Semantic annotation of web services: A comparative study

Abstract

A Web service is software that provides its functionality through the Web using a common set of technologies, including SOAP, WSDL and UDDI. This allows access to software components residing on different platforms and written in different programming languages. However, several spots, including the service discovery and composition, remain difficult to be automated. Thus, a new technology has emerged to help automate these tasks; it is the Semantic Web Services (SWS). One solution to the engineering of SWS is the annotation. In this paper, an approach for annotating Web services is presented. The approach consists of two processes, namely the categorization and matching. Both processes use ontology matching techniques. In particular, the two processes use similarity measures between entities, strategies for computing similarities between sets and a threshold corresponding to the accuracy. Thus, an internal comparative study has been done to answer the questions: which strategy is appropriate to this approach? Which measure gives best results? And which threshold is optimum for the selected measure and strategy? An external comparative study is also useful to prove the efficacy of this approach compared to existing annotation approaches. © 2013 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.