An ontology-based mechanism for automatic categorization of web services

The addition of semantic information into Web services (WS) results in more accurate search and retrieval in service registries. The key issue to facilitate organization of services, taking into account their semantics, is the development of automatic mechanisms that generate appropriate mappings between Web service elements and their semantics-enabled counterparts. In this paper, we introduce an ontology-based mechanism for automatic semantic categorization of WS and their structural components. The presented approach, as opposed to similar ones, takes into account the lexicographic, structural, and data type characteristics of WS. Moreover, a software tool that implements the proposed service categorization mechanism is presented, and a benchmark process is executed that reveals outstanding performance of the developed mechanism in comparison with a relevant state-of-the-art approach. Copyright (c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.