The World Wide Web is transitioning from being a mere collection of documents that contain useful information toward providing a collection of services that perform useful tasks. The emerging Web service technology has been envisioned as the next technological wave and is expected to play an important role in this recent transformation of the Web. By providing interoperable interface standards for application-to-application communication, Web services can be combined with component-based software development to promote application interaction and integration within and across enterprises. To make Web services for service-oriented computing operational, it is important that Web services repositories not only be well-structured but also provide efficient tools for an environment supporting reusable software components for both service providers and consumers. As the potential of Web services for service-oriented computing is becoming widely recognized, the demand for an integrated framework that facilitates service discovery and publishing is concomitantly growing.In our research, we propose a framework that facilitates Web service discovery and publishing by combining clustering techniques and leveraging the semantics of the XML-based service specification in WSDL files. We believe that this is one of the first attempts at applying unsupervised artificial neural network-based machine-learning techniques in the Web service domain. Our proposed approach has several appealing features: (1) It minimizes the requirements of prior knowledge from both service providers and consumers, (2) It avoids exploiting domain-dependent ontologies,(3) It is able to visualize the information space of Web services by providing a category map that depicts the semantic relationships among them,(4) It is able to semi-automatically generate Web service taxonomies that reflect both capability and geographic context, and(5) It allows service consumers to combine multiple search strategies in a flexible manner.We have developed a Web service discovery tool based on the proposed approach using an unsupervised artificial neural network and empirically evaluated the proposed approach and tool using real Web service descriptions drawn from operational Web services repositories. We believe that both service providers and consumers in a service-oriented computing environment can benefit from our Web service discovery approach.

This thesis addresses the question of what would be a domain independent taxonomy that is capable of representing the non-functional properties of conventional, electronic and web services. We cover all forms of services, as we prefer not to make any distinction between the three forms. Conventional service descriptions, such as newspaper advertisements, are rich in detail, and it is this richness that we wish to make available to electronic and web service descriptions. In a conventional service context, when we ask a service provider for details, perhaps by phoning the service provider, we are seeking ways to assist with decision making. It is this same decision making or reasoning that we wish to be available to electronic services. Historically, services have always been distinguished according to some criteria of a service requestor. Examples are price, payment alternatives, availability and security. We are motivated to ensure that the criteria used to evaluate conventional services are also available for electronic and web services. We believe that the ability to richly and accurately describe services has significant applicability in the areas of electronic service discovery, dynamic service composition, service comparison, service optimisation, and service management. In particular, the increased level of descriptive depth will also facilitate more thorough decision-making by a service requestor. Whilst we acknowledge the importance of service functionality, this thesis is primarily concerned with the non-functional properties of services. A service is not a function alone. It is a function performed on your behalf at a cost. And the cost is not just some monetary price; it is a whole collection of limitations. This thesis is all about these. We believe that to accurately represent any service, a description requires information relating to both the functionality and the associated constraints. We consider these constraints over the functionality of the service to be non-functional properties. We believe that a service description is only complete once the non-functional aspects are also expressed. We undertook a significant analysis of services from numerous domains. From our analysis we compiled the non-functional properties into a series of 80 conceptual models that we have categorised according to availability (both temporal and locative), payment, price, discounts, obligations, rights, penalties, trust, security, and quality. Our motivation is to provide a theoretical basis for automated service discovery, comparison, selection, and substitution. The need to describe a service is analogous with labelling for goods or products. Product labelling occurs for the safety and benefit of purchasers. Why is the same labelling not afforded for the benefit of service requestors?

In this thesis, I, as the author, have tried to propose a methodology for establishing IT service taxonomy in order to elaborate IT service portfolio and IT service catalog. As a core part of my thesis, IT service taxonomy has been discussed to manage IT services in an efficient way in the small and medium sized enterprises The small and medium sized enterprises can use the categories and sub categories of this taxonomy to define their service catalog and portfolio. In that regards, a list of IT services has been identified from the industries and has been used to define the IT service taxonomy.