A PROBING-BASED APPROACH TO SEMANTIC ANNOTATION OF BIOINFORMATICS WEB SERVICES

Abstract

Semantic annotation of Web services is achieved by associating parts of service interface descriptions (e.g., operations, parameters and datatypes) to concepts defined in a semantic model, such as an ontology. Annotating Web services with semantic metadata is currently a manual procedure that is conducted by human annotators. In practice, however, service annotation can be both time-consuming and error-prone to implement on real-world Web services. We have investigated this problem in the bioinformatics domain, where certain characteristics shared by many Web services make them a difficult breed to annotate with semantics. By taking these characteristics into consideration, in this thesis we describe a probing-based technique that identifies upper and lower semantic bounds for the annotation of Web service input parameters. The output bounds can serve as a useful starting point for human annotators and could help reduce the required effort in the semantic annotation process. Our experiment results showed the probing-based technique was overall able to produce better candidate annotation sets in comparison with an existing string similarity matching based annotation tool.

Date of Award	31 Dec 2011
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Suzanne Embury (Supervisor)