Semantic web service automation with lightweight annotations

Web services, both RESTful and WSDL-based, are an increasingly important part of the Web. With the application of semantic technologies, we can achieve automation of the use of those services. In this paper, we present WSMO-Lite and MicroWSMO, two related lightweight approaches to semantic Web service description, evolved from the WSMO framework. WSMO-Lite uses SAWSDL to annotate WSDL-based services, whereas MicroWSMO uses the hRESTS microformat to annotate RESTful APIs and services. Both frameworks share an ontology for service semantics together with most of automation algorithms

WSMO-lite annotations for web services

and other research output

Semantically Resolving Type Mismatches in Scientific Workflows

Scientists are increasingly utilizing Grids to manage large data sets and execute scientific experiments on distributed resources. Scientific workflows are used as means for modeling and enacting scientific experiments. Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) is a major component of Microsoft’s .NET technology which offers lightweight support for long-running workflows. It provides a comfortable graphical and programmatic environment for the development of extended BPEL-style workflows. WF’s visual features ease the syntactic composition of Web services into scientific workflows but do nothing to assure that information passed between services has consistent semantic types or representations or that deviant flows, errors and compensations are handled meaningfully. In this paper we introduce SAWSDL-compliant annotations for WF and use them with a semantic reasoner to guarantee semantic type correctness in scientific workflows. Examples from bioinformatics are presented

Extending OWL-S for the Composition of Web Services Generated With a Legacy Application Wrapper

Despite numerous efforts by various developers, web service composition is still a difficult problem to tackle. Lot of progressive research has been made on the development of suitable standards. These researches help to alleviate and overcome some of the web services composition issues. However, the legacy application wrappers generate nonstandard WSDL which hinder the progress. Indeed, in addition to their lack of semantics, WSDLs have sometimes different shapes because they are adapted to circumvent some technical implementation aspect. In this paper, we propose a method for the semi automatic composition of web services in the context of the NeuroLOG project. In this project the reuse of processing tools relies on a legacy application wrapper called jGASW. The paper describes the extensions to OWL-S in order to introduce and enable the composition of web services generated using the jGASW wrapper and also to implement consistency checks regarding these services.Comment: ICIW 2012, The Seventh International Conference on Internet and Web Applications and Services, Stuttgart : Germany (2012

WSMO-Lite and hRESTS: lightweight semantic annotations for Web services and RESTful APIs

Service-oriented computing has brought special attention to service description, especially in connection with semantic technologies. The expected proliferation of publicly accessible services can benefit greatly from tool support and automation, both of which are the focus of Semantic Web Service (SWS) frameworks that especially address service discovery, composition and execution. As the first SWS standard, in 2007 the World Wide Web Consortium produced a lightweight bottom-up specification called SAWSDL for adding semantic annotations to WSDL service descriptions. Building on SAWSDL, this article presents WSMO-Lite, a lightweight ontology of Web service semantics that distinguishes four semantic aspects of services: function, behavior, information model, and nonfunctional properties, which together form a basis for semantic automation. With the WSMO-Lite ontology, SAWSDL descriptions enable semantic automation beyond simple input/output matchmaking that is supported by SAWSDL itself. Further, to broaden the reach of WSMO-Lite and SAWSDL tools to the increasingly common RESTful services, the article adds hRESTS and MicroWSMO, two HTML microformats that mirror WSDL and SAWSDL in the documentation of RESTful services, enabling combining RESTful services with WSDL-based ones in a single semantic framework. To demonstrate the feasibility and versatility of this approach, the article presents common algorithms for Web service discovery and composition adapted to WSMO-Lite

Developing a semantic web-based distributed model management system: Experiences and lessons learned

Distributed model management systems (DMMSs) are decision support systems with a focus on managing decision models throughout the modeling lifecycle and across the extended enterprise. The advent and proliferation of web services and semantic web technologies offers the possibilities of sharing and reusing models in a distributed setting. This paper presents the design and implementation of a semantic web-based DMMS. Key lessons learned, technical and organizational issues encountered are summarized and directions for future research have been outlined. From a technical perspective, future research will need to explore the viability of tools specifically designed to facilitate the semantic annotation of models, specify and validate SA-SMML, and extend the white-box approach presented in this paper to other model types not amenable to structured modeling. From an organizational perspective, further research is needed in the areas of adoption issues and business models that would ensure the sustainable support for of such systems in the service enterprise

Semantics take the SOA registry to the next level: an empirical study in a telecom company

We describe an empirical study of the creation of a Semantic Service Registry in the context of the Operations Support Systems (OSS) department of a telecom company, to address an emerging problem of finding the right services to build new business processes in a pool that steadily increases. We show how to obtain an ontology for the telecom domain to annotate services and thus benefit from semantic technologies to effectively find them based on description logics inference mapping. We designed and implemented a proof of concept for providing a matching degree even when the cardinality of the service elements of the query and the cardinality of the service elements being sought differ. This is relevant for web services reusability and flexibility. Our solutions are overviewed and a set of lessons learned are discussed

Bridging between sensor measurements and symbolic ontologies through conceptual spaces

The increasing availability of sensor data through a variety of sensor-driven devices raises the need to exploit the data observed by sensors with the help of formally specified knowledge representations, such as the ones provided by the Semantic Web. In order to facilitate such a Semantic Sensor Web, the challenge is to bridge between symbolic knowledge representations and the measured data collected by sensors. In particular, one needs to map a given set of arbitrary sensor data to a particular set of symbolic knowledge representations, e.g. ontology instances. This task is particularly challenging due to the potential infinite variety of possible sensor measurements. Conceptual Spaces (CS) provide a means to represent knowledge in geometrical vector spaces in order to enable computation of similarities between knowledge entities by means of distance metrics. We propose an ontology for CS which allows to refine symbolic concepts as CS and to ground instances to so-called prototypical members described by vectors. By computing similarities in terms of spatial distances between a given set of sensor measurements and a finite set of prototypical members, the most similar instance can be identified. In that, we provide a means to bridge between the real-world as observed by sensors and symbolic representations. We also propose an initial implementation utilizing our approach for measurement-based Semantic Web Service discovery

Comprehensive service semantics and light-weight Linked Services: towards an integrated approach

Semantics are used to mark up a wide variety of data-centric Web resources but, are not used in significant numbers to annotate online services — that is despite considerable research dedicated to Semantic Web Services (SWS). This is partially due to the complexity of comprehensive SWS models aiming at automation of service-oriented tasks such as discovery, composition, and execution. This has led to the emergence of a new approach dubbed Linked Services which is based on simplified service models that are easier to populate and interpret and accessible even to non-experts. However, such Minimal Service Models so far do not cover all execution-related aspects of service automation and merely aim at enabling more comprehensive service search and clustering. Thus, in this paper, we describe our approach of combining the strengths of both distinct approaches to modeling Semantic Web Services – “lightweight” Linked Services and “heavyweight” SWS automation – into a coherent SWS framework. In addition, an implementation of our approach based on existing SWS tools together with a proof-of-concept prototype used within the EU project NoTube is presented