Structured Collaborative Tagging: Is It Practical for Web Service Discovery?

One of the key requirements for the success of Service Oriented Architecture is discoverability of Web services. However, public services suffer from the lack of metadata. Current methods to provide such metadata are impractical for the volume of services published on the Web: they are too expensive to be implemented by a service broker, and too difficult to be used for retrieval. We introduce structured collaborative tagging to address these issues. Here, user tags not only aspects relevant for her but also suggested ones (input, output and behavior). Cost, performance and usability of the proposed technique obtained during the Semantic Service Selection 2009 contest are reported. Obtained results suggests that there is no “free lunch.” While the method is user-friendly and supports effective retrieval, it still involves cost of attracting the community, and is practical only as complementary one. The analysis shows this is due to user’s autonomy as to what, when and how to tag.