Automatic annotation of web services based on workflow definitions

Semantic annotationsof web services can facilitate the discovery of services, as well as their composition into workflows. At present, however, the practical utility of such annotationsis limited by the small number of service annotationsavailable for general use. Resources for manual annotationare scarce, and therefore some means is required by which services can be automatically (or semi-automatically) annotated. In this paper, we show how information can be inferred about the semantics of operation parameters based on their connections to other ( annotated) operation parameters within tried-and-tested workflows. In an open-world context, we can infer only constraints on the semantics of parameters, but these so-called loose annotationsare still of value in detecting errors within workflows, annotationsand ontologies, as well as in simplifying the manual annotationtask.