International Journal of Information Systems and Social Change, 2(2), 37-54, April-June 2011 37
A Query-Based Approach for
Semi-Automatic Annotation
of Web Services
Mohammad Mourhaf AL Asswad, Brunel University, UK
Sergio de Cesare, Brunel University, UK
Mark Lycett, Brunel University, UK
ABSTRACT
Semantic Web services (SWS) have attracted increasing attention due to their potential to automate discovery
and composition of current syntactic Web services. An issue that prevents a wider adoption of SWS relates
to the manual nature of the semantic annotation task. Manual annotation is a difficult, error-prone, and
time-consuming process and automating the process is highly desirable. Though some approaches have
been proposed to semi-automate the annotation task, they are difficult to use and cannot perform accurate
annotation for the following reasons: (1) They require building application ontologies to represent candidate services and (2) they cannot perform accurate name-based matching when labels of candidate service
elements and ontological entities contain Compound Nouns (CN). To overcome these two deficiencies, this
paper proposes a query-based approach that can facilitate semi-automatic annotation of Web services. The
proposed approach is easy to use because it does not require building application ontologies to represent
services. Candidate service elements that need to be annotated are extracted from a WSDL file and used to
generate query instances by filling a Standard Query Template. The resulting query instances are executed
against a repository of ontologies using a novel query execution engine to find appropriate correspondences
for candidate service elements. This query execution engine employs name-based and structural matching
mechanisms that can perform effective and accurate similarity measurements between labels containing
CNs. The proposed semi-automatic annotation approach is evaluated by employing it to annotate existing
Web services using published domain ontologies. Precision and recall are used as evaluation metrics. The
resulting precision and recall values demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed approach.
Keywords:
Compound Nouns, Ontology Learning, Semantic Matching, Semantic Web Services, SemiAutomatic Annotation of Web Services, Web Services
INTRODUCTION
Web services are software components that
can enable flexible, low cost and platform-
independent application communication and
integration (Paolucci, Kawamura, Payne, &
Sycara, 2002). The Web service framework is
mainly composed of XML-based standards as
follows (Curbera et al., 2002):
DOI: 10.4018/jissc.2011040103
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38 International Journal of Information Systems and Social Change, 2(2), 37-54, April-June 2011
•
•
•
SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol),
which is a messaging protocol that facilitates message exchange among services.
WSDL (Web Service Description Language), which describes the service interface as a set of communication endpoints
that enable message exchange.
UDDI (Universal Description Discovery
and Integration), which is a centralized
directory of service description.
For Web services to meet the needs of
future Web applications, it is essential to enable on-the-fly discovery and composition of
services (Agarwal, Handschuh, & Staab, 2003).
Unfortunately, the use of existing Web service
standards alone does not enable the desired
automation and agility of service discovery
and composition – primarily because these
standards lack the necessary semantic constructs
(Sivashanmugam et al., 2003; Sycara, Paolucci,
Ankolekar, & Srinivasan, 2003). The utilization of semantics, represented in the form of
ontologies, in the area of Web services launched
an active research area called “Semantic Web
Services” (SWS) (McIlraith, Son, & Zeng,
2001; Sycara et al., 2003).
SWS has attracted increasing attention
in computer science and information systems
research (Feier, Roman, Polleres, Domingue,
& Fensel, 2005; Jacek, Tomas, Carine, &
Joel, 2007; Martin et al., 2007). Successful
implementation of SWS, however, requires
the existence of suitable methods for SWS
description (Lara, Roman, Polleres, & Fensel,
2004), catering for service elements such as
inputs and outputs annotated using suitable
semantic metadata (Verma & Sheth, 2007). In
this context, annotation means explicitly referencing the data and functional elements of a
service using concepts from shared ontologies.
The annotation process is currently performed
manually and thus requires comprehensive human involvement. Automating the annotation
task is highly desirable as the manual process
is tedious, error-prone and difficult (Hepp,
2006; Patil, Oundhakar, Sheth, & Verma, 2004;
Rajasekaran, Miller, Verma, & Sheth, 2005).
Few approaches have looked at the
problem of semi-automatic annotation. Those
approaches that exist can be categorized twofold: First, approaches that automatically build
ontologies to represent semantics of given
services using learning techniques. Examples
of this class of techniques are the approaches
of Chifu, Salomie, and Chifu (2007) and Heb
and Kushmerick (2003). Second, approaches
that require manual development of application ontologies that model implicit semantics
of WSDL files. Such application ontologies
are then matched against existing domain ontologies using semantic matching techniques in
order to find appropriate correspondences that
are then used to annotate service data. These
approaches are called semantic matching-based
approaches. Examples of this category are
Patil et al., (2004) and Duo, Juan-Zi, and Bin
(2005). Current approaches in both categories
have limitations:
•
•
Manual ontology building is difficult and
requires extensive technical and domain
knowledge. On the other hand, automatic
ontology development using learning
techniques is still under development and
results in ontologies that are of questionable quality.
Matching-based approaches utilize similarity measurement mechanisms that do
not produce precise results when labels
of ontological classes and Web service
elements are composed of multiple words
i.e. Compound Nouns (CNs).
In response to the increasing need for an effective semi-automatic Web service annotation
approach; this paper proposes a novel annotation
framework that can facilitate easier and more
effective WSDL annotation in comparison to
other approaches. This approach takes as inputs
a WSDL file and a set of ontologies that cover
domains of data of the given service. The proposed approach is easy to use because it does
not require building application ontologies to
represent service data. Rather, Web service data
are extracted and used to fill a Standard Query
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