A Semantic Similarity Measure for Semantic Web Services

Establishing the compatibility of services is an essential prerequisite to service composition. By formally defining the similarity of semantic services, useful information can be obtained about their compatibility. In this paper we propose a metric for measuring the similarity of semantic services annotated with OWL ontology. Similarity is calculated by defining the intrinsic information value of a service description based on the “inferencibility” of each of OWL Lite constructs. We apply this technique to OWL-S, an emerging standard for defining semantic service metadata and demonstrate how to measure the similarity of OWL-S annotated services.