Cost-Effective Semantic Annotation of XML Schemas and Web Service Interfaces

Research in the field of semantic Web services aims at automating the discovery, selection, composition and management of Web services based on semantic descriptions. However, the applicability of many solutions developed in this field is hampered by the costs associated with semantically annotating large repositories of Web services. To overcome this gap we propose a practical method for semantically annotating collections of XML Schemas and Web service interfaces. We have evaluated this method on a large repository of governmental Web services. The evaluation shows that relatively simple techniques are surprisingly cost-effective, saving hundreds of man-hours of semantic annotation effort. Moreover, the proposed method does not assume the availability of a preexisting ontology or controlled vocabulary. Instead, the space of annotations is dynamically built during the annotation process.