Correctness-aware high-level functional matching approaches for semantic Web services

Service matching approaches trade precision for recall, creating the need for users to choose the correct services, which obviously is a major obstacle for automating the service discovery and aggregation processes. Our approach to overcome this problem, is to eliminate the appearance of false positives by returning only the correct services. As different users have different semantics for what is correct, we argue that the correctness of the matching results must be determined according to the achievement of users' goals: that only services achieving users' goals are considered correct. To determine such correctness, we argue that the matching process should be based primarily on the high-level functional specifications (namely goals, achievement contexts, and external behaviors). In this article, we propose models, data structures, algorithms, and theorems required to correctly match such specifications. We propose a model called G+, to capture such specifications, for both services and users, in a machine-understandable format. We propose a data structure, called a Concepts Substitutability Graph (CSG), to capture the substitution semantics of application domain concepts in a context-based manner, in order to determine the semantic-preserving mapping transformations required to match different G+ models. We also propose a behavior matching approach that is able to match states in an m-to-n manner, such that behavior models with different numbers of state transitions can be matched. Finally, we show how services are matched and aggregated according to their G+ models. Results of supporting experiments demonstrate the advantages of the proposed service matching approaches.