Towards Automatic Tagging for Web Services

Tagging technique is widely used to annotate objects in Web 2.0 applications. Tags can support web service understanding, categorizing and discovering, which are important tasks in a service-oriented software system. However, most of existing web services' tags are annotated manually. Manual tagging is time-consuming. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to tag web services automatically. Our approach consists of two tagging strategies, tag enriching and tag extraction. In the first strategy, we cluster web services using WSDL documents, and then we enrich tags for a service with the tags of other services in the same cluster. Considering our approach may not generate enough tags by tag enriching, we also extract tags from WSDL documents and related descriptions in the second step. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, a series of experiments are carried out based on web-scale web services. The experimental results show that our tagging method is effective, ensuring the number and quality of generated tags. We also show how to use tagging results to improve the performance of a web service search engine, which can prove that our work in this paper is useful and meaningful.