Abstract-This paper presents a semi-automatic Web service composition approach. This approach ranks all available candidate Web service operations based on semantic annotations and suggests service operations to a human designer during the process of Web service composition. The ranking scores are based on data mediation, functionality and formal service specifications. A formal graph model, an IODAG, is defined to formalize an input/output schema of a Web service operation. Three data mediation algorithms are developed to handle the data heterogeneities arising during Web service composition. The data mediation algorithms analyze the schemas of the inputs and outputs of service operations and consider the structures of the schemas. A typed representation for our data mediation approach, which formalizes the data mediation problem as a subtype-checking problem, is presented. An evaluation is performed to study the effectiveness of different data mediation and service suggestion algorithms used to assist designers composing Web services.

The wide-scale development of ontologies in the bioinformatics domain facilitates their use in the creation of scientific workflows. To speed up the design of workflows, a Service Suggestion Engine is interfaced to the Galaxy Tool Integration and Workflow Platform. This enables users to ask for suggestions (e.g., what operation should go next) while designing workflows with the Galaxy user interface. The Service Suggest Engine utilizes semantic annotations to suggest appropriate Web service operations to plug into the workflow under design. The enriched Ontology for Biomedical Investigation (OBI) is used as a target for the annotations. The effectiveness of the suggestions provided is evaluated against a human consensus.