Contextualized semantic analysis of web services

The poor locality of operation descriptions expressed in the Web Service Description Language (WSDL) makes them difficult to analyze and compare in web service discovery tasks. This problem has led us to develop a new method for service operation comparison involving contextualizing operation descriptions by inlining related type information from other sections of the service description. In this paper, we show that this contextualization of web service descriptions can enable topic models (statistical techniques for identifying relationships) to produce semantically meaningful results that can be used to reverse engineer service-oriented web systems and automatically identify related web service operations. Specifically, we model contextualized WSDL service operations using Latent Dirichlet Allocation, and show how this approach can be used to more accurately find similar web service operations.