Programming-by-Example Meets the Semantic Web: Using Ontologies and Web Services to Close the Semantic Gap

Programming-by-example (PbE) as a technique can only make substantial progress by addressing the open problem commonly known as the Semantic Gap. This gap is the discrepancy between what the user intended by their actions, and how the inference engine generalizes the actions for reuse in a program. The Seahawk/Daggoo PbE system attempts to close this gap in a novel way: by using Semantic Web and Web Service resources as the building blocks the user manipulates during the demonstration stage of PbE. This eliminates the need for PbE inference by leveraging domain-specific Web Services and community-based agreements about data meanings. The semantic gap in PbE is closed a priori because of semantic agreement between users and service providers within a domain. The new PbE system has been tested in the domain of Bioinformatics to create Web Service workflows, with justification and results reported here. Fundamentally, Seahawk/Daggoo is domain-agnostics because semantics are defined in Web-based ontologies rather than by the PbE system itself. Novel action-to-workflow concept mappings are also introduced.