Web-Service Clustering with a Hybrid of Ontology Learning and Information-Retrieval-Based Term Similarity

Organizing Web services into functionally similar clusters, is an efficient approach to discovering Web services efficiently. An important aspect of the clustering process is calculating the semantic similarity of Web services. Most current clustering approaches are based on similarity-distance measurement, including keyword, ontology and information-retrieval-based methods. Problems with these approaches include a shortage of high quality ontologies and a loss of semantic information. In addition, there has been little fine-grained improvement in existing approaches to service clustering. In this paper, we present a new approach to grouping Web services into functionally similar clusters by mining Web service documents and generating an ontology via hidden semantic patterns present within the complex terms used in service features to measure similarity. If calculating the similarity using the generated ontology fails, the similarity is calculated by using an information-retrieval-based term-similarity method that adopts term-similarity measuring techniques used by thesaurus and search engines. Another important aspect of high performance in clustering is identifying the most suitable cluster center. To improve the utility of clusters, we propose an approach to identifying the cluster center that combines service similarity with the term frequency-inverse document frequency values of service names. Experimental results show that our clustering approach performs better than existing approaches.