UML-Based Service Component Discovery

Abstract

Web service discovery plays an important role in constructing SOA-based applications since it is crucial to find services that can fulfill service requesters’ needs or requirements. Web service discovery can be applied in the software component retrieval problem to increase the opportunity of reuse of software components and to speed up the development of new software projects. However, most of existing service discovery schemes still cannot perform effective software component retrieval due to manual service query process, no support of service query using UML, and higher integration complexity. Therefore, we propose an approach, called UML-based Service Component Discovery (USCD), to realize two key features, transforming the UML models into WSDL (Web Services Description Language) documents as service requests and using a proposed web service discovery mechanism to assist software developers in finding out service components suiting users' requirements based on lexical similarity and component minimization. Experimental results demonstrate that USCD achieves a higher degree of precision and recall than the text-based service discovery scheme.