Towards Semantic Web Services: An empirical evaluation of service ontology generation tools

Web services are currently the most popular way of achieving service orientation for enterprise systems over the Web. Ontologies like OWL-S and WSMO have been defined as part of the semantic Web initiative to add semantics to service descriptions. The shift from mainly using the syntactic description of a web service, WSDL, to also providing a semantic description is fundamental to the effort of incorporating semantics in various service lifecycle tasks like service discovery, matchmaking and composition. With a few tools available for manual and semi-automated mapping of WSDL to OWL-S, choosing the best tool becomes a difficult choice to make. In this paper, a comprehensive comparative evaluation of some mapping tools currently available is presented and their performance is analyzed based on different parameters in order to assist service developers in choosing the right tool. The tools considered for the evaluation presented here are WSDL2OWL-S, Mindswap OWL-S API and OWL-S Editor.