An Analysis of Service Ontologies

Services are increasingly shaping the world’s economic activity. Service provision and consumption have been profiting from advances in ICT, but the decentralization and heterogeneity of the involved service entities still pose engineering challenges. One of these challenges is to achieve semantic interoperability among these autonomous entities. Semantic web technology aims at addressing this challenge on a large scale, and has matured over the last years. This is evident from the various efforts reported in the literature in which service knowledge is represented in terms of ontologies developed either in individual research projects or in standardization bodies. This paper aims at analyzing the most relevant service ontologies available today for their suitability to cope with the service semantic interoperability challenge. We take the vision of the Internet of Services (IoS) as our motivation to identify the requirements for service ontologies. We adopt a formal approach to ontology design and evaluation in our analysis. We start by defining informal competency questions derived from a motivating scenario, and we identify relevant concepts and properties in service ontologies that match the formal ontological representation of these questions. We analyze the service ontologies with our concepts and questions, so that each ontology is positioned and evaluated according to its utility. The gaps we identify as the result of our analysis provide an indication of open challenges and future work

Methods and tools for ontology-based software development

Wiederverwendung wird in der Software-Technik eingesetzt, um sowohl Effizienz als auch die Qualität eines Produkts konstruktiv zu beeinflussen. Während einem Software-Projekt in den späten Phasen ausgereifte Techniken und Werkzeuge zur Verfügung stehen, fehlt weitgehend eine entsprechende Unterstützung bei der Untersuchung des Gegenstandsbereichs und der zugehörigen konzeptuellen Modellierung der Anforderungen. Dabei haben diese Aktivitäten einen entscheidenden Einfluss auf spätere Entwicklung und erfolgreiche Durchführung eines Software-Projekts. Um die Wiederverwendung auf der konzeptuellen Ebene zu ermöglichen, wird in dieser Arbeit zunächst eine Infrastruktur entwickelt, die mit Hilfe einer Domänen-Ontologie einen Wissens-Austausch zwischen den beteiligten Projekten erlaubt. Anschließend wird ein auf dieser Infrastruktur aufbauender Prozess zur Ontologie-Entwicklung definiert und seine Anbindung an die klassische oder agile Vorgehensmodelle beschrieben. Ergänzend dazu wird ein Werkzeug zur Prozessunterstützung vorgestellt.Re-use is employed in software engineering to influence efficiency constructively and the overall quality of a product. While well-established tools and technologies are available in the advanced phases of software projects, support is missing to a large extent for analysis of the universe of discourse and the corresponding conceptual modelling of the requirements. At the same time these activities have a decisive influence on later development and successful implementation of software projects. To enable re-use at the conceptual level, this thesis describes first of all, how to develop an infrastructure, which allows an exchange of knowledge between participating projects with the help of domain ontology. Subsequently, a process of an ontology development will be defined, which is based on this infrastructure; its connection to the classical or agile process models will also be described. In addition, a tool to support the process will be introduced

An Ontology for Quality-Aware Service Discovery

Abstract. The fast emergence and acceptance of service oriented architectures leads to fast development of extensional technologies like service delivery, discovery and composition. As main effort is being spent on automatic discovery and composition, current solutions do not reflect real world scenarios sufficiently. Services are offered by different vendors with different quality levels and prices. Large service oriented architectures with dynamic service compositions are not able to adapt without manual inspection of service quality and negotiation of service contracts. We propose an ontology for modelling Quality of Services (QoS) and Service-Level-Agreements (SLA). A semantic approach should bridge the gap of different terminology, languages and metrics making Service-Level offers and requests agent understandable and automatic quality-aware discovery possible.