The ability to rapidly locate useful on-line services (e.g. software applications, software components, process models, or service organizations), as opposed to simply useful documents, is becoming increasingly critical in many domains. Current service retrieval technology is, however, notoriously prone to low precision. This project investigates a novel service retrieval approached based on the sophisticated use of process ontologies. Our preliminary evaluations suggest that this approach offers qualitatively higher retrieval precision than existing (keyword and table-based) approaches without sacrificing recall and computational tractability/scalability.

• Prof. Abraham Bernstein, Ph. D., University of Zurich
• Mark Klein, Ph. D., MIT- Center for Coordination Science

A publicly accessible version of a Java-based PQL server is available here.

• Bernstein, Abraham, and Mark Klein. 2002.
  Discovering Services: Towards High Precision Service Retrieval
  Proceedings of the CaiSE workshop on Web Services, e-Business, and the Semantic Web: Foundations, Models, Architecture, Engineering and Applications. Toronto, Canada
  PDF-file (draft version) 
  
• Bernstein, Abraham, and Mark Klein. 2002.
  High Precision Service Retrieval
  Proceedings of the First International Semantic Web Conference
  (ISWC’02), Sardinia, Italy
  PDF-file (draft version)
  abstract
  DAML/RDF-description
  (final version is © Springer-Verlag, LNCS)
  
• Klein, Mark, and Abraham Bernstein. 2001.
  Searching for Services on the Semantic Web Using Process Ontologies
  Proceedings of the International Semantic Web Working Symposium (SWWS'2001), Stanford University, CA
  PDF-file