Development of a Smart Technique for Mobile Web Services Discovery

Web service (WS) presents a good solution to the interoperability of different types of systems that aims to reduce the overhead of high processing in a resource-limited environment. With the increasing demand for mobile WS (MWS), the WS discovery process has become a significant challenging point in the WS lifecycle that aims to identify the relevant MWSs that best match the service requests. This discovery process is a resource-consuming task that cannot be performed efficiently in a mobile computing environment due to the limitations of mobile devices. Meanwhile, a cloud computing can provide rich computing resources for mobile environments given its unlimited and easily scalable resources. This paper proposes a semantic WS discovery and invocation framework in mobile environments based on cloud and a relationship-aware matchmaking algorithm. The discovery algorithm enriches MWS and user requests semantically with the functional and non-functional properties of Ontology Web Language for Services, such as Quality of Web Service, device context, and user preferences. The WS repository is filtered based on logical reasoning and a parameter-based matching algorithm to minimize the matching space and improve runtime performance. The cosine similarity between the user request and services repository is then assessed to generate the most relevant WS. The relationships among concepts in the ontology are considered to improve the recall and precision ratio. After the WS discovery process, users can invoke and test these services in a mobile environment through a dynamic user interface. The interface of the invocation process is changed according to the WS description document. An application prototype is also developed to evaluate the framework based on a Cordova cross-mobile development framework.