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

Semantic-driven matchmaking of web services using case-based reasoning

With the rapid proliferation of Web services as the medium of choice to securely publish application services beyond the firewall, the importance of accurate, yet flexible matchmaking of similar services gains importance both for the human user and for dynamic composition engines. In this paper, we present a novel approach that utilizes the case based reasoning methodology for modelling dynamic Web service discovery and matchmaking. Our framework considers Web services execution experiences in the decision making process and is highly adaptable to the service requester constraints. The framework also utilises OWL semantic descriptions extensively for implementing both the components of the CBR engine and the matchmaking profile of the Web services

A schema-based P2P network to enable publish-subscribe for multimedia content in open hypermedia systems

Open Hypermedia Systems (OHS) aim to provide efficient dissemination, adaptation and integration of hyperlinked multimedia resources. Content available in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks could add significant value to OHS provided that challenges for efficient discovery and prompt delivery of rich and up-to-date content are successfully addressed. This paper proposes an architecture that enables the operation of OHS over a P2P overlay network of OHS servers based on semantic annotation of (a) peer OHS servers and of (b) multimedia resources that can be obtained through the link services of the OHS. The architecture provides efficient resource discovery. Semantic query-based subscriptions over this P2P network can enable access to up-to-date content, while caching at certain peers enables prompt delivery of multimedia content. Advanced query resolution techniques are employed to match different parts of subscription queries (subqueries). These subscriptions can be shared among different interested peers, thus increasing the efficiency of multimedia content dissemination

Non-functional Property based service selection: A survey and classification of approaches

In recent years there has been much effort dedicated to developing approaches for service selection based on non-functional properties. It is clear that much progress has been made, and by considering the individual approaches there is some overlap in functionality, but obviously also some divergence. In this paper we contribute a classification of approaches, that is, we define a number of criteria which allow to differentiate approaches. We use this classification to provide a comparison of existing approaches and in that sense provide a survey of the state of the art of the field. Finally we make some suggestions as to where the research in this area might be heading and which new challenges need to be addressed

Performance-related ontologies and semantic web applications for on-line performance assessment of intelligent systems

AbstractSeveral techniques and applications have been proposed to aid the decision taking process in the system performance domain. Most of these techniques have depicted the performance model of systems through annotations of performance measurements coming from specific software descriptive syntactical languages. However, the semantic representation of performance information provides the possibility of its ulterior machine-processable logical interpretation and therefore the applicability of inference rules about a particular domain. Moreover, ontologies ease the interchange and reuse of knowledge of particular domains, e.g. system performance. In this work, we propose a performance ontology together with the system performance analysis technique as an example of framework building for intelligent applications based on semantic web. The paper also shows the construction of performance rules through OWL to automatically infer new performance constraints and QoS knowledge about the system on execution

Delivering services by building and running virtual organisations

Non peer reviewedPostprin

A component-based middleware framework for configurable and reconfigurable Grid computing

Significant progress has been made in the design and development of Grid middleware which, in its present form, is founded on Web services technologies. However, we argue that present-day Grid middleware is severely limited in supporting projected next-generation applications which will involve pervasive and heterogeneous networked infrastructures, and advanced services such as collaborative distributed visualization. In this paper we discuss a new Grid middleware framework that features (i) support for advanced network services based on the novel concept of pluggable overlay networks, (ii) an architectural framework for constructing bespoke Grid middleware platforms in terms of 'middleware domains' such as extensible interaction types and resource discovery. We believe that such features will become increasingly essential with the emergence of next-generation e-Science applications. Copyright (c) 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd