Comprehensive service matching with MatchBox
Abstract
Nowadays, many service providers offer software components in the form of Software as a Service. Requesters that want to discover those services in order to use or to integrate them, need to find out which service satisfies their requirements best. For this purpose, service matching approaches determine how well the specifications of provided services satisfy their requirements (including structural, behavioral, and non-functional requirements). In this paper, we describe the tool-suite MatchBox that allows the integration of existing service matchers and their combination as part of flexibly configurable matching processes. Taking requirements and service specifications as an input, MatchBox is able to execute such matching processes and deliver rich matching results. In contrast to related tools, MatchBox allows users to take into account many different kinds of requirements, while it also provides the flexibility to control the matching process in many different ways.