ASSAM: A Tool for Semi-automatically Annotating Semantic Web Services

The semantic Web Services vision requires that each service be annotated with semantic metadata. Manually creating such metadata is tedious and error-prone, and many software engineers, accustomed to tools that automatically generate WSDL, might not want to invest the additional effort. We therefore propose ASSAM, a tool that assists a user in creating semantic metadata for Web Services. ASSAM is intended for service consumers who want to integrate a number of services and therefore must annotate them according to some shared ontology. ASSAM is also relevant for service producers who have deployed a Web Service and want to make it compatible with an existing ontology. ASSAM’s capabilities to automatically create semantic metadata are supported by two machine learning algorithms. First, we have developed an iterative relational classification algorithm for semantically classifying Web Services, their operations, and input and output messages. Second, to aggregate the data returned by multiple semantically related Web Services, we have developed a schema mapping algorithm that is based on an ensemble of string distance metrics.