Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chulalongkorn University, 2005

Service discovery is one key aspect in the enabling technologies for service-oriented systems including Web Services. Growing attention has been paid to the content of business and service descriptions to allow services to be discovered more flexibly and accurately. This thesis presents a semantic service description model which adopts ontology as a shared knowledge representation for describing service descriptions in a particular domain. A semantic registry is proposed to complement the standard UDDI registry to maintain semantic service descriptions and enable flexible service discovery. The semantic service description model describes service capabilities by structural and rule-based behavioural profiles as well as simple attribute and semantic attribute profiles. Service discovery will be semantics-based since query can be defined in terms of functional capabilities, behaviour, or attributes. The thesis proposes the algorithms for matchmaking andranking services against service consumers requirements. Service consumers can specify preference criteria for matching and ranking. Also, an evaluation of these algorithms is discussed