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A Semantic Approach for the Enhancement of
Ranking of Web Services
N.S Gowri Ganesh, Viji Gopal
Abstract— Web services are software components located
in the web which uses open protocols to communicate. A
web service is described by its WSDL document. Web
services allow clients to invoke procedures, functions, and
methods on remote objects. There are UDDI registries
pointing to the WSDL descriptions of the web services.
UDDI allows for the discovery of businesses, their web
services and the technical interfaces they make available.
A search engine takes input from the user, searches for
matching services in the repository and returns a set of
web service references to the user. The semantic
representation of a web service make the search much
context specific and meaningful. Ontology is used as a
mean for increasing the certainty of matching service
functionality. WSDL documents are converted to more
generic models and its operations are represented as a
tuple OP = <I,O,C,M>, where I is a set of input messages,
and O is a set of output messages. C is a set of concepts,
belonging to a set of ontologies. M is a mapping between
input and output messages to concepts, which assigns a
probability value p є [0, 1] that signifies the certainty of
the mapping. We propose to enhance the representation of
the semantic web service into a seven-tuple such that it is
an aid to improve the ranking of web services when the
result is given to the user by the search engine. We also
suggest some ideas for improving the response time of the
search engine.
Index Terms—availability, ontology, repository, semantic web
services
I.INTRODUCTION
T he services that are available from the internet using
some standard protocols like HTTP or SMTP to access
are called web services. Remote procedures expose input and
output parameters that a web service must support. The client
queries a UDDI registry for the service either by name,
category, identifier, or specification supported. Once located,
the client obtains information about the location of a WSDL
Manuscript received January 16, 2008.

N.S. Gowri Ganesh, Centrer for development of Advanced Computing, ,
A scientific society under Informaton & Commn. Tech.,Govt.of India, Chennai
(phone: 91-44-2461 0880; fax: 91-44-2461-0898; e-mail: nsgganesh@cdac.in).
Viji Gopal is a Master of Engineering Student in R.M.K.Engineering
College, Kavaraipettai, Chennai (e-mail: vijigopalakrishnan@gmail.com).
document from the UDDI registry. The UDDI registry
maintains pointers to the Web Service description and to the
service. The UDDI allows clients to search this registry, find
the intended service and retrieve its details.
Th emergence of Web Services developments and
standards in support of automated business integration has
driven major technological advances in the integration
software space, most notably, the Service Oriented
Architecture.
Paper Outline: The remainder of the paper is organized as
follows. Section 2 introduces the semantic web, Ontologies
and Four Tuple Representation. Section 3 and 4 proposes the
availability of web services with seven tuple representation.
We present the enhancing features in section 4, suggested
improvement in section 5 and conclude in section 6.
II.BACKGROUND
A.Semantic Web
Current web which can be assumed to be the biggest
global database lacks the existence of a semantic structure
to keep the interdependency of its components and as a
result the information available on web is mostly human
understandable. Semantic web provides some languages
that express information in a machine process-able format.
This implies that we can take more benefit from their
processing power. A huge amount of data are conceptually
related, but much of these relationships still have to be kept
in human memory and not stored in an understandable way
for machines. ultimate goal of Semantic Web is to create
some smarter content which could be understood by
machines. When the content is understood by machine,
some assertions may come out of the content and new
pieces of information will be produced.
Figure 1: The architecture of a search engine for web
services

A search engine handles queries to retrieve web services.
(figure 1). It takes as input a set of input parameters of the
web services and a set of output parameters of the web
service. The search engine contains four parts: a Crawler,
an Index, a query interface, and a result interface. The
retrieved services are ranked and presented to the user via
the result interface. The crawler discovers, analyzes and
indexes semantic descriptions of Web services. The
structure of the index allows the questions above to be
answered, by indexing services according to the concepts
they relate to, and according to their relations with other
services.
B.Ontologies
During the last few years many Semantic Web related
technologies have emerged or have been elaborated. One of
the most important parts of these improvements is the status
of ontology development languages which looks to be more
stable now. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) who
has been working intensively on semantic standards, has
approved the Resource Definition Framework (RDF) and
the OWL Web Ontology Language (OWL) and hence
provides a solid base to establish enterprise semantic
applications and has implied a significant leverage of the
Semantic Web from a research level to an industry standard
for building next generation applications.
Ontologies are building blocks of Semantic Web based
systems. Creating ontologies is not an easy task and
obviously there is no unique correct ontology for any
domain. The real quality of ontology can be assessed only
by its use in real applications. its use in real applications.
Web services enable us to access relevant applications,
but the discovery, invocation and composition of web
services still need to be supported by human interaction.
This is the point where Semantic Web comes to play and to
support web services with ontologies as an added value.
Combining the strength of web services and the added value
of Semantic Web will result in a concrete base for enterprise
applications.
C.Four Tuple Representation
Eran toch et. al proposes a search engine which uses the
above said idea of combining semantic web with ontology.
This approach relies on ontologies as a mean for increasing
the certainty of matching service functionality. By using data
integration and conceptual model techniques, WSDL
documents are analyzed and transformed into a generic
service model. Following that, the service properties are
mapped to concepts that belong to ontologies in different
domains. For instance, a library service will be mapped to
ontologies that describe book-vendors, members and book-
title concepts. A Web service is described as a set of
operations WS = {OP1,OP2, ...,OPn}. The operations, rather
than the services themselves, are the elements which will be
matched against the query. An operation is defined as a tuple
OP = <I,O,C,M>, where I is a set of input messages, and O is
a set of output messages. C is a set of concepts, belonging to a
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set of ontologies. M is a mapping between input and output
messages to concepts, which assigns a probability value p є
[0, 1] that signifies the certainty of the mapping.
The search query terms will be mapped to ontological
concepts in a similar way. We will define a query as a tuple
Query = <E,C,M>, where E is a set of structured query
expressions (which are not formally defined in this paper). C
and M have the same meaning as in the formal model of Web
services described above. Figure depicts the conceptual
models of operations and queries. The small-cap c denotes
concepts, while the i and o symbolizes the operation’s input
and output messages, respectively. The service-retrieval
problem is transformed from a mapping problem between a
query and a set of services to a mapping problem between a
set of query concepts and a set of service concepts.
The matching algorithm analyzes the ontology, using
related concepts and the structure of the ontology itself. The
results will be ranked according to the accumulated certainty
(over the set of query expressions, concepts and messages) of
the match between the query and the services.
III.SEVEN TUPLE REPRESENTATION
A.Concept of ‘Fairness’
As described above, a web service has been transformed
to concepts. Based on the affinity it is ranked and displayed
to the user. But the World Wide Web is so dynamic that it
changes every moment. The services available today may
not be working tomorrow and those who are down today
may be placed back on service tomorrow, after some
renovations or improvements. So the content of the
repository is also susceptible to this dynamic nature. The
index should show the changes that happen to the web
services listed in it.
We propose that the index should be able to show the
total time the web service was available to the user. The
availability of the web service,W during its entire life time
till the current time is termed as the fairness, F of the web
service. This is an integer value. Time stamp, T represents
the time at which the last periodic check on web service,W
was performed. LatestStatus, L represents the status of W
at the time of the last availability check on it. L is a Boolean
value. We propose to add these three parameters along with
the standard parameters of the web service ontological
representation discussed in section II.C. Now the tuple
becomes <I,O, C, M, F, T, L>.
When the result reaches the user, he is shown the values
of F, T and L so that the user can know how reliable the
web service is and what is its present status at ∆t hours
back. ∆t is the difference between the current server system
time and the time stamp, T. The time when the last
availability verification was performed is not directly shown
to the user because of the geographical diversity of the
location of users. Different places have different time zones.
Showing the number of hours before what time an
availability verification was performed eases the

complication of time conversion and ambiguities regarding
that.
Each of the parameters F, T and L is assigned an initial
value at the time the crawler enters it in the index. F is set
to an initial value of 0.500. Its maximum value is 0.999 and
minimum value is 0.001. Initial value of T is the system
time of the server at the time the web service is indexed for
the first time. Initial value of L is true.
B.Implementation of Fairness
The fairness of a web service should be calculated and
stored along with the description, in the index. We use a
verifier to update the fairness of a web service.
Figure 2: Enhanced Search Engine with Verifier
Figure 2 shows the structure of an enhanced search engine
for web services, with the verifier. The crawler crawls the
web and populates the index with the references to web
services. The verifier is invoked periodically to check the
current availability of the web services. It takes its input from
the index and checks each link in the index for liveness. It
tests the availability of a potential web service by invoking
one of its methods using randomly generated test data.
When the verifier performs an availability verification, if it
gets a SOAP response from the web service, it indicates that
the web service is in working condition. Now the verifier adds
0.001 to the current value of F. This indicates the
improvement of fairness. The higher the fairness value, the
more reliable the web service is. In other words, if the value
of F is above 0.900 it indicates that the web service was
available most of the time the verifier performed an
availability verification. If the web service was available
whenever the verifier was invoked, its value is 0.999 and does
not change further.
When the verifier performs an availability verification, if it
gets an HTTP error message, it indicates that the web service
is in not available at that time or it is permanently dead. Now
the verifier subtracts 0.001 from the current value of F. This
indicates the decrease of fairness. The lower the fairness
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value, the less reliable the web service is. In other words, if
the value of F is below 0.2, it indicates that the web service
was not responding most of the time the verifier performed an
availability verification. If the web service was not responding
whenever the verifier was invoked, its value is 0.001 and does
not change further.
C.Effect on Ranking
A web service search engine based on ontology ranks the
results in the following way. It checks the affinity between the
concepts describing the query and the service. The services
which has high affinity is given high ranking. But this
method can not ensure that a service with a high ranking is
available all the time or most of the time. Sometimes the
service may have been listed, have worked for some time and
shut down after a while.
Our approach ensures that the user is able to know the
responsiveness of a web service when the search engine gives
a result set. From the value of F, user can know how fair the
web service have been during its life time. Also he can know
the latest status of the web service at ∆t hours back when the
availability verifier performed its last check. So even if a web
service was down for a long time and its fairness value is very
low, the user may opt for giving a shot for that web service if
L shows the service is available when it was last checked.
IV.ENHANCING FAIRNESS
There are two chances that a web service does not respond
when the verifier invokes it. It may be shut down or the server
may be busy. In the latter case, actually the web service is
working but not available at present. In this case, we can
subtract a value of 0.0005 from the current value of F. This
avoids mistaking a web service as a dead one.
V.SUGGESTED IMPROVEMENT FOR BETTER PERFORMANCE OF THE
REPOSITORY
We plan to improve the response time of the search engine
by providing a cache effect to its output interface making use
of the concept of ontology.
VI.CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
Even when a rich set of ontologies is built the ontology
engineering process is not terminated, the next problem we
should deal with is the issue of ontology aging. Results,
extracted from an out-of-dated ontology can not be used in a
totally meaningful way. There should be some mechanism to
detect ontology aging and force the semantic based systems to
evolve ontologies as environmental parameters are changing.
Multilingual support is recognized as one of the most
important challenges of Semantic Web. Nowadays English is
the predominating language and about 70 percent of Internet
 4

content is in English, but only about 44 percent of Internet [18] A Min Tjoa, Amin Andjomshoaa, Ferial Shayeganfar, Roland Wagner.
users are native English speakers. Especially in India this Semantic Web-Challenges and New Requirements. Proceedings of the 16th
International Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications
issue is quite essential and the diversity of languages needs to (DEXA’05)
be taken into consideration. One method to handle this
problem is by establishing relevant inter-ontology translators
that map ontologies and content to other languages.
Also we are planning to extend the current research such
that the search engine can identify trusted service providers
because trust is something that is given very high importance
in today’s business world.

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