An automated and fuzzy approach for semantically annotating services

In the recent past, semantic technologies have played an significant role in service retrieval and service querying. Annotating services semantically enables machines to understand the purpose of services and can further assist in intelligent and precise service retrieval, selection and composition. A key issue in semantically annotating services is the manual nature of service annotation. Manual service annotation requires a large amount of time and updating happens infrequently, hence annotations may get out-of-date due to service description changes. Although some researchers have studied semantic service annotation, they have only focused on web services not business service information. Moreover, their approaches are semi-automated, and still require service providers to select appropriate service annotations. In this paper, we propose a completely automated semantic annotation approach for e-services. The aim of this paper is to semantically annotate a service to relevant service concepts in domain-specific ontologies. Services and service concepts are represented by an extended VSM model, based on fuzzy rules. Then, we link a service to a concept, based on the similarity value of the representing vectors. We found during the experimentation process that the performances of the proposed approach and the VSM-based approach were quite similar and, as a result, developed a system to retrieve services that are annotated to relevant concepts. Experiments using a high service retrieval threshold demonstrated a retrieval approach based on extended VSM annotation performed much better than an approach based on VSM annotation.