Success! At least, a limited form of success. I manged to find the cause of my parameter scoring bug. It was indeed simple and it seems the one fix solved many (hopefully all) of the symptoms. Even better, I think I also found the cause of the memory issue that has recently cropped up. I’m running the fixes now to make sure they work.

It also appears that my ontology builder is working properly. Once I build an ontology out of enough services I should know whether or not my scoring algorithm is effective. It’s working as designed, but whether that is what it needs to do is another matter entirely.

In the meantime, having squashed my bug, I think I have earned a cigar and a glass of Scotch. And I intend to collect my earnings immediately.

What a pain. I’ve spent about 4 hours total today running a bug to ground and I came across a couple other major bugs in the process. It seems these problems always multiply instead of collapsing into a smaller number than they first appear. The good news is, it should be a relatively quick fix; it will just take some tedious stubby-pencil analysis to get it right this time.

But as I have to coordinate the decorating for my church’s Vacation Bible School tomorrow night, I guess my bug hunting may have to wait for a day or so. If I can get it fixed on Friday night, I may be generating ontologies by Saturday. I’d like to get a paper submitted for a conference whose deadline is August 9th. I still have a fighting chance of making it, although I wouldn’t bet the rent money on it.

I spent a couple of hours this evening learning the basics of the Protege API. It’s pretty easy to read in an ontology and read out or create new parts of it. But now I have to figure out how to take specific evaluated service parameters and create new named classes and individuals from them in the ontology. If I can do that, I will have some real results to show. Well, maybe not “real” results, but certainly some intermediate results.

There are a few display issues I’ll have to work on, but they shouldn’t be an issue. The issue is digging through all of the documentation to figure out how to suppress (or eliminate) the excess text that gets appended to the class names. that may or may work; there are still gaps in the Protege documentation. I spent an hour finding out why the I was getting an error that OntologyLoadException couldn’t resolve. I made sure I was importing all the jar files the programmer’s guide said should be imported, but they neglected to mention that protege.jar from the main Protege directory needed to be imported as well. Perhaps the computer science types who are creating Protege at Stanford should team up with some folks from the humanities majors to check their documentation. Just a thought.

It seems like I have done nothing all weekend. I have no additional code, no improvements to my algorithm, no drafts of papers to show for two days (I took Friday off — even students are allowed a little relaxation).

However, I did spend my time learning the new interfaces for Protege 4.1 because it supports OWL 2.0. Based on the assumption that my research should be founded on the latest standards, I assumed this was the way to go. It took a little while, but I learned how to use the new user interface to create an ontology.

And then I realized that the Protege 4.1 release, being a beta release, does not include the Protege OWL API. Given that I want to generate an ontology from a set of web service parameters, the OWL API is something of  a necessity.  Lesson learned about researching the features and limitations of beta software.

So I spent the remainder of the weekend going through the tutorial for Protege 3.4.4. It doesn’t support OWL 2, but it does include the API I wanted. So I reviewed the tutorial and built a basic ontology (in reality, more like a meta-ontology). The next task is to learn the API so I can work on generating an ontology from the service parameters I have evaluated.

Not the most productive weekend I have had, but definitely a learning experience. And it certainly could have been worse.

Until now, I have had a simple system that uses several agents to parse a WSDL and drop its contents into a database, with some other agents that analyze the individual input and output parameters for each service and try to find matches for them among the parameters already in the database. Each match is loosely ranked based on how exact a match it is to any other parameter.

As of this evening, I am finally doing something with those scores. I added code that will take the set of matching parameters and their scores, apply a configurable weight to each type of match, and evaluate them to find the highest scoring match. That match is then stored in the database with the original parameter. This should give me some reasonable progress to show my advisor the next time we meet. It’s not much, but it is enough of a framework that I should be able to add an arbitrary number of evaluator agents and have all their scores accounted for and evaluated.

Now comes the tricky part: figuring out whether all these matches form any sort of reasonable ontology.