A vast majority of web services exist without explicit associated semantic descriptions. As a result many services that are relevant to a specific user service request may not be considered during service discovery. In this paper, we address the issue of web service discovery given no explicit service description semantics that match a specific service request. Our approach to semantic based web service discovery involves semantic-based service categorization and semantic enhancement of the

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... ice request. We propose a solution for achieving functional level service categorization based on an ontology framework. Additionally, we utilize clustering for accurately classifying the web services based on service functionality. The semantic-based categorization is performed offline at the universal description discovery and integration (UDDI). The semantic enhancement of the service request achieves a better matching with relevant services. The service request enhancement involves expansion of additional terms (retrieved from ontology) that are deemed relevant for the requested functionality. An efficient matching of the enhanced service request with the retrieved service descriptions is achieved utilizing Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). Our experimental results validate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed approach.