Learning domain ontologies for Web service descriptions: an experiment in bioinformatics

ABSTRACT

The reasoning tasks that can be performed with semantic web service descriptions depend on the quality of the domain ontologies used to create these descriptions. However, building such domain ontologies is a time consuming and difficult task.We describe an automatic extraction method that learns domain ontologies for web service descriptions from textual documentations attached to web services. We conducted our experiments in the field of bioinformatics by learning an ontology from the documentation of the web services used in ^myGrid, a project that supports biology experiments on the Grid. Based on the evaluation of the extracted ontology in the context of the project, we conclude that the proposed extraction method is a helpful tool to support the process of building domain ontologies for web service descriptions.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.5 On-line Information Services
          Subjects: Web-based services

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.4 INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS
      H.4.m Miscellaneous

  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
      I.2.6 Learning
          Subjects: Knowledge acquisition
      I.2.7 Natural Language Processing
          Subjects: Text analysis

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Languages

Keywords:
OWL-S, Web services, bioinformatics, domain ontology, ontology evaluation, ontology learning, semantic Web