Flexible matching and ranking of web service advertisements

With the growing number of service advertisements in service marketplaces, there is a need for matchmakers which select and rank functionally similar services based on non-functional properties, such as QoS and reputation parameters. Current matchmakers only support predefined service description languages and predefined third-party repositories of service description documents, which both are hard-coded inside their internal structure, forcing providers to publish their services using a specific service publishing component. Therefore, current matchmakers are not able to look for existing services which are published using different service publishers. In this paper, we propose a flexible matchmaker for service discovery, selection, and ranking, taking both functional and non-functional properties of the services into account. The matchmaker provides an expressive language for the clients to define service requests, specifying involved repositories, non-functional properties and a utility function for ranking Web services. The proposed matchmaker enables clients to search inside existing UDDI and third-party repositories and match already published services, while supporting different service description languages as well as emerging languages. Independency from the service description language and the type of the third-party repository is preserved as long as very basic constraints are satisfied.