Crawling for Customers

seekda is actively participating in this Austrian research project to continuously improve the quality of its Web Service search engine.

  Abstract:

The Web is moving from a collection of static documents to a collection of services. Web Services are today accepted as a common standard for realizing service interchanges in a business to business context. The discovery of Web Services is essential for creating and utilizing dynamically created applications. Current technologies provide means to describe services on a syntactical level, thus providing only limited automation support. For efficient service discovery, a good characterization of functional and non-functional properties is though essential. The aim of the Service-Detective project is to make Web Services available to potential consumers in a similar way as static Web documents are made available to users by current state-of-the-art search engines. The project will deliver a search engine that will crawl the Web for services and that will thus not be limited to explicitly published services. The crawler will identify Web Service descriptions with focus on RESTful services, i.e. so-called Web APIs. All available information will be analyzed and added to a cohesive semantic model. In particular Service-Detective will focus on integrating dynamic aspects of the service requesters and on building meaningful clusters of services.

Key Facts

• Partners: STI Innsbruck, Information Retrieval Facility
• Funded by: FIT-IT
• Objective: create an architecture for a Web Service search engine that automatically aggregates information from heterogeneous sources to facilitate discovery of both WSDL and RESTful services
• Homepage: http://service-detective.sti2.at/