Geospatial data integration with Semantic Web services: the eMerges approach

Geographic space still lacks the semantics allowing a unified view of spatial data. Indeed, as a unique but all encompassing domain, it presents specificities that geospatial applications are still unable to handle. Moreover, to be useful, new spatial applications need to match human cognitive abilities of spatial representation and reasoning. In this context, eMerges, an approach to geospatial data integration based on Semantic Web Services (SWS), allows the unified representation and manipulation of heterogeneous spatial data sources. eMerges provides this integration by mediating legacy spatial data sources to high-level spatial ontologies through SWS and by presenting for each object context dependent affordances. This generic approach is applied here in the context of an emergency management use case developed in collaboration with emergency planners of public agencies

A Requirement-centric Approach to Web Service Modeling, Discovery, and Selection

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) has gained considerable popularity for implementing Service-Based Applications (SBAs) in a flexible\ud and effective manner. The basic idea of SOC is to understand users'\ud requirements for SBAs first, and then discover and select relevant\ud services (i.e., that fit closely functional requirements) and offer\ud a high Quality of Service (QoS). Understanding users’ requirements\ud is already achieved by existing requirement engineering approaches\ud (e.g., TROPOS, KAOS, and MAP) which model SBAs in a requirement-driven\ud manner. However, discovering and selecting relevant and high QoS\ud services are still challenging tasks that require time and effort\ud due to the increasing number of available Web services. In this paper,\ud we propose a requirement-centric approach which allows: (i) modeling\ud users’ requirements for SBAs with the MAP formalism and specifying\ud required services using an Intentional Service Model (ISM); (ii)\ud discovering services by querying the Web service search engine Service-Finder\ud and using keywords extracted from the specifications provided by\ud the ISM; and(iii) selecting automatically relevant and high QoS services\ud by applying Formal Concept Analysis (FCA). We validate our approach\ud by performing experiments on an e-books application. The experimental\ud results show that our approach allows the selection of relevant and\ud high QoS services with a high accuracy (the average precision is\ud 89.41%) and efficiency (the average recall is 95.43%)

Benefits and challenges of applying Semantic Web Services in the e-Government domain

Joining up services in e-Government usually implies governmental agencies acting in concert without a central control regime. This requires the sharing of scattered and heterogeneous data. Semantic Web Service (SWS) technology can help to integrate, mediate and reason between these datasets. However, since few real-world applications have been developed, it is still unclear which are the actual benefits and issues of adopting such a technology in the e-Government domain. In this paper, we contribute to raising awareness of the potential benefits in the e-Government community by analyzing motivations, requirements, and expected results, before proposing a reusable SWS-based framework. We demonstrate the application of this framework by a compelling use case: a GIS-based emergency planning system. We illustrate the obtained benefits and the key challenges which remain to be addressed

Cloud service localisation

The essence of cloud computing is the provision of software and hardware services to a range of users in dierent locations. The aim of cloud service localisation is to facilitate the internationalisation and localisation of cloud services by allowing their adaption to dierent locales. We address the lingual localisation by providing service-level language translation techniques to adopt services to dierent languages and regulatory localisation by providing standards-based mappings to achieve regulatory compliance with regionally varying laws, standards and regulations. The aim is to support and enforce the explicit modelling of aspects particularly relevant to localisation and runtime support consisting of tools and middleware services to automating the deployment based on models of locales, driven by the two localisation dimensions. We focus here on an ontology-based conceptual information model that integrates locale specication in a coherent way

Mediation of semantic web services in IRS-III

Business applications composed of heterogeneous distributed components or Web services need mediation to resolve data and process mismatches at runtime. This paper describes mediation in IRS-III, a framework and platform for developing WSMO-based Semantic Web Services. We present our approach to mediation within Semantic Web Services and highlight the role of WSMO mediator types when solving mismatches at the semantic level between a service requester and a service provider. We describe the components of our mediation framework and how it can handle data, goal and process mediation during the activities of selection, composition and invocation of Semantic Web Services

NLSC: Unrestricted Natural Language-based Service Composition through Sentence Embeddings

Current approaches for service composition (assemblies of atomic services) require developers to use: (a) domain-specific semantics to formalize services that restrict the vocabulary for their descriptions, and (b) translation mechanisms for service retrieval to convert unstructured user requests to strongly-typed semantic representations. In our work, we argue that effort to developing service descriptions, request translations, and matching mechanisms could be reduced using unrestricted natural language; allowing both: (1) end-users to intuitively express their needs using natural language, and (2) service developers to develop services without relying on syntactic/semantic description languages. Although there are some natural language-based service composition approaches, they restrict service retrieval to syntactic/semantic matching. With recent developments in Machine learning and Natural Language Processing, we motivate the use of Sentence Embeddings by leveraging richer semantic representations of sentences for service description, matching and retrieval. Experimental results show that service composition development effort may be reduced by more than 44\% while keeping a high precision/recall when matching high-level user requests with low-level service method invocations.Comment: This paper will appear on SCC'19 (IEEE International Conference on Services Computing) on July 1

A monitoring approach for runtime service discovery

Effective runtime service discovery requires identification of services based on different service characteristics such as structural, behavioural, quality, and contextual characteristics. However, current service registries guarantee services described in terms of structural and sometimes quality characteristics and, therefore, it is not always possible to assume that services in them will have all the characteristics required for effective service discovery. In this paper, we describe a monitor-based runtime service discovery framework called MoRSeD. The framework supports service discovery in both push and pull modes of query execution. The push mode of query execution is performed in parallel to the execution of a service-based system, in a proactive way. Both types of queries are specified in a query language called SerDiQueL that allows the representation of structural, behavioral, quality, and contextual conditions of services to be identified. The framework uses a monitor component to verify if behavioral and contextual conditions in the queries can be satisfied by services, based on translations of these conditions into properties represented in event calculus, and verification of the satisfiability of these properties against services. The monitor is also used to support identification that services participating in a service-based system are unavailable, and identification of changes in the behavioral and contextual characteristics of the services. A prototype implementation of the framework has been developed. The framework has been evaluated in terms of comparison of its performance when using and when not using the monitor component

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