An Intuitive and Formal Description of Preferences for Semantic Web Service Discovery and Ranking (Technical Report ISA-12-TR-07)

Abstract

Preference modeling constitutes an essential component for the execution of Semantic Web Service (SWS) discovery and, especially, ranking processes, providing facilities to define user requests and preferences. In this technical report we describe our proposed preference model, introducing in Section 1 the existing challenges on this topic that motivates our research work. Section 2 presents an abstract upper ontology to define both services and user requests, that serves as a common model to make our proposal independent from concrete SWS frameworks. Then, Section 3 further describes, both intuitively and formally, our preference model and its facilities to define preferences within a user request. Finally, we sum up the main characteristics of our solution to model preferences for discovery and ranking in Section 4, discussing its fulfillment degree with respect to our identified challenges on preference modeling.