Automatic selection of Web services based on attributes and ratings

Web services are a unified framework that enables the exchange of information among distributed applications using existing World Wide Web communications technologies. Web services offer the benefit of simplifying the sharing of information among different applications that are operated via remote terminals. However, when multiple services exist that provide the same functionality, a mechanism for automatically selecting the most appropriate service from those on offer is necessary. Unfortunately, the majority of automatic selection mechanisms are designed to use a fixed set of indicators as the selection criteria and are therefore unable to adapt to the diverse demands of users. In this paper we propose a new mechanism for automatically performing such service selection that integrates a wide range of different indicators. Specifically, we assign attributes to each of the services that can be used as evaluation criteria; we then gather these attributes at the user's client. We can compute a rating for each service on the basis of the attributes that have been collected and select the service that is assigned the highest rating. In this paper we introduce the concept of an attribute database (an attribute repository) and define a new communications protocol to enable the registration and searching of attributes in order to deal with variation in the attributes used by different services. In addition, using a simulation of a distributed applications environment, we perform evaluations and demonstrate that the proposed selection mechanism is able to reduce execution times as compared to a random selection mechanism. We also implement the proposed mechanism in an experimental environment and show that it can be used in practice for automatically selecting services on the basis of attribute values. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 1, 90(8): 40–49, 2007; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecja.20284 Copyright © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.Copyright © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.