WSColab: Structured Collaborative Tagging for Web Service Matchmaking

Current approaches use authoritatively defined taxonomies to categorize services which simply does not work for the flood of services being published on the Web in uncoordinated manner. Collaborative tagging claims to address this problem but it suffers from the lack of structure to describe Web service interfaces.

Web Service Classification Schema

We introduce structured collaborative tagging classification schema which can provide Web service descriptions for both categorization and interface matchmaking approaches.

I have developed the portal where the community could annotate Web services using the proposed classification schema. from the Jena Geoghrapy Dataset. Observe for instance tags describing the behaviour of one of services providing a distance for two geographical coordinates. Different things are important (intention gap) for the system and different participants of our experiment and differently can be expressed (vocabulary gap).

Each tag cloud corresponds to one of the Web service facets: behaviour, input, and output. The bigger the tag the more actors (i.e. the system and users) have used it.

Web Service Matchmaker

Publications

1. WSColab: Structured Collaborative Tagging for Web Service Matchmaking, 6th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies 2010, Valencia, Spain (slides)
2. Short presentation [PDF] for under-graduate students of University of Modena and Reggio-Emilia.
3. How to Describe Web Service so People Can Find It?, D-Day 2010 poster

Test it online!

1. Tagging
2. Querying

Download

• WSColab set-based matchmaker -- binaries of the plugin for Semantic Web Service Matchmaker Evaluation Environment (SME2); participated in the S3 Contest
• WSColab matchmaker -- binaries of the same plugin forced to return results followed by random non-matching results to make it comparable with other matchmakers in the contest
• Corpus of tagged service offers for Jena Geography Dataset (JDG50). It contains also XML Schema defining format of service offers accepted by WSColab matchmaker.
• Corpus of example service requests. The matchmaker accepts service requests demarcated in a simple query language:

      service_request := (predicate PREDICATE_DELIMITER)+
            predicate := facet FACET_DELIMITER TAG
                facet := INPUT | OUTPUT | BEHAVIOUR
                INPUT := 'input'
               OUTPUT := 'output'
            BEHAVIOUR := 'behaviour'
                  TAG := 'A'..'Z','a'..'z','0'..'9','_'
  PREDICATE_DELIMITER := ' ' // space
      FACET_DELIMITER := ':'

  Here is a simple example of a request:

  input:us_city input:us_state_code output:zip_codes_list behaviour:USA 
  behaviour:zip_codes

  .