Specificity-Aware Ontology Generation for Improving Web Service Clustering

抄録

With the expansion of the Internet, the number of available Web services has increased. Web service clustering to identify functionally similar clusters has become a major approach to the efficient discovery of suitable Web services. In this study, we propose a Web service clustering approach that uses novel ontology learning and a similarity calculation method based on the specificity of an ontology in a domain with respect to information theory. Instead of using traditional methods, we generate the ontology using a novel method that considers the specificity and similarity of terms. The specificity of a term describes the amount of domain-specific information contained in that term. Although general terms contain little domain-specific information, specific terms may contain much more domain-related information. The generated ontology is used in the similarity calculations. New logic-based filters are introduced for the similarity-calculation procedure. If similarity calculations using the specified filters fail, then information-retrieval-based methods are applied to the similarity calculations. Finally, an agglomerative clustering algorithm, based on the calculated similarity values, is used for the clustering. We achieved highly efficient and accurate results with this clustering approach, as measured by improved average precision, recall, F-measure, purity and entropy values. According to the results, specificity of terms plays a major role when classifying domain information. Our novel ontology-based clustering approach outperforms comparable existing approaches that do not consider the specificity of terms.