A Multi-criteria Service Ranking Approach Based on Non-Functional Properties Rules Evaluation

Service oriented architectures (SOAs) are quickly becoming the de-facto solutions for providing end-to-end enterprise connectivity. However realizing the vision of SOA requires, among others, solutions for one fundamental challenge, namely service ranking. Once a set of services that fulfill the requested functionality is discovered, an ordered list of services needs to be created according to users preferences. These preferences are often expressed in terms of multiple non-functional properties (NFPs). This paper proposes a multi-criteria ranking approach for semantic web services. We start by briefly introducing ontological models for NFPs. These models are used to specify rules which describe NFP aspects of services and goals/requests. The ranking mechanism evaluates these NFPs rules using a reasoning engine and produces a ranked list of services according to users preferences.