Approaches to Semantic Web Services: An Overview and Comparison

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 semantic description framework for web services descriptions and matchmaking

In the M.Sc thesis, the project focuses on the problems of semantic-based representing and retrieving Web services based on the capabilities of services. Service description is critical to application development in Web service environments. There are a number of motivated research developed for representing Web services by different research organisations such as WSDL and UDDI. Both of them are existing standards for Web services. WSDL is designed to provide descriptions of message transport and interface used by each service. UDDI provides a registration structure for businesses and services, and describes businesses and services using their physical attributes in terms of names, addresses, human-understandable business descriptions and service descriptions. Both WSDL and UDDI lack semantic-based description information and a number of essential factors of service capabilities are out of the current description frameworks such as the degrees of service capabilities, relationships between users and services. Moreover, the discovery mechanism provided by UDDI is "exact match” search on the business or service names and descriptions. Actually, service providers and service consumers may have very different background and knowledge, so they do not usually share the same description information for the same item in their minds. It is difficult to locate the proper Web services if users do not express their requirements exactly same with the service provider advertisements. With the consideration of above problems, the development of techniques to semantically represent Web services is necessary for the Web service description and matchmaking. To address the above problems, we identify several requirements and essential factors that a Web service description framework should have and propose a semantic rich modelling framework to integrate these factors to describe Web services capabilities in unambiguous and computer-understandable forms with ontology. The novel description framework is the Business-Service-User (BSU) framework which provides a semantic based description information for business, service and user. Another important goal for the BSU framework is to integrate with current Semantic Web markup languages so that the framework can be easily accessed and understood by the computer. In this thesis, we use the semantic web language OWL to represent the BSU framework and the new semantic description language is called OWL-BSU, which is a computer-interpretable description of the business, service and user. Moreover, a simple and effective matching algorithm is designed to calculate the semantic relationships between service consumers requirements and service descriptions. To make our approach work in the real world, we develop a semantic Web services search engine, which integrates OWL-BSU and the matching algorithm on the top of UDDI registry. The evaluation experimental results have shown that our approach can achieve a great improvement on retrieval performance in terms of recall and precision, comparable to the existing UDDI registry

Mobile computing and sensor Web services for coastal buoys

Mobile device technology with the influence of the Internet is creating a lot of Webbased services so that people can have easy and 24-hour access to the services. Recently, the Google’s Android has revolutionized applications development for the mobile platform. As there is an increasing number of companies exposing their services as Web services, enabling flexible mobile access to distributed Web resources is a relevant challenge. However, the current Web is a collection of human readable pages that are unintelligible to computer programs. Semantic Web and Web services have the potential of overcoming this limitation. For this, a standard ontology called Ontology Web Language for Services (OWL-S) is employed. The vision is to automatically discover services like Sensor Web services from mobile. In this thesis, a mobile framework is developed for the automatic discovery of services. The application is implemented for the Coastal Sensor Web and the Semantic Web service

Integrating Protein Data Resources through Semantic Web Services

Understanding the function of every protein is one major objective of bioinformatics. Currently, a large amount of information (e.g., sequence, structure and dynamics) is being produced by experiments and predictions that are associated with protein function. Integrating these diverse data about protein sequence, structure, dynamics and other protein features allows further exploration and establishment of the relationships between protein sequence, structure, dynamics and function, and thereby controlling the function of target proteins. However, information integration in protein data resources faces challenges at technology level for interfacing heterogeneous data formats and standards and at application level for semantic interpretation of dissimilar data and queries. In this research, a semantic web services infrastructure, called Web Services for Protein data resources (WSP), for flexible and user-oriented integration of protein data resources, is proposed. This infrastructure includes a method for modeling protein web services, a service publication algorithm, an efficient service discovery (matching) algorithm, and an optimal service chaining algorithm. Rather than relying on syntactic matching, the matching algorithm discovers services based on their similarity to the requested service. Therefore, users can locate services that semantically match their data requirements even if they are syntactically distinctive. Furthermore, WSP supports a workflow-based approach for service integration. The chaining algorithm is used to select and chain services, based on the criteria of service accuracy and data interoperability. The algorithm generates a web services workflow which automatically integrates the results from individual services.A number of experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the matching algorithm. The results reveal that the algorithm can discover services with reasonable performance. Also, a composite service, which integrates protein dynamics and conservation, is experimented using the WSP infrastructure

Towards ontology based BPMN Implementation.

International audienceNatural language is understandable by human and not machine. None technical persons can only use natural language to specify their business requirements. However, the current version of Business process management and notation (BPMN) tools do not allow business analysts to implement their business processes without having technical skills. BPMN tool is a tool that allows users to design and implement the business processes by connecting different business tasks and rules together. The tools do not provide automatic implementation of business tasks from users' specifications in natural language (NL). Therefore, this research aims to propose a framework to automatically implement the business processes that are expressed in NL requirements. Ontology is used as a mechanism to solve this problem by comparing between users' requirements and web services' descriptions. Web service is a software module that performs a specific task and ontology is a concept that defines the relationships between different terms

Extended Service Registry for Efficient Web Service Search

Service registries and web service engines are the main approaches for discovering web services. Current service directories are mainly based on Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI), which is an industry standard for service registries, developed to solve the web service search problem. However, UDDI offers limited search functionalities which may return a huge number of irrelevant services. Often consumers may be unaware of precise keywords to retrieve the required services satisfactorily and may be looking for services capable of providing certain outputs. In this paper, we propose a new system called Extended Service Registry (ESR) for extended and efficient service search using an object relational database. The functional requirements are provided by the user as a set of input parameters provided for and output parameters desired from the web service. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of service search in our Extended Service Registry (ESR) and the variety of user queries supported

An architecture for user preference-based IoT service selection in cloud computing using mobile devices for smart campus

The Internet of things refers to the set of objects that have identities and virtual personalities operating in smart spaces using intelligent interfaces to connect and communicate within social environments and user context. Interconnected devices communicating to each other or to other machines on the network have increased the number of services. The concepts of discovery, brokerage, selection and reliability are important in dynamic environments. These concepts have emerged as an important field distinguished from conventional distributed computing by its focus on large-scale resource sharing, delivery and innovative applications. The usage of Internet of Things technology across different service provisioning environments has increased the challenges associated with service selection and discovery. Although a set of terms can be used to express requirements for the desired service, a more detailed and specific user interface would make it easy for the users to express their requirements using high-level constructs. In order to address the challenge of service selection and discovery, we developed an architecture that enables a representation of user preferences and manipulates relevant descriptions of available services. To ensure that the key components of the architecture work, algorithms (content-based and collaborative filtering) derived from the architecture were proposed. The architecture was tested by selecting services using content-based as well as collaborative algorithms. The performances of the algorithms were evaluated using response time. Their effectiveness was evaluated using recall and precision. The results showed that the content-based recommender system is more effective than the collaborative filtering recommender system. Furthermore, the results showed that the content-based technique is more time-efficient than the collaborative filtering technique

Enterprise application reuse: Semantic discovery of business grid services

Web services have emerged as a prominent paradigm for the development of distributed software systems as they provide the potential for software to be modularized in a way that functionality can be described, discovered and deployed in a platform independent manner over a network (e.g., intranets, extranets and the Internet). This paper examines an extension of this paradigm to encompass ‘Grid Services’, which enables software capabilities to be recast with an operational focus and support a heterogeneous mix of business software and data, termed a Business Grid - "the grid of semantic services". The current industrial representation of services is predominantly syntactic however, lacking the fundamental semantic underpinnings required to fulfill the goals of any semantically-oriented Grid. Consequently, the use of semantic technology in support of business software heterogeneity is investigated as a likely tool to support a diverse and distributed software inventory and user. Service discovery architecture is therefore developed that is (a) distributed in form, (2) supports distributed service knowledge and (3) automatically extends service knowledge (as greater descriptive precision is inferred from the operating application system). This discovery engine is used to execute several real-word scenarios in order to develop and test a framework for engineering such grid service knowledge. The examples presented comprise software components taken from a group of Investment Banking systems. Resulting from the research is a framework for engineering servic

Extending Web Service Architecture with a Quality Component: Web Service Architecture and Quality Component

The Web service technology provides standard mechanisms for describing the interface of the services available on the Web, as well as protocols for locating such services and invoking them. Each Web service has an associated Web Services Description Language (WSDL) document which describes how it works and how to invoke it. Such document is registered at a Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) registry that provides a discovery service for the WSDL descriptions. The Web services architecture consists of three components: Service Provider, Service Requester and UDDI Registry, and the interactions between them through publish, find, and bind operations. Between finding and binding steps there is another crucial step, which is not fully considered by current approaches. This is the step of selection. The UDDI service registry hosts hundreds of similar Web services, which makes it difficult for the service requesters to choose from them, as the selection is based on the functional properties only. However, many similar services are differentiated by their quality criteria. Therefore, quality criteria are important to be considered in the web service selection. This thesis proposes a quality-based Web service architecture (QWSA) that extends the current Web service architecture with a quality server. The quality server consists of four main components: quality manager, quality matchmaker, quality report analyzer, and quality database. The main purpose of quality server is to assist service requester to select the best available service that fulfils his/her preference by matching between a service requester’s quality requirement and the service providers’ quality specifications. In addition, this thesis reports the development of a quality matchmaking process (QMP) based on the proposed architecture by building a quality service selection system (QSSS). This QSSS has been verified and validated using a case study of Amazon E-commerce service (ECS)

Understanding semantic aware Grid middleware for e-Science

In this paper we analyze several semantic-aware Grid middleware services used in e-Science applications. We describe them according to a common analysis framework, so as to find their commonalities and their distinguishing features. As a result of this analysis we categorize these services into three groups: information services, data access services and decision support services. We make comparisons and provide additional conclusions that are useful to understand better how these services have been developed and deployed, and how similar services would be developed in the future, mainly in the context of e-Science applications