OWL-LingS Editor

A Tool for Semantic Description of Linguistic Web Services

Nabil Baklouti

, Faten Fakhfakh

, Bilel Gargouri

and Mohamed Jmaiel

ReDCAD Laboratory, University of Sfax, Sfax, Tunisia

MIRACL Laboratory, University of Sfax, Sfax, Tunisia

Keywords:

Linguistic Web Service, Non-functional Linguistic Properties, Semantic Description.

Abstract:

We propose in this paper a tool called OWL-LingS (stands for OWL for Linguistic Services) Editor providing

an augmented semantic description for Linguistic Web Services (LingWS for short). It supports an exten-

sion of OWL-S approach for representing non-functional linguistic properties. OWL-LingS uses a linguistic

domain ontology in order to semantically annotate the LingWS elements.

1 INTRODUCTION

The development of linguistic systems is very costly.

Indeed, it represents a complex task, since it needs

many competences. Hence, researchers in linguis-

tic domain have resorted to reuse existing systems.

These attempts are essentially based on Web Services

(WS for short) such as (Ishida, 2006), (Tuﬁs et al.,

2008), (Baklouti et al., 2010), and (Hayashi, 2011).

As the number of Linguistic Web Services

(LingWS for short) increases, the issue of select-

ing desired service(s) becomes a challenging research

problem. These services deal with several linguistic

applications such as Text Summarization, Translation,

and Information Retrieval (Bramantoro, 2011).

The majority of these services are described using

WSDL (Web Service Description Language). Never-

theless, the lack of semantic in WSDL prevents the

automatic discovery of WS (Papazoglou et al., 2007).

In order to overcome this issue, several semantic

approaches have been proposed. They use ontologies

for describing WS. We can cite OWL-S (W3C, 2004),

WSMO (Group, 2004), and SAWSDL (W3C, 2007).

However, they cannot represent some speciﬁc proper-

ties as well as relationships between them. Indeed, the

linguistic domain is characterized by several proper-

ties called non-functional linguistic properties such as

the processing level, phenomenon, formalism, analy-

sis type, and resources.

Elsewhere in the software engineering domain,

some extensions of semantic approaches have been

proposed such as (Aier et al., 2007) and (Jean et al.,

2010). These extensions have tried to integrate the

quality standards of WS.

In this paper, we propose a new tool which is

able to semantically describe the LingWS. This tool

is based on an extension of OWL-S which is al-

ready presented in our previous works (Baklouti et al.,

2012a) and (Baklouti et al., 2012b).

The rest of this paper is organized as follows: In

section 2, we comment on some works which deal

with the LingWS description issues. Thereafter, sec-

tion 3 provides the proposed approach. The imple-

mentation details of OWL-LingS editor and a demon-

stration are presented respectively by sections 4 and

5. Section 6 concludes the paper.

2 RELATED WORK

For enhancing the semantic description of LingWS,

Klein and Potter (Klein and Potter, 2004) have used

OWL-S for describing their LingWS. However, this

contribution has proposed an annotation of the I/O

and ignored non-functional linguistic properties (e.g,

processing level, approach, and phenomenon) which

are mandatory to know how the LingWS operates.

Toru Ishida (Ishida, 2006) has proposed a wrap-

per around LingWS that represents the LingWS Pro-

ﬁle containing the LingWS name, its type, a textual

description, LingWS status, and so on. However, this

proﬁle does not contain other relevant properties and

mainly their relations which can improve the LingWS

discovery.

In (Hayashi, 2011), the author has presented a

224

Baklouti N., Fakhfakh F., Gargouri B. and Jmaiel M..

OWL-LingS Editor - A Tool for Semantic Description of Linguistic Web Services.

DOI: 10.5220/0004374902240227

In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science (CLOSER-2013), pages 224-227

ISBN: 978-989-8565-52-5

 2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

high-level conﬁguration of a linguistic domain on-

tology, which is integrated into a comprehensive

LingWS ontology. They have examined relevant in-

ternational standards and discussed how these frame-

works can be ‘ontologized‘ and incorporated into the

comprehensive LingWS ontology. In the developed

ontology, authors did not represent the language ser-

vice I/O which are crucial in the discovery task. For

linking service speciﬁcations with domain ontology,

(Hayashi, 2011) has used the SAWSDL language

which is characterized by its simplicity and its in-

teroperability with many ontologies. Nevertheless, it

does not offer the possibility to represent precondi-

tion, effects, and other details particularly with the

richness of the linguistic knowledge.

As a result of the above, we can note that the

LingWS description should be augmented with non-

functional linguistic properties and their relationships

in order to enhance the quality of the discovery task.

3 APPROACH

We present in this section an overview of the OWL-

S extension which is already detailed in our previous

contributions (Baklouti et al., 2012a) and (Baklouti

et al., 2012b). In fact, we start with presenting some

non-functional linguistic properties, then we focus on

how to integrate these properties within the OWL-S

semantic approach.

3.1 Non-functional Linguistic

Properties

Different linguistic properties need to be modelled in

the LingWS description for enhancing LingWS dis-

covery. We present in Table 1 some examples of non-

functional linguistic properties which are further de-

tailed in (Baklouti et al., 2012a) and (Baklouti et al.,

2012b).

3.2 OWL-S Extension

The extension is based on the specialization of the

‘ServiceParameter‘ class of OWL-S ontology by one

class namely ‘ServiceProcessing Level‘ (Baklouti

et al., 2012a).

The main elements of the proposed extension are:

• ServiceProcessing Level: It represents the pro-

cessing level of the LingWS. Each of them is char-

acterized by its phenomena.

• LinguisticPhenomenon: It has the ‘reﬁned Into‘

relation, since each phenomenon has its sub-

Phenomena. The LinguisticPhenomenon has also

the relations ‘supported By‘ and ‘treated By‘ re-

spectively with the LinguisticFormalism and Ap-

proach classes.

• LinguisticFormalism: It represents the formalism

(e.g., HPSG and LFG for syntactic Grammars).

Each LinguisticFormalism has an analysis type for

resolving a phenomenon.

• Approach: It represents the treatment approach

of a phenomenon. It has the ‘reﬁned Into‘ re-

lation. An approach uses a resource to treat

a phenomenon. For this reason, we add the

‘use Resource‘ relation and the Resource class.

4 IMPLEMENTATION

In this section, we are presenting the implementation

details of the OWL-LingS (stands for OWL for Lin-

guistic Services) Editor. Indeed, we have developed

this editor to consolidate the proposed extension of

OWL-S(Baklouti et al., 2012a). Figure 1 shows the

main basics of this tool, so from a WSDL ﬁle it gen-

erates an OWL-S description using the WSDL2OWL-

S API. Then, the Service Provider chooses the re-

quired non-functional properties and he/she annotates

the LingWS I/O using the developed domain ontology

which contains several linguistic resources(Baklouti

et al., 2012a). Thus, an OWL-LingS description will

be generated and published on the service registry.

WSDL2OWL-S

Service

Registry

OWL-S

Description

Service

Provider

non-

functional

properties

Linguistic

Data

Domain

Ontology

OWL-LingS

WSDL

publish

Figure 1: OWL-LingS Editor operation.

To implement the OWL-LingS Editor, we have

done an extension of the OWL-S API

. This exten-

sion consists of adding some classes, their attributes,

and their relationships (as it is presented in (Baklouti

et al., 2012a)). Figure 2 shows the interface of our

editor.

The service provider may choose the WSDL ﬁle

URL (as it is indicated in Figure 2 by (1)), a set of

http://www.mindswap.org/2004/owl-s/api/

OWL-LingSEditor-AToolforSemanticDescriptionofLinguisticWebServices

225

Table 1: Examples of Non-Functional Linguistic Properties.

Non-Functional Linguistic Properties Examples

Processing Level Lexical, Morphological, Syntactic, and Semantic

Phenomenon Ellipsis, Accord, and Anaphora

Structural, Thematic, Syntagmatic,

Analysis Top-down, Bottom-Up, Profound,

and Surfacing or Chunking

Approach Linguistic, Statistic, and Hybrid

Formalism Uniﬁcation Grammar and Resolution Algorithm

Resource WordNet-LMF and GermaNet

Figure 2: OWL-LingS Editor Interface.

operations will be shown (as it is indicated in Figure

2 by (2)). By selecting one operation, its name, its

textual description, and its I/O are shown in area (3).

Nevertheless, the I/O types do not reﬂect the suitable

linguistic resources. For this, the service provider has

to semantically annotate the I/O by clicking on the

‘Browse‘ button and choose concepts from the do-

main ontology(Baklouti et al., 2012b). The I/O ar-

eas in Figure 2 contain the names of parameters, their

types before annotation (as it is indicated by WSDL

Type column in Figure 2), and their types after annota-

tion (as it is indicated by OWL Type column in Figure

2). In addition, the service provider can add some pa-

rameters related to the non-functional linguistic prop-

erties by choosing a value for each property. There are

some relations between properties, for example: the

service provider cannot choose the ‘Resource‘ or the

‘Linguistic Phenomenon‘ if he/she does not choose

the ‘Processing level‘ (as it is indicated by Figure 2

in area 4). Moreover, if the chosen ‘Linguistic Phe-

nomenon‘ is treated by an approach, one value from

the list of approaches will be selected. The same way

will be applied for the other non-functional linguistic

properties. In area 5, the service provider can choose

a value of ‘Sub Phenomenon‘ if the main chosen

‘Phenomenon‘ is reﬁned into a ‘Sub-phenomenon‘.

He/she can also choose a ‘Formalism‘ value if the

chosen ‘Sub-phenomenon‘ is supported by a ‘Formal-

ism‘. Besides, he/she can choose the ‘Analysis Type‘.

After choosing these values, the service provider has

to click on the Add Sub Phenomenon button, so the

chosen properties of ‘Sub-phenomenon‘ are shown

in table (see area 5 in Figure2). This process can

be repeated as many times as possible reﬁnements of

CLOSER2013-3rdInternationalConferenceonCloudComputingandServicesScience

226

the main ‘Phenomenon‘. Finally, a semantic descrip-

tion will be generated by clicking on Generate OWL-

LingS button. The generated ﬁle has an owl-lings ex-

tension.

5 DEMONSTRATION

In order to consolidate our solution, we reuse a

service library that is available in our laboratory

(Baklouti et al., 2010). It contains many LingWS.

Currently, our library contains about forty LingWS

which can be expanded by other. The available

LingWS cover some languages: Arabic, French, and

English. We obtained these LingWS from some open-

source tools like OPEN-NLP

, NLP-LIB, classi-

ﬁer4j, standford

, extjwnl

, and JavaRAP

. The ma-

jority of these tools are used by the known linguistic

platforms (e.g, GATE and UIMA). To ensure the de-

scription of these services, we use OWL-LingS Editor

allowing the generation of the OWL-LingS descrip-

tions. We choose the ‘Anaphora WS‘ as an example

of LingWS for making a practical study. The latter

ensures the resolution of the anaphora phenomenon.

It treats the ‘English‘ language and it has ‘Analysis‘

as a treatment type. In addition, it deals with the

‘Anaphora‘ phenomenon which is treated by a ‘Lin-

guistic‘ approach. This approach uses ‘WordNet‘ as a

resource to resolve the anaphora phenomenon. Also,

this phenomenon is supported by LFG (Lexical Func-

tional Grammar) formalism.

6 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

WORK

This paper provides a solution to the problems re-

lated to the lack of semantic in the LingWS descrip-

tion. Indeed, we implemented an editor called OWL-

LingS that takes into account the proposed extension

of OWL-S(Baklouti et al., 2012a).

Currently, we are deﬁning an appropriate matching

algorithm allowing the LingWS discovery through its

I/O and non-functional linguistic properties.

In the future work, we plan to deploy our editor in the

cloud. In fact, the cloud computing provides elastic

services, high performance and scalable data storage

to a large and everyday increasing number of users.

http://incubator.apache.org/opennlp/

http://nlp.stanford.edu/

http ://extjwnl.sourceforge.net/

https://github.com/WING-NUS/JavaRAP

REFERENCES

Aier, S., Offermann, P., Schonherr, M., and Schropfer, C.

(2007). Implementing non-functional service descrip-

tions in soas. In Trends in Enterprise Application Ar-

chitecture Lecture Notes in Computer Science, volume

4473/2007, pages 40–53.

Baklouti, N., Bouaziz, S., Gargouri, B., Aloulou, C., and

Jmaiel, M. (2010). Towards the reuse of lingware sys-

tems: A proposed approach with a practical experi-

ment. In Proceedings of the International Conference

on Information Integration and Web-based Applica-

tion and Services (iiWAS2010) ACM, pages 566–572,

Paris-France.

Baklouti, N., Gargouri, B., and Jmaiel, M. (2012a). En-

hancing linguistic web service description with non-

functional nlp properties. In In proceedings of the

7th International Conference on Software Paradigm

Trends (ICSOFT), pages 439–444.

Baklouti, N., Gargouri, B., and Jmaiel, M. (2012b). An

ontology-based approach for linguistic web service

description. In WETICE, pages 450–455. IEEE Com-

puter Society.

Bramantoro, A. (2011). Composing and Organizing Lan-

guage Services. PhD thesis, Ishida and Matsubara

Laboratory.

Group, E. W. W. (2004). Web service modeling ontology.

http://www.wsmo.org/.

Hayashi, Y. (2011). Prospects for an ontology-grounded

language service infrastructure. In Proceedings of

Workshop on Language Resources, Technology and

Services in the Sharing Paradigm, page 17, Chiang

Mai, Thailand.

Ishida, T. (2006). Language grid: An infrastructure for in-

tercultural collaboration. In proceedings of the Inter-

national Symposium on Applications and the Internet

(SAINT06) IEEE, pages 96–100.

Jean, S., Losavio, F., Matteo, A., and L

evy, N. (2010). An

extension of owl-s with quality standards. In Pro-

ceedings of the Fourth IEEE International Conference

on Research Challenges in Information Science, pages

483–494.

Klein, E. and Potter, S. (2004). An ontology for nlp ser-

vices. In Proc. of LREC Workshop on a Registry of

Linguistic Data Categories within an Integrated Lan-

guage Resource Repository Area.

Papazoglou, M. P., Traverso, P., Ricerca, I., and Tecno-

logica, S. (2007). Service-oriented computing: State

of the art and research challenges. IEEE Computer,

40:2007.

Tuﬁs, D., Ion, R., Ceausu, A., and Stefnescu, D. (2008).

Racais linguistic web services. In Proceedings

of the Sixth International Language Resources and

Evaluation (LREC08), Marrakech, Morocco. Eu-

ropean Language Resources Association (ELRA).

http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/.

W3C (2004). Owl-s: Semantic markup for web services.

W3C (2007). Semantic annotations for wsdl and xml

schema.

OWL-LingSEditor-AToolforSemanticDescriptionofLinguisticWebServices

227