SAWS: A tool for semantic annotation of web services

Several frameworks for the semantic annotation of Web services have been proposed in order to enhance the processes of service discovery and composition. This paper presents SAWS, as a new tool for semantic annotation of web services with data and protocol semantics aiming the enhancement of the WSDL descriptions with semantic concepts provided by domain ontologies. The proposed tool combines string matching algorithms and the Levenshtein distance concept to attain a high degree of correctness in ranking domain ontology concepts relative to an abstract and purely syntactic element. Using a semiautomatic annotation process also contributes to increasing the efficiency in choosing the most appropriate concept matching. The evaluation of SAWS has confirmed the assumptions related to correctness and efficiency and allows us to formulate a method of determining the appropriate annotations for a large spectrum of abstract entities such as input and output elements and operations.