Bootstrapping Ontologies for Web Services
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SERVICES COMPUTING,
VOL. 5,
NO. 1,
JANUARY-MARCH 2012
33
Bootstrapping Ontologies for Web Services
Aviv Segev, Member, IEEE, and Quan Z. Sheng, Member, IEEE
Abstract—Ontologies have become the de-facto modeling tool of choice, employed in many applications and prominently in the semantic web. Nevertheless, ontology construction remains a daunting task. Ontological bootstrapping, which aims at automatically generating concepts and their relations in a given domain, is a promising technique for ontology construction. Bootstrapping an ontology based on a set of predefined textual sources, such as web services, must address the problem of multiple, largely unrelated concepts. In this paper, we propose an ontology bootstrapping process for web services. We exploit the advantage that web services usually consist of both WSDL and free text descriptors. The WSDL descriptor is evaluated using two methods, namely Term Frequency/Inverse Document Frequency (TF/IDF) and web context generation. Our proposed ontology bootstrapping process integrates the results of both methods and applies a third method to validate the concepts using the service free text descriptor, thereby offering a more accurate definition of ontologies. We extensively validated our bootstrapping method using a large repository of real-world web services and verified the results against existing ontologies. The experimental results indicate high precision. Furthermore, the recall versus precision comparison of the results when each method is separately implemented presents the advantage of our integrated bootstrapping approach. Index Terms—Web services discovery, metadata of services interfaces, service-oriented relationship modeling.
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1 INTRODUCTION service can be separated into two types of descriptions: 1) the Web Service Description Language (WSDL) describing “how” the service should be used and 2) a textual description of the web service in free text describing
VOL. 5,
NO. 1,
JANUARY-MARCH 2012
33
Bootstrapping Ontologies for Web Services
Aviv Segev, Member, IEEE, and Quan Z. Sheng, Member, IEEE
Abstract—Ontologies have become the de-facto modeling tool of choice, employed in many applications and prominently in the semantic web. Nevertheless, ontology construction remains a daunting task. Ontological bootstrapping, which aims at automatically generating concepts and their relations in a given domain, is a promising technique for ontology construction. Bootstrapping an ontology based on a set of predefined textual sources, such as web services, must address the problem of multiple, largely unrelated concepts. In this paper, we propose an ontology bootstrapping process for web services. We exploit the advantage that web services usually consist of both WSDL and free text descriptors. The WSDL descriptor is evaluated using two methods, namely Term Frequency/Inverse Document Frequency (TF/IDF) and web context generation. Our proposed ontology bootstrapping process integrates the results of both methods and applies a third method to validate the concepts using the service free text descriptor, thereby offering a more accurate definition of ontologies. We extensively validated our bootstrapping method using a large repository of real-world web services and verified the results against existing ontologies. The experimental results indicate high precision. Furthermore, the recall versus precision comparison of the results when each method is separately implemented presents the advantage of our integrated bootstrapping approach. Index Terms—Web services discovery, metadata of services interfaces, service-oriented relationship modeling.
Ç
1 INTRODUCTION service can be separated into two types of descriptions: 1) the Web Service Description Language (WSDL) describing “how” the service should be used and 2) a textual description of the web service in free text describing