SPRANKER: a discovery tool to rank service providers using quality of experience

The HPC-Lab at ISTI-CNR is investigating the topic of service discovery with the aim of supporting service-oriented architectures (SOAs) on Grid computing infrastructures. We present a brief overview of SPRanker (Service Provider Ranker), a discovery tool that, unlike the usual service discovery components, retrieves provider information rather than service descriptions. At its core SPRanker exploits a score formula based on information retrieval that takes into account judgments expressed collaboratively by past service users.