A semantic web service-based architecture for the interoperability of e-government services

We propose a semantically-enhanced architecture to address the issues of interoperability and service integration in e-government web information systems. An architecture for a life event portal based on Semantic Web Services (SWS) is described. The architecture includes loosely-coupled modules organized in three distinct layers: User Interaction, Middleware and Web Services. The Middleware provides the semantic infrastructure for ontologies and SWS. In particular a conceptual model for integrating domain knowledge (Life Event Ontology), application knowledge (E-government Ontology) and service description (Service Ontology) is defined. The model has been applied to a use case scenario in e-government and the results of a system prototype have been reported to demonstrate some relevant features of the proposed approach

Knowledge-based life event model for e-government service integration with illustrative examples

The advancement of information and communications technology and web services offers an opportunity for e-government service integration, which can help improve the availability and quality of services offered. However, few of the potential service integration applications have been adopted by governments to increase the accessibility of and satisfaction with government services and information for citizens. Recently, the 'life event' concept was introduced as the core element of integrating complexity of service delivery to improve the efficiency and reusability of e-government services, web-based information management systems. In addition, a semantic web-based ontology is considered to be the most powerful conceptual approach for dealing with challenges associated with developing seamless systems in distributed environments. Among these challenges are interoperability, which can be loosely defined as the technical capability for interoperation. Despite the conceptual emergence of semantic web-based ontology for life events, the question remains of what methodology to use when designing a semantic web-based ontology for life events. This paper proposes a semantic web-based ontology model for life events for e-government service integration created using a methodology that implements the model using the ontology modelling tool Protégé and evaluates the model using Pellet Reasoner and the SPARQL query language. In addition, this model is illustrated by two examples, the Saudi Arabia King Abdullah Scholarship and Hafiz, to show the advantages of integrated systems compared with standalone systems. These examples show that the new model can effectively support the integration of standalone e-government services automatically so that citizens do not need to manually execute individual services. This can significantly improve the accessibility of e-government services and citizen's satisfaction. © 2014-IOS Press

ODE-SWS: A Semantic Web Service Development Environment

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

Towards a component composition and interaction architecture for the web

The Web is currently undergoing a change from a document- to a services-centered environment. This shift can be seen as a first step towards a component-centered environment. We shall explore requirements for a Web component architecture based on the Web services framework, which has been promoted recently. A description language, protocols, and repository and directory services are the key elements. We will motivate an underlying conceptual model for these aspects capturing their foundations. We will identify two key features for a Web component framework – a two-layered type system capturing two different behavioural aspects and semantic descriptions of components – that makes it different from a services environment

Intelligent matching for public internet web services ? towards semi-automatic internet services mashup

In this paper, we propose an Internet public Web service matching approach that paves the way for(semi-)automatic service mashup. We will first provide the overview of the solution, which requires a detailed review of two fundamental models ? schema/graph matching and semantic space. Based on the conceptual model and the literature study, the complete service matching approach is then provided with four essential steps ? semantic space, parameter tree, similarity measures, and WSDL operation matching. The system demonstration that proves the concept proposed in this approach is finally presented. The solution has the potential to facilitate the Internet services mashup

Organising the knowledge space for software components

Software development has become a distributed, collaborative process based on the assembly of off-the-shelf and purpose-built components. The selection of software components from component repositories and the development of components for these repositories requires an accessible information infrastructure that allows the description and comparison of these components. General knowledge relating to software development is equally important in this context as knowledge concerning the application domain of the software. Both form two pillars on which the structural and behavioural properties of software components can be addressed. Form, effect, and intention are the essential aspects of process-based knowledge representation with behaviour as a primary property. We investigate how this information space for software components can be organised in order to facilitate the required taxonomy, thesaurus, conceptual model, and logical framework functions. Focal point is an axiomatised ontology that, in addition to the usual static view on knowledge, also intrinsically addresses the dynamics, i.e. the behaviour of software. Modal logics are central here – providing a bridge between classical (static) knowledge representation approaches and behaviour and process description and classification. We relate our discussion to the Web context, looking at Web services as components and the Semantic Web as the knowledge representation framewor

Data integration with the Climate Science Modelling Language

The Climate Science Modelling Language (CSML) has been developed by the NERC DataGrid (NDG) project as a standards-based data model and XML markup for describing and constructing climate science datasets. It uses conceptual models from emerging standards in GIS to define a number of feature types, and adopts schemas of the Geography Markup Language (GML) where possible for encoding. A prototype deployment of CSML is being trialled across the curated archives of the British Atmospheric and Oceanographic Data Centres. These data include a wide range of data types – both observational and model – and heterogeneous file-based storage systems. CSML provides a semantic abstraction layer for data files, and is exposed through higher level data delivery services. In NDG these will include file instantiation services (for formats of choice) and the web services of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)

An Approach to Domain-Specific Reuse in Service-Oriented Environments

Domain engineering is successful in promoting reuse. An approach to domain-specific reuse in service-oriented environments is proposed to facilitate service requesters to reuse Web services. In the approach, we present a conceptual model of domain-specific services (called domain service). Domain services in a certain business domain are modeled by semantic and feature modeling techniques, and bound to Web services with diverse capabilities through a variability-supported matching mechanism. By reusing pre-modeled domain services, service requesters can describe their requests easily through a service customization mechanism. Web service selection based on customized results can also be optimized by reusing the pre-matching results between domain services and Web services. Feasibility of the whole approach is demonstrated on an example

Transport service ontology and its application in the field of semantic search

Transport is a crucial component in logistics, which joints each activity in the logistics chain. The performance of logistics heavily relies on the efficiency of transport services. However, until now there has not been a clear definition about transport services. Moreover, along with the rapid rise of fuel prices, the input-output ratio of transport has been trapped in an unreasonable situation, which causes the poor performance of logistics. Therefore, the research on transport service and transport service efficiency is urgently required. In this paper, we propose to use semantic web technologies to construct a conceptual model of transport services and thus present a clear structure of the transport service hierarchy. Furthermore, we propose a semantic search engine based on this transport service ontology, in order to provide an efficient tool for users to query transport service providers. This design can also be seen as a potentially alternative approach for solving the issue of transport service inefficiency

iSemServ : a framework for engineering intelligent semantic services

The need for modern enterprises and Web users to simply and rapidly develop and deliver platform-independent services to be accessed over the Web by the global community is growing. This is self-evident, when one considers the omnipresence of electronic services (e-services) on the Web. Accordingly, the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is commonly considered as one of the de facto standards for the provisioning of heterogeneous business functionalities on the Web. As the basis for SOA, Web Services (WS) are commonly preferred, particularly because of their ability to facilitate the integration of heterogeneous systems. However, WS only focus on syntactic descriptions when describing the functional and behavioural aspects of services. This makes it a challenge for services to be automatically discovered, selected, composed, invoked, and executed – without any human intervention. Consequently, Semantic Web Services (SWS) are emerging to deal with such a challenge. SWS represent the convergence of Semantic Web (SW) and WS concepts, in order to enable Web services that can be automatically processed and understood by machines operating with limited or no user intervention. At present, research efforts within the SWS domain are mainly concentrated on semantic services automation aspects, such as discovery, matching, selection, composition, invocation, and execution. Moreover, extensive research has been conducted on the conceptual models and formal languages used in constructing semantic services. However, in terms of the engineering of semantic services, a number of challenges are still prevalent, as demonstrated by the lack of development and use of semantic services in real-world settings. The lack of development and use could be attributed to a number of challenges, such as complex semantic services enabling technologies, leading to a steep learning curve for service developers; lack of unified service platforms for guiding and supporting simple and rapid engineering of semantic services, and the limited integration of semantic technologies with mature service-oriented technologies. vi In addition, a combination of isolated software tools is normally used to engineer semantic services. This could, however, lead to undesirable consequences, such as prolonged service development times, high service development costs, lack of services re-use, and the lack of semantics interoperability, reliability, and re-usability. Furthermore, available software platforms do not support the creation of semantic services that are intelligent beyond the application of semantic descriptions, as envisaged for the next generation of services, where the connection of knowledge is of core importance. In addressing some of the challenges highlighted, this research study adopted a qualitative research approach with the main focus on conceptual modelling. The main contribution of this study is thus a framework called iSemServ to simplify and accelerate the process of engineering intelligent semantic services. The framework has been modelled and developed, based on the principles of simplicity, rapidity, and intelligence. The key contributions of the proposed framework are: (1) An end-to-end and unified approach of engineering intelligent semantic services, thereby enabling service engineers to use one platform to realize all the modules comprising such services; (2) proposal of a model-driven approach that enables the average and expert service engineers to focus on developing intelligent semantic services in a structured, extensible, and platform-independent manner. Thereby increasing developers’ productivity and minimizing development and maintenance costs; (3) complexity hiding through the exploitation of template and rule-based automatic code generators, supporting different service architectural styles and semantic models; and (4) intelligence wrapping of services at message and knowledge levels, for the purposes of automatically processing semantic service requests, responses and reasoning over domain ontologies and semantic descriptions by keeping user intervention at a minimum. The framework was designed by following a model-driven approach and implemented using the Eclipse platform. It was evaluated using practical use case scenarios, comparative analysis, and performance and scalability experiments. In conclusion, the iSemServ framework is considered appropriate for dealing with the complexities and restrictions involved in engineering intelligent semantic services, especially because the amount of time required to generate intelligent semantic vii services using the proposed framework is smaller compared with the time that the service engineer would need to manually generate all the different artefacts comprising an intelligent semantic service. Keywords: Intelligent semantic services, Web services, Ontologies, Intelligent agents, Service engineering, Model-driven techniques, iSemServ framework.ComputingD. Phil. (Computer science