CoTE-WeD: A Collaborative Tagging-based Environment for Web Service Discovery
Résumé
The number of published Web services has known a considerable growth these recent years making the task of finding the ones relevant to a requirement more and more complicated. Many approaches are proposed to solve this discovery issue. Most of them are interested only in the internal characteristics related to Web service description itself and neglect the user-centric aspect of the discovery process. User’s involvement may be seen as contributing information, after using or testing a service, which marks the personal opinion on service functionality, quality or invocation cost. This kind of contribution is perceived as a participative aspect inside the Web 2.0 environment. The success of Del.icio.us, Flickr, CiteULike and Connotea convinces us that collaborative tagging system is not only helpful in sharing and classifying Web resources but also can enhance the Web service discovery process. Without affecting actual Web 2.0 users’ habit, we illustrate in this research work, a collaborative tagging-based environment for Web service discovery (CoTE-WeD) allowing users to tag or annotate a Web service using keyword or free-text. The system implementing our environment proposes consequently two types of query to search tagged Web services: keyword-based and free-text. We put in place an advanced mode in the discovery by keyword which offers different ways to combine keywords together inside a query to make it more flexible and accurate. In both types of look-up (by keyword and by free-text), synonym relation between terms is processed using WordNet5 in order to enhance the similarity computing between a query and the tagged web services. The Web services found after a discovery process are ranked according to their tag weights, in the case of discovery by keywords.