The idea of a decentralised, self-organising service-oriented architecture seems to be more and more plausible than the traditional registry-based ones in view of the success of the web and the reluctance in taking up web service technologies. Automatically clustering Web Service Description Language (WSDL) files on the web into functionally similar homogeneous service groups can be seen as a bootstrapping step for creating a service search engine and, at the same time, reducing the search space for service discovery. This paper proposes techniques to automatically gather, discover and integrate features related to a set of WSDL files and cluster them into naturally occurring service groups. Despite the lack of a common platform for assessing the performance of web service cluster discovery, our initial experiments using real-world WSDL files demonstrated the great potential of the proposed techniques.

Ontologies are often viewed as the answer to the need for interoperable semantics in modern information systems. The explosion of textual information on the Read/Write Web coupled with the increasing demand for ontologies to power the Semantic Web have made (semi-)automatic ontology learning from text a very promising research area. This together with the advanced state in related areas, such as natural language processing, have fueled research into ontology learning over the past decade. This survey looks at how far we have come since the turn of the millennium and discusses the remaining challenges that will define the research directions in this area in the near future.

Many conventional methods for concepts formation in ontology learning have relied on the use of predefined templates and rules, and static resources such as WordNet. Such approaches are not scalable, difficult to port between different domains and incapable of handling knowledge fluctuations. Their results are far from desirable, either. In this paper, we propose a new antbased clustering algorithm, Tree-Traversing Ant (TTA), for concepts formation as part of an ontology learning system. With the help of Normalized Google Distance (NGD) and n • of Wikipedia (n • W) as measures for similarity and distance between terms, we attempt to achieve an adaptable clustering method that is highly scalable and portable across domains. Evaluations with an seven datasets show promising results with an average lexical overlap of 97% and ontological improvement of 48%. At the same time, the evaluations demonstrated several advantages that are not simultaneously present in standard ant-based and other conventional clustering methods.

More and more people are turning to the World Wide Web for learning and sharing information about their health using search engines, forums and question answering systems. In this demonstration, we look at a new way of delivering health information to the end-users via coherent conversations. The proposed conversational system allows the end-users to vaguely express and gradually refine their information needs using only natural language questions or statements as input. We provide example scenarios in this demonstration to illustrate the inadequacies of current delivery mechanisms and highlight the innovative aspects of the proposed conversational system.

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