18 research outputs found

    Approaches to Semantic Web Services: An Overview and Comparison

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    Abstract. The next Web generation promises to deliver Semantic Web Services (SWS); services that are self-described and amenable to automated discovery, composition and invocation. A prerequisite to this, however, is the emergence and evolution of the Semantic Web, which provides the infrastructure for the semantic interoperability of Web Services. Web Services will be augmented with rich formal descriptions of their capabilities, such that they can be utilized by applications or other services without human assistance or highly constrained agreements on interfaces or protocols. Thus, Semantic Web Services have the potential to change the way knowledge and business services are consumed and provided on the Web. In this paper, we survey the state of the art of current enabling technologies for Semantic Web Services. In addition, we characterize the infrastructure of Semantic Web Services along three orthogonal dimensions: activities, architecture and service ontology. Further, we examine and contrast three current approaches to SWS according to the proposed dimensions

    A Framework for Design and Composition of Semantic Web Services

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    Semantic Web Services (SWS) are Web Services (WS) whose description is semantically enhanced with markup languages (e.g., OWL-S). This semantic description will enable external agents and programs to discover, compose and invoke SWSs. However, as a previous step to the specification of SWSs in a language, it must be designed at a conceptual level to guarantee its correctness and avoid inconsistencies among its internal components. In this paper, we present a framework for design and (semi) automatic composition of SWSs at a language-independent and knowledge level. This framework is based on a stack of ontologies that (1) describe the different parts of a SWS; and (2) contain a set of axioms that are really design rules to be verified by the ontology instances. Based on these ontologies, design and composition of SWSs can be viewed as the correct instantiation of the ontologies themselves. Once these instances have been created they will be exported to SWS languages such as OWL-S

    An Environment for Development of Semantic Web Services

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    Semantic Web Services (SWSs) are specified in a semantic markup language to enable other services (and agents) to reason about their capabilities, in order to decide whether a SWS should be invoked or not. In this paper an environment for development and description of SWSs is presented. This environment, called ODE SWSDesigner, consists of a graphical interface, which allows users to carry out the design and characterization of SWSs at a conceptual level, and a set of software modules, which verify the design correctness and perform the translations from the graphical descriptions to the languages used to specify SWSs. ODE SWSDesigner provides support for a layer-based framework that we have proposed with the aim of enabling a language -independent development of SWSs. This framework is based on the use of problemsolving methods that are considered as highlevel specifications from which SWS descriptions can be generated and verified

    ODE-SWS: A Semantic Web Service Development Environment

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    Web Services (WS) are software modules that perform operations that are network-accessible through XML messaging. Web Services in the Semantic Web, that is, Semantic Web Services (SWS), should describe semantically their structure and capabilities to enable its automatic discovery, invocation and composition. In this work we present a development environment to design SWS in a language-independent manner. This environment is based on a framework that defines an ontology set to characterize how a SWS should be specified. The core ontology of this framework describes the SWS problem-solving behaviour and enables the SWS design at a conceptual level. Considering this framework, the SWS development environment is composed of (1) a graphical interface, in which the conceptual design of SWSs is performed, and (2) a tool set, which instantiates the framework ontologies according to the graphical model created by the user, verifies the completeness and consistency of the SWS through instance evaluation, and translates the SWS conceptual model description into SWS (and WS) languages, such as DAML-S, WSDL or UDDI. This tool set is integrated in the WebODE ontology engineering workbench in order to take advantage of its reasoning and ontology translation capabilities

    Emergent semantics in distributed knowledge management

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    Organizations and enterprises have developed complex data and information exchange systems that are now vital for their daily operations. Currently available systems, however, face a major challenge. On todays global information infrastructure, data semantics is more and more context- and time-dependent, and cannot be fixed once and for all at design time. Identifying emerging relationships among previously unrelated information items (e.g., during data interchange) may dramatically increase their business value. This chapter introduce and discuss the notion of Emergent Semantics (ES), where both the representation of semantics and the discovery of the proper interpretation of symbols are seen as the result of a selforganizing process performed by distributed agents, exchanging symbols and adaptively developing the proper interpretation via multi-party cooperation and conflict resolution. Emergent data semantics is dynamically dependent on the collective behaviour of large communities of agents, which may have different and even conflicting interests and agendas. This is a research paradigm interpreting semantics from a pragmatic prospective. The chapter introduce this notion providing a discussion on the principles, research area and current state of the art

    IRS-III: A broker-based approach to semantic Web services

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    A factor limiting the take up of Web services is that all tasks associated with the creation of an application, for example, finding, composing, and resolving mismatches between Web services have to be carried out by a software developer. Semantic Web services is a combination of semantic Web and Web service technologies that promise to alleviate these problems. In this paper we describe IRS-III, a framework for creating and executing semantic Web services, which takes a semantic broker based approach to mediating between service requesters and service providers. We describe the overall approach and the components of IRS-III from an ontological and architectural viewpoint. We then illustrate our approach through an application in the eGovernment domain

    Semantic Service Description Framework for Efficient Service Discovery and Composition

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    Web services have been widely adopted as a new distributed system technology by industries in the areas of, enterprise application integration, business process management, and virtual organisation. However, lack of semantics in current Web services standards has been a major barrier in the further improvement of service discovery and composition. For the last decade, Semantic Web Services have become an important research topic to enrich the semantics of Web services. The key objective of Semantic Web Services is to achieve automatic/semi-automatic Web service discovery, invocation, and composition. There are several existing semantic Web service description frameworks, such as, OWL-S, WSDL-S, and WSMF. However, existing frameworks have several issues, such as insufficient service usage context information, precisely specified requirements needed to locate services, lacking information about inter-service relationships, and insufficient/incomplete information handling, make the process of service discovery and composition not as efficient as it should be. To address these problems, a context-based semantic service description framework is proposed in this thesis. This framework focuses on not only capabilities of Web services, but also the usage context information of Web services, which we consider as an important factor in efficient service discovery and composition. Based on this framework, an enhanced service discovery mechanism is proposed. It gives service users more flexibility to search for services in more natural ways rather than only by technical specifications of required services. The service discovery mechanism also demonstrates how the features provided by the framework can facilitate the service discovery and composition processes. Together with the framework, a transformation method is provided to transform exiting service descriptions into the new framework based descriptions. The framework is evaluated through a scenario based analysis in comparison with OWL-S and a prototype based performance evaluation in terms of query response time, the precision and recall ratio, and system scalability
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