A pragmatic based web service description and discovery mechanism within service orientated contexts

Contemporary techniques for web service description and discovery are insufficient when considering diverse and variable organisational contexts. Strategic objectives, organisational structures, business processes and technology when placed into a climate of constant change impact the normative behavioural patterns of people working in all kinds of organisations. Such dynamic conditions profoundly affect the discovery of appropriate web services. To overcome this challenge, a stratagem based upon semiotic theory is used to define a mechanism that enriches existing web service description approaches with techniques that enable the varied and erratic character of web service consumer organisational contexts to be captured and added as pragmatic information to web service description. Calibrated against an established sign classification scheme, the signs exchanged between web service providers and consumers reveal areas that pragmatic information complements existing web service description methods. United with established semiotic techniques for understanding organisational behaviour - affordances and norms, semiotic theory is used to form shared semiosis in joint action between web service providers and consumers. Encapsulating the signs exchanged in communication and supplementing them with pragmatic information made it possible to specify and apply a norm- based software agent to describe and discover web services on behalf of web service consumers. Assisted by speech act theory in a communication architecture specialised for web service description, the norm based software agent follows a dedicated negotiation protocol to add and make use of pragmatic information related to web services. To demonstrate the effectiveness of adding pragmatic information to web services, a case study shows that such descriptions when augmented with pragmatic information enhances the matching of web services to organisations with diverse and unpredictable contexts. The case study validates the approach taken to defining and building a mechanism for web service description and discovery and the relevance of semiotic theory to challenge the issues associated with web service utilisation.