What does Software Engineering Practice offer to Semantic Web Service Composition?

Bruce Spencer and Sandy Liu are the leader and a researcher in the Internet Logic group, which specializes in reasoning systems for Internet applications. The group’s activities on the Semantic Web include (i) a Semantic Web Lab with close ties to RuleML.org, (ii) a graduate course at the University of New Brunswick on the Semantic Web Techniques, (iii) BASeWEB (Business Agents and the Semantic Web) workshop held annually in conjunction with the Canadian AI Conference since 2002, (iv) an open source reasoning engine jDREW [2] on SourceForge, (v) a queuing inference engine [3], (vi) DeFleX, an XML Router for agile knowledge workflows [1], and (vii) WSIRD, a rule-based data integration engine between Web Services [4]. Challenges: Web Services can be seen as functional components that can be selected for composition to achieve certain purposes, based on descriptions of the components ’ purposes, their preconditions and effects, and the data they accept and produce. The selection may be done by an abstract reasoner, such as a planner, which uses these descriptions to infer that a specific combination o