Clustering Web Services for Automatic Categorization

Analyzing the functionality of Web services is the basis of using Web services effectively and efficiently. The first step in such analysis of Web services is to categorize different services, which may be offered by different service providers, based on their functionalities. In this paper, we present a clustering-based approach to Web service categorization in order to form a hierarchy of service taxonomy. Our novel clustering scheme takes into consideration not only individual factors such as input or output of service operations, but also the latent inter-relationships among the individual factors. Given a set of services that may or may not have been categorized, we adopt individual methods to handle the issue and mark out their classification labels in terms of a common (given) taxonomy, such as UNSPSC. When a new service description is published, the unclassified service is compared with the classified ones and measures of the likelihood that the new service description is belonging to each cluster are calculated. Based on this calculation, the service will be assigned to a suitable category.