated use of process ontologies. Our preliminary evaluations suggest that this approach offers qualitatively higher retrieval precision than existing (keyword and tablebased) approaches without sacrificing recall and computational tractability/scalability.

The ability to rapidly locate useful on-line services (e.g. software applications, software components, process models, or service organizations), as opposed to simply useful documents, is becoming increasingly critical in many domains. As the sheer number of such services increases it will become increasingly more important to provide tools that allow people (and software) to quickly find the services they need, while minimizing the burden for those who wish to list their services with these search engines. This can be viewed as a critical enabler of the `friction-free' markets of the `new economy'. Current service retrieval technology is, however, seriously deficient in this regard. The information retrieval community has focused on the retrieval of documents, not services per se, and has as a result emphasized keyword-based approaches. Those approaches achieve fairly high recall but low precision. The software agents and distributed computing communities have developed...

Abstract- Service discovery has been recognised as an important activity for service-based systems. In this paper we describe a framework for dynamic service discovery that supports the identification of service during the execution time of service-based systems. In the framework, services are identified based on structural, behavioural, quality, and contextual characteristics of a system represented in query languages. The framework supports both pull and push modes of query execution. In the approach, a service is identified based on the computation of distances between a query and a candidate service. A prototype tool has been implemented in order to illustrate and evaluate the framework. The paper also describes the results of a set of experiments that we have conducted to evaluate the work. I.