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

On the Combination of Textual and Semantic Descriptions for Automated Semantic Web Service Classification

Abstract Semantic Web services have emerged as the solution to the need for automating several aspects related to service-oriented architectures, such as service discovery and composition, and they are realized by combining Semantic Web technologies and Web service standards. In the present paper, we tackle the problem of automated classification of Web services according to their application domain taking into account both the textual description and the semantic annotations of OWL-S advertisements. We present results that we obtained by applying machine learning algorithms on textual and semantic descriptions separately and we propose methods for increasing the overall classification accuracy through an extended feature vector and an ensemble of classifiers

Uma abordagem automática para descoberta e composição de serviços web semânticos

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Tecnológico, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ciência da Computação, Florianópolis, 2012A adição de semântica à descrição de Serviços Web visa permitir a automação dos processos de descoberta e composição de serviços. Para que isso seja possível, é necessário que sejam desenvolvidas ferramentas que façam com que esses processos sejam realizados dinamicamente, sem a necessidade de intervenção humana. Diversos trabalhos na área de Web Semântica têm explorado a descoberta e a composição de Serviços Web através da descrição semântica das suas funcionalidades. Este trabalho apresenta uma abordagem para a descoberta e a composição de Serviços Web Semânticos de forma automática. Mediante o envio de uma requisição com a descrição das funcionalidades de um serviço, a abordagem proposta possibilita que composições sejam estabelecidas quando um único Serviço Web não é suficiente para atender as necessidades dos usuários. Por meio de anotações semânticas baseadas em SAWSDL (Semantic Annotations for WSDL), a abordagem proposta realiza o matching semântico das funcionalidades dos serviços web disponíveis em repositórios de serviços com as informações enviadas na requisição e constrói um grafo de composições. No final da construção do grafo, um algoritmo analisa se dois ou mais caminhos levam à mesma informação desejada pelo usuário. Caso isso aconteça, uma função é aplicada para cada caminho, a fim de selecionar aquele com o menor grau de divergência semântica. A proposta da abordagem apresentada é criar composições de serviços web em tempo de requisição de modo que sejam capazes de combinar serviços pré-existentes para criar um novo serviço, tirando proveito das funcionalidades oferecidas por cada um e combinando-as a fim de oferecer funcionalidades ainda mais complexas e até inexistentes. Dessa forma, a abordagem torna o processo de busca e composição de serviços web capaz de informar não apenas serviços individuais, mas também composições de serviços. Como contribuições deste trabalho citam-se: um algoritmo para a seleção de composições baseado na qualidade semântica das mesmas e um protótipo em conjunto com uma infraestrutura para a descoberta e a composição de serviços web.Abstract : The addition of semantic to web services description allows the automation of the discovery and composition process. However, tools must be developed to allow these processes be performed dynamically without human intervention. Several studies in the area of the Semantic Web have explored the discovery and composition of Web Services through semantic description of its functionality. This work presents an approach for automatic discovery and composition of semantic web services. By sending a request with the description of a service functionality, the proposed approach enables compositions to be established when a single web service is not sufficient to meet the user needs. Through semantic annotations based on SAWSDL (Semantic Annotations for WSDL), the proposed approach performs the semantic matching of Web services capabilities available in services repositories with the information sent in the request and builds a composition graph. At the end of the construction of the graph, an algorithm analyzes if two or more paths lead to the same information desired by the user. If this happens, a function is applied to each path in order to select the one with the lowest semantic mismatch degree. The purpose of the presented approach is to create compositions of web services at request time so that they are able to combine pre-existing services to create a new service, taking advantage of the functionality offered by each and combining them to provide functionality yet more complex and even non-existent. Thus, the approach makes the process of discovery and composition of web services return not only individual services, but also compositions of services. The main contributions of this work are: an algorithm for selection of compositions based on its semantics quality, a prototype and an infrastructure for discovery and composition of web services

Acquisition and management of semantic web service descriptions

Abstract. The increasing importance and use of Web services have resulted in a number of efforts targeted at automating Web service discovery and composition based on semantic descriptions of their properties. However, the progress in the automation of Web service discovery is still held back by the fact that the description of Web services in terms of semantic metadata is still mainly manually. This Ph.D. thesis addresses this problem by developing an approach for the acquisition and management of semantic Web service descriptions in order to facilitate efficient service discovery and composition. Specifically, this involves the collection of information about a Web service, the acquisition of semantic descriptions based on the collected information, and the structured storage of the generated semantic descriptions.

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

WSMO-lite annotations for web services

and other research output

Defining and Prototyping a Life-cycle for Dynamic Service Composition

Since the Internet has become a commodity in both wired and wireless environments, new applications and paradigms have emerged to explore this highly distributed and widespread system. One such paradigm is service-orientation, which enables the provision of software functionality as services, \ud allowing in this way the construction of distributed systems with loosely coupled parts. The Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides a set of principles to create service-oriented systems, by defining how services can be \ud created, composed, published, discovered and invoked. In accordance with these principles, in this paper we address the challenge of performing dynamic service composition. The composition process and its associated tasks have to be precisely defined so that the different problems of dynamic service composition can be identified and tackled. To achieve this, this paper defines a life-cycle for dynamic service composition, which defines the required phases and stakeholders. Furthermore, we present our prototype in which the different phases of the dynamic service composition life-cycle are being implemented. This prototype is being used to experiment with and validate our initial ideas on dynamic service composition