Ontology learning for cost-effective large-scale semantic annotation of web service interfaces

Abstract

In this paper we introduce a novel unsupervised ontology learning approach, which can be used to automatically derive a reference ontology from a corpus of web services for annotating semantically the Web services in the absence of a core ontology. Our approach relies on shallow parsing technique from natural language processing in order to identify grammatical patterns of web service message element/part names and exploit them in construction of the ontology. The generated ontology is further enriched by introducing relationships between similar concepts. The experimental results on a set of global Web services indicate that the proposed ontology learning approach generates an ontology, which can be used to automatically annotate around 52% of element part and field names in a large corpus of heterogeneous Web services. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.