  This paper shows that the problem of web services representation is crucial
and analyzes the various factors that influence on it. It presents the
traditional representation of web services considering traditional textual
descriptions based on the information contained in WSDL files. Unfortunately,
textual web services descriptions are dirty and need significant cleaning to
keep only useful information. To deal with this problem, we introduce rules
based text tagging method, which allows filtering web service description to
keep only significant information. A new representation based on such filtered
data is then introduced. Many web services have empty descriptions. Also, we
consider web services representations based on the WSDL file structure (types,
attributes, etc.). Alternatively, we introduce a new representation called
symbolic reputation, which is computed from relationships between web services.
The impact of the use of these representations on web service discovery and
recommendation is studied and discussed in the experimentation using real world
web services.
