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

Cloud service discovery and analysis: a unified framework

Over the past few years, cloud computing has been more and more attractive as a new computing paradigm due to high flexibility for provisioning on-demand computing resources that are used as services through the Internet. The issues around cloud service discovery have considered by many researchers in the recent years. However, in cloud computing, with the highly dynamic, distributed, the lack of standardized description languages, diverse services offered at different levels and non-transparent nature of cloud services, this research area has gained a significant attention. Robust cloud service discovery approaches will assist the promotion and growth of cloud service customers and providers, but will also provide a meaningful contribution to the acceptance and development of cloud computing. In this dissertation, we have proposed an automated cloud service discovery approach of cloud services. We have also conducted extensive experiments to validate our proposed approach. The results demonstrate the applicability of our approach and its capability of effectively identifying and categorizing cloud services on the Internet. Firstly, we develop a novel approach to build cloud service ontology. Cloud service ontology initially is built based on the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) cloud computing standard. Then, we add new concepts to ontology by automatically analyzing real cloud services based on cloud service ontology Algorithm. We also propose cloud service categorization that use Term Frequency to weigh cloud service ontology concepts and calculate cosine similarity to measure the similarity between cloud services. The cloud service categorization algorithm is able to categorize cloud services to clusters for effective categorization of cloud services. In addition, we use Machine Learning techniques to identify cloud service in real environment. Our cloud service identifier is built by utilizing cloud service features extracted from the real cloud service providers. We determine several features such as similarity function, semantic ontology, cloud service description and cloud services components, to be used effectively in identifying cloud service on the Web. Also, we build a unified model to expose the cloud service’s features to a cloud service search user to ease the process of searching and comparison among a large amount of cloud services by building cloud service’s profile. Furthermore, we particularly develop a cloud service discovery Engine that has capability to crawl the Web automatically and collect cloud services. The collected datasets include meta-data of nearly 7,500 real-world cloud services providers and nearly 15,000 services (2.45GB). The experimental results show that our approach i) is able to effectively build automatic cloud service ontology, ii) is robust in identifying cloud service in real environment and iii) is more scalable in providing more details about cloud services.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Computer Science, 201

An agent composition framework for the J-Park Simulator - A knowledge graph for the process industry

Digital twins, Industry 4.0 and Industrial Internet of Things are becoming ever more important in the process industry. The Semantic Web, linked data, knowledge graphs and web services/agents are key technologies for implementing the above concepts. In this paper, we present a comprehensive semantic agent composition framework. It enables automatic agent discovery and composition to generate cross-domain applications. This framework is based on a light-weight agent ontology, OntoAgent, which is an adaptation of the Minimal Service Model (MSM) ontology. The MSM ontology was extended with grounding components to support the execution of an agent while keeping the compatibility with other existing web service description standards and extensibility. We illustrate how the comprehensive agent composition framework can be integrated into the J-Park Simulator (JPS) knowledge graph, for the automatic creation of a composite agent that simulates the dispersion of the emissions of a power plant within a selected spatial area.National Research Foundation (NRF)Accepted versionThis project is supported by the National Research Foundation (NRF), Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore under its Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE) programme. Markus Kraft acknowledges the support of the Alexander von Humboldt foundation

Semantic information systems engineering: A query-based approach for semi-automatic annotation of web services

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.There has been an increasing interest in Semantic Web services (SWS) as a proposed solution to facilitate automatic discovery, composition and deployment of existing syntactic Web services. Successful implementation and wider adoption of SWS by research and industry are, however, profoundly based on the existence of effective and easy to use methods for service semantic description. Unfortunately, Web service semantic annotation is currently performed by manual means. Manual annotation is a difficult, error-prone and time-consuming task and few approaches exist aiming to semi-automate that task. Existing approaches are difficult to use since they require ontology building. Moreover, these approaches employ ineffective matching methods and suffer from the Low Percentage Problem. The latter problem happens when a small number of service elements - in comparison to the total number of elements – are annotated in a given service. This research addresses the Web services annotation problem by developing a semi-automatic annotation approach that allows SWS developers to effectively and easily annotate their syntactic services. The proposed approach does not require application ontologies to model service semantics. Instead, a standard query template is used: This template is filled with data and semantics extracted from WSDL files in order to produce query instances. The input of the annotation approach is the WSDL file of a candidate service and a set of ontologies. The output is an annotated WSDL file. The proposed approach is composed of five phases: (1) Concept extraction; (2) concept filtering and query filling; (3) query execution; (4) results assessment; and (5) SAWSDL annotation. The query execution engine makes use of name-based and structural matching techniques. The name-based matching is carried out by CN-Match which is a novel matching method and tool that is developed and evaluated in this research. The proposed annotation approach is evaluated using a set of existing Web services and ontologies. Precision (P), Recall (R), F-Measure (F) and Percentage of annotated elements are used as evaluation metrics. The evaluation reveals that the proposed approach is effective since - in relation to manual results - accurate and almost complete annotation results are obtained. In addition, high percentage of annotated elements is achieved using the proposed approach because it makes use of effective ontology extension mechanisms

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 conceptual architecture for semantic web services development and deployment

Several extensions of the Web Services Framework (WSF) have been proposed. The combination with Semantic Web technologies introduces a notion of semantics, which can enhance scalability through automation. Service composition to processes is an equally important issue. Ontology technology – the core of the Semantic Web – can be the central building block of an extension endeavour. We present a conceptual architecture for ontology-based Web service development and deployment. The development of service-based software systems within the WSF is gaining increasing importance. We show how ontologies can integrate models, languages, infrastructure, and activities within this architecture to support reuse and composition of semantic Web services

A framework for deriving semantic web services

Web service-based development represents an emerging approach for the development of distributed information systems. Web services have been mainly applied by software practitioners as a means to modularize system functionality that can be offered across a network (e.g., intranet and/or the Internet). Although web services have been predominantly developed as a technical solution for integrating software systems, there is a more business-oriented aspect that developers and enterprises need to deal with in order to benefit from the full potential of web services in an electronic market. This ‘ignored’ aspect is the representation of the semantics underlying the services themselves as well as the ‘things’ that the services manage. Currently languages like the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) provide the syntactic means to describe web services, but lack in providing a semantic underpinning. In order to harvest all the benefits of web services technology, a framework has been developed for deriving business semantics from syntactic descriptions of web services. The benefits of such a framework are two-fold. Firstly, the framework provides a way to gradually construct domain ontologies from previously defined technical services. Secondly, the framework enables the migration of syntactically defined web services toward semantic web services. The study follows a design research approach which (1) identifies the problem area and its relevance from an industrial case study and previous research, (2) develops the framework as a design artifact and (3) evaluates the application of the framework through a relevant scenario

Semantic web service automation with lightweight annotations

Web services, both RESTful and WSDL-based, are an increasingly important part of the Web. With the application of semantic technologies, we can achieve automation of the use of those services. In this paper, we present WSMO-Lite and MicroWSMO, two related lightweight approaches to semantic Web service description, evolved from the WSMO framework. WSMO-Lite uses SAWSDL to annotate WSDL-based services, whereas MicroWSMO uses the hRESTS microformat to annotate RESTful APIs and services. Both frameworks share an ontology for service semantics together with most of automation algorithms

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

Organising the knowledge space for software components

Software development has become a distributed, collaborative process based on the assembly of off-the-shelf and purpose-built components. The selection of software components from component repositories and the development of components for these repositories requires an accessible information infrastructure that allows the description and comparison of these components. General knowledge relating to software development is equally important in this context as knowledge concerning the application domain of the software. Both form two pillars on which the structural and behavioural properties of software components can be addressed. Form, effect, and intention are the essential aspects of process-based knowledge representation with behaviour as a primary property. We investigate how this information space for software components can be organised in order to facilitate the required taxonomy, thesaurus, conceptual model, and logical framework functions. Focal point is an axiomatised ontology that, in addition to the usual static view on knowledge, also intrinsically addresses the dynamics, i.e. the behaviour of software. Modal logics are central here – providing a bridge between classical (static) knowledge representation approaches and behaviour and process description and classification. We relate our discussion to the Web context, looking at Web services as components and the Semantic Web as the knowledge representation framewor