Supporting the semi-automatic semantic annotation of web services: A systematic literature review

Context Semantically annotating web services is gaining more attention as an important aspect to support the automatic matchmaking and composition of web services. Therefore, the support of well-known and agreed ontologies and tools for the semantical annotation of web services is becoming a key concern to help the diffusion of semantic web services. Objective The objective of this systematic literature review is to summarize the current state-of-the-art for supporting the semantical annotation of web services by providing answers to a set of research questions. Method The review follows a predefined procedure that involves automatically searching well-known digital libraries. As a result, a total of 35 primary studies were identified as relevant. A manual search led to the identification of 9 additional primary studies that were not reported during the automatic search of the digital libraries. Required information was extracted from these 44 studies against the selected research questions and finally reported. Results Our systematic literature review identified some approaches available for semantically annotating functional and non-functional aspects of web services. However, many of the approaches are either not validated or the validation done lacks credibility. Conclusion We believe that a substantial amount of work remains to be done to improve the current state of research in the area of supporting semantic web services.