Verification of Semantic Web Service Annotations Using Ontology-Based Partitioning

Semantic annotation of web services has been proposed as a solution to the problem of discovering services to fit a particular need, and reusing them appropriately. While there exist tools that assist human users in the annotation task, e.g., Radiant and Meteor-S, no semantic annotation proposal considers the problem of verifying the accuracy of the resulting annotations. Early evidence from workflow compatibility checking suggests that the proportion of annotations that are inaccurate is high, and yet no tools exist to help annotators to test the results of their work systematically before they are deployed for public use. In this paper, we adapt techniques from conventional software testing to the verification of semantic annotations for web service input and output parameters. We present an algorithm for the testing process, and discuss ways in which manual effort from the annotator during testing can be reduced. We also present two adequacy criteria for specifying test cases used as input for the testing process. These criteria are based on structural coverage of the domain ontology used for annotation. The results of an evaluation exercise, based on a collection of annotations for bioinformatics web services, show that defects can be successfully detected by the technique.