Graphical and Collaborative Annotation Support for Semantic Web Services

Web services have become increasingly important for software development. In order to facilitate the search, composition, and reuse of web services, their descriptions can be semantically annotated using definitions provided by an ontology, thus creating the so-called semantic web services. A semantic web service is developed according to different approaches and standards recommended by W3C, such as OWL-S, SAWSDL, and WSMO-Lite. A limited number of tools are available to support the development of semantic annotations using SAWSDL, such as Radiant, Iridescent, and EasyWSDL. However, these tools support the annotation process at a low abstraction level, therefore requiring from users an extensive technical knowledge on XML/WSDL, among other technologies. The semantic annotation task could be facilitated if the semantic annotation process were carried at a higher abstraction level using graphical notations. Additionally, the semantic annotation could also benefit from a collaborative approach. Different people from different backgrounds could individually contribute with the semantic web services creation, regardless of their geographic locations. In that sense, this paper presents a visual notation to represent the main elements of a WSDL 2.0 specification focused on the semantic annotation using SAWSDL. The paper also describes a graphical collaborative semantic annotation support tool.