Selection

This chapter discusses one important Semantic Web Service related task, namely, selection. Selection is the process where one service which best satisfies the user preferences is selected from the candidate services returned from the service discovery stage. Before describing the service selection process itself, the first part of this chapter will present our solution for modeling nonfunctional properties of services. These descriptions are vital for selection, since scenarios such as “I want the cheapest and fastest service,” involving price and execution time nonfunctional properties, are very common. The last part of this chapter focuses on the service selection process describing our approach with a strong emphasis on a core subprocess, namely, service ranking.