Can the Semantic Web be a valid tool to enhance information sharing on the Internet? Will it ever justify the vision Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila dreamt in that famous Scientific American article? Hundreds, if not thousands, of researchers are working on Semantic Web technologies and ideas. Are they on the right direction? A paper we had published, with co-authors Prof. Dov Dori and Dr. Iris Reinhartz-Berger, tries to tackle a facet of this question. We had suspected that a major cornerstone of the semantic Web, inference of semantic Web services, is not align with the way people intuitively infer similarity between Web services. We had conducted a very simple user study in which participants were asked to rank how similar a Web service is to a given query. We then tested if users infer similarity in the same way Semantic Web logic-based inference would predict. We found that users have very different way of recognizing similarity.

Here is the full citation:

Eran Toch, Iris Reinhartz-Berger, Dov Dori, Humans, Semantics Services and Similarity: A User Study of Semantic Web Services Matching and Composition. Journal of Web Semantics, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 16-28, 2011. Download, Info