WSC-07: Evolving the Web Services Challenge

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an evolving architectural paradigm where businesses can expose their capabilities as modular, network-accessible software services. By decomposing capabilities into modular services, organizations can share their offerings at multiple levels of granularity while also creating unique access points for their peer organizations. The true impact of SOA will be realized when 3rd party organizations can obtain a variety of services, on-demand, and create higher-order composite business processes. The Web Services Challenge (WSC) is a forum where academic and industry researchers can share experiences of developing tools that automate the integration of web services. In the third year (i.e. WSC-07) of the Web Services Challenge, software platforms will address several new composition challenges. Requests and results will be transmitted within SOAP messages. In addition, semantic representations will be both represented in the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and in the Web Ontology Language (OWL). Finally, composite processes will have both sequential and concurrent branches

Combining SAWSDL, OWL-DL and UDDI for Semantically Enhanced Web Service Discovery

UDDI registries are included as a standard offering within the product suite of any major SOA vendor, serving as the foundation for establishing design-time and run-time SOA governance. Despite the success of the UDDI specification and its rapid uptake by the industry, the capabilities of its offered service discovery facilities are rather limited. The lack of machine-understandable semantics in the technical specifications and classification schemes used for retrieving services, prevent UDDI registries from supporting fully automated and thus truly effective service discovery. This paper presents the implementation of a semantically-enhanced registry that builds on the UDDI specification and augments its service publication and discovery facilities to overcome the aforementioned limitations. The proposed solution combines the use of SAWSDL for creating semantically annotated descriptions of service interfaces and the use of OWL-DL for modelling service capabilities and for performing matchmaking via DL reasoning

Cross-Layer Routing Based on Semantic Web Services Discovery with Energy Evaluation and Optimization in MANET

The web services discovery process in mobile adhoc networks is considered as a very difficult challenge due to the continuous change in the topology of the network and also the lack of a fixed central directory for publishing web services. Several approaches have been proposed which are based on either keywords or identifiers representing the service to be searched or by using a specific scenario of discovery. All of those proposed solutions try to respect the constraints of ad hoc networks such as energy, bandwidth, throughput ... etc. In this paper we present our new proposed model for measuring the cost of the overall energy consumption in ad hoc networks depending on the web services discovery protocols. We also present a new optimized web services discovery protocol in MANET based on cross_layer routing techniques with the dissemination in the routing process at the same time the semantic web services information and a Discovery_Diameter parameter that we have proposed to limit the area of discovery in the network. Finally, we present simulation results of our defined approach showing a significant optimization of the energy consumption level and the average throughput

A business service selection model for automated web service discovery requirements

Automated web service (WS) discovery, i.e. discovery without human intervention, is a goal of service-oriented computing. So far it is an elusive goal. The weaknesses of UDDI and other partial solutions have been extensively discussed, but little has been articulated concerning the totality of requirements for automated web service discovery. Our work has led to the conclusion that solving automated web service discovery will not be found through solely technical thinking. We argue that the business motivation for web services must be given prominence and so have looked to processes in business for the identification, assessment and selection of business services in order to assess comprehensively the requirements for web service discovery and selection. The paper uses a generic business service selection model as a guide to analyze a comprehensive set of requirements for facilities to support automated web service discovery. The paper presents an overview of recent work on aspects of WS discovery, proposes a business service selection model, considers a range of technical issues against the business model, articulates a full set of requirements, and concludes with comments on a system to support them

Optimizing Description Logic Reasoning for the Service Matchmaking and Composition

The Semantic Web is a recent initiative to expose semantically rich information associated with Web resources to build more intelligent Web-based systems. Recently, several projects have embraced this vision and there are several successful applications that combine the strengths of the Web and of semantic technologies. However, Semantic Web still lacks a technology, which would provide the needed scalability and integration with existing infrastructure. In this paper we present our ongoing work on a Semantic Web repository, which is capable of addressing complex schemas and answer queries over ontologies with large number of instances. We present the details of our approach and describe the underlying architecture of the system. We conclude with a performance evaluation, which compares the current state-of-the-art reasoners with our system

A Dynamic Composition and Stubless Invocation Approach for Information-Providing Services

The automated specification and execution of composite services are important capabilities of service-oriented systems. In practice, service invocation is performed by client components (stubs) that are generated from service descriptions at design time. Several researchers have proposed mechanisms for late binding. They all require an object representation (e.g., Java classes) of the XML data types specified in service descriptions to be generated and meaningfully integrated in the client code at design time. However, the potential of dynamic composition can only be fully exploited if supported in the invocation phase by the capability of dynamically binding to services with previously unknown interfaces. In this work, we address this limitation by proposing a way of specifying and executing composite services, without resorting to previously compiled classes that represent XML data types. Semantic and structural properties encoded in service descriptions are exploited to implement a mechanism, based on the Graphplan algorithm, for the run-time specification of composite service plans. Composite services are then executed through the stubless invocation of constituent services. Stubless invocation is achieved by exploiting structural properties of service descriptions for the run-time generation of messages

Interoperability and FAIRness through a novel combination of Web technologies

Data in the life sciences are extremely diverse and are stored in a broad spectrum of repositories ranging from those designed for particular data types (such as KEGG for pathway data or UniProt for protein data) to those that are general-purpose (such as FigShare, Zenodo, Dataverse or EUDAT). These data have widely different levels of sensitivity and security considerations. For example, clinical observations about genetic mutations in patients are highly sensitive, while observations of species diversity are generally not. The lack of uniformity in data models from one repository to another, and in the richness and availability of metadata descriptions, makes integration and analysis of these data a manual, time-consuming task with no scalability. Here we explore a set of resource-oriented Web design patterns for data discovery, accessibility, transformation, and integration that can be implemented by any general- or special-purpose repository as a means to assist users in finding and reusing their data holdings. We show that by using off-the-shelf technologies, interoperability can be achieved atthe level of an individual spreadsheet cell. We note that the behaviours of this architecture compare favourably to the desiderata defined by the FAIR Data Principles, and can therefore represent an exemplar implementation of those principles. The proposed interoperability design patterns may be used to improve discovery and integration of both new and legacy data, maximizing the utility of all scholarly outputs

Ontology-based faceted semantic search with automatic sense disambiguation for bioenergy domain

WordNet is a lexicon widely known and used as an ontological resource hosting comparatively large collection of semantically interconnected words. Use of such resources produces meaningful results and improves users’ search experience through the increased precision and recall. This paper presents our facet-enabled WordNet powered semantic search work done in the context of the bioenergy domain. The main hurdle to achieving the expected result was sense disambiguation further complicated by the occasional fine-grained distinction of meanings of the terms in WordNet. To overcome this issue, this paper proposes a sense disambiguation methodology that uses bioenergy domain related ontologies (extracted from WordNet automatically), WordNet concept hierarchy and term sense rank

Discovering Semantic Web Services with Process Specifications

Abstract. Service discovery is one of the crucial issues for service-oriented architectural model. Recently the trend is towards semantic discovery by which semantic descriptions are the basis for service matchmaking instead of simple search based on service attributes. OWL-S is a widely adopted semantic specification for Web Services which comprises three profiles. Among those, process model is the profile that describes dynamic behaviour of Web Services in terms of functional aspects and process flows, and is generally aimed for service enactment, composition, and monitoring. This paper presents a new approach to use OWL-S process model for service discovery purpose. A Web Service can have its internal process described as an OWL-S process model specification, and a service consumer can query for a Web Service with a particular process detail. Matchmaking will be based on flexible ontological matching and evaluation of constraints on the functional behaviour and process flow of the Web Service. The architecture for process-based discovery is also presented