Lightweight Semantic based Approach to Assess Readability of Web Service Interfaces

Abstract

A Web Service has an interface described in a machine-processable format (specifically WSDL). Service providers expose their services by publishing their WSDL documents. Service consumers can learn about service capabilities and how to interact with services. Service descriptions (WSDL documents) should be ideally understood easily by service stakeholders so that the process of consuming services is simplified. In this work we present a practical metric to quantify readability in WSDL documents. We adapted and extended an existing ontology-based semantic readability metric to focus on WSDL documents by using WordNet as a lightweight concept hierarchy. We have validated our approach by performing both qualitative and quantitative experiments. The first one consists of a controlled survey with a group of service consumers. The results showed that consumers (software engineers) required less time and effort to analyze WSDL documents with higher readability values. The second experiment compares our approach with two ontology-based approaches. The third experiment compares the readability values of a dataset of real-life service descriptions before and after rewriting them. The results showed the effectiveness of our approach to assess readability of Web Services interfaces.