The Issue of Annotation

A while ago I was doing searches on Google Scholar, ACM and IEEE databases to find some good references on Web Service Annotation. To my surprise I could find only few papers which had some emphasis on annotation. It made me think whether the issue of annotation is really an issue or not. I could find lots and lots of work on WS Composition, Automated Discovery, Workflow etc but annotation was something left behind by many researchers around the world. To me annotation is a research problem because:

1. With the growing popularity of Web services, there arise issues of finding relevant services, especially with the possibility of the existence of thousands of Web services.
2. Web Services are typically used as part of larger Web processes that result from Web services composition. Current Web Service standards have focused on operational and syntactic details for implementation and execution of Web services. This limits the search mechanism for Web services to keyword-based searches.
3. With the growing number of Web Services the current search mechanism (keyword-search) is not going to be feasible way to find Web Services. As the keyword search will return virtually every service which has the keyword mentioned as part of the description. The user will then have large number of services to filter from (most of them will be irrelevant though).
4. Semantically described services will enable better service discovery and allow easier inter-operation and composition of Web Services.

Considering the role annotation is going to play in the problem space it is a need of the hour to find a suitable annotation mechanism that will be solve or eliminate the problem to an extent. I would love to know what you think about the annotation and its role in Semantic Web Services. In future posts I will discuss about different annotation models.

To every visitor of my blog. Wish you Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Until Next Time....:)