Managing the replaceability of web services using underlying semantics

In the context of web services, service replaceability refers to the ability of substituting one service for another. With the bloom of service-oriented computing, the effective management of service replaceability is important to make the applications unaffected once the requested service cannot work. This work studies the quantitative aspect of the replaceability of web services. FCA (Formal Concept Analysis) method is applied to reveal the pairwise replaceable relationship among web services. A novel structure, called RSLattice, is proposed to index web services on the basis of the underlying semantics, and the replaceability among services at the operation level is represented accurately. It ensures that the services having mutual replaceability are organized in the same path of RSLattice. Based on this property, we can greatly reduce the search space when retrieving the replaceable services in RSLattice. Experimental evaluation shows that RSLattice is an efficient and flexible structure for service replaceability management.