Though DAML-S is growing into a de facto standard for semantic webservice markup, we have only found few complete service descriptions and even less papers discussing technical issues about the markup process. We

addressed this lack by (1) reporting on our experiences in describing a set of services, (2) concluding several limitations of the latest DAML-S version (v0.7) and (3) making our work accessible to the research community1

Richards, Debbie

Sabou, Marta

Splunter, Sander van

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Sabou, M.

Richards, D.J.

van Splunter, S.

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An experience report on using DAML-S

VU Research Portal

van Splunter, Sander

Macquarie University ResearchOnline

An Experience Report on using DAML-S

Splunter, S. van

DSpace at VU

Though DAML-S is growing into a de facto standard for semantic webservice markup, we have only found few complete service descriptions and even less papers discussing technical issues about the markup process. We addressed this lack by (1) reporting on our experiences in describing a set of services, (2) concluding several limitations of the latest DAML-S version (v0.7) and (3) making our work accessible to the research community    

Marta Sabou

Debbie Richards

Sander van Splunter

CiteSeerX

Though DAML-S is growing into a de facto standard for semantic web-service markup, we have only found few complete service descriptions and even less papers discussing technical issues about the markup process. We addressed this lack by (1) reporting on our experiences in describing a set of services, (2) concluding several limitations of the latest DAML-S version (v0.7) and (3) making our work accessible to the research community 

Open Research Online (The Open University)

Open Research OnlineThe Open University’s repository of research publicationsand other research outputsAn Experience report on using DAML-SConference or Workshop ItemHow to cite:Richards, Debbie; Splunter, Sander van and Sabou, Marta (2003). An Experience report on using DAML-S.In: Workshop on E-Services and the Semantic Web (ESSW ’03), The Twelfth International World Wide WebConference, 20 May 2003, Budapest, Hungary.For guidance on citations see FAQs.c© [not recorded]Version: [not recorded]Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyrightowners. For more information on Open Research Online’s data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policiespage.oro.open.ac.ukAn experience report on using DAML-SMarta Sabou a Debbie Richards b Sander van Splunter aa Dept. of Artificial Intelligence, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdamb Division of I.C.S., Macquarie University, SydneyAbstractThough DAML-S is growing into a de facto standard for semantic web-service markup, we have only found few complete service descriptions andeven less papers discussing technical issues about the markup process. Weaddressed this lack by (1) reporting on our experiences in describing a setof services, (2) concluding several limitations of the latest DAML-S version(v0.7) and (3) making our work accessible to the research community1.1 IntroductionDAML-S is an initiative of the Semantic Web community to facilitate automaticdiscovery, invocation, composition, interoperation and monitoring of web-services(WSs) through their semantic description [1]. DAML-S is a DAML+OIL ontologyconceptually divided into three sub-ontologies for specifying what a service does?(Profile), how the service works? (Process) and how the service is implemented?(Grounding). The existing grounding allows aligning the semantic specificationwith implementation details described using WSDL, the industry standard forweb-service description.DAML-S has generated a lot of interest through its promise to add semanticsto web service descriptions. Despite that interest we were only able to find a smallnumber of DAML-S descriptions of web services and most of these did not pointto real services and were from the DAML-S community. Within the DAML-Scoalition two complete, fictitious examples (on the DAML-S site) are provided.Several other projects use only certain parts of the DAML-S ontology, eg. match-making research tends to focus on the Profile ontology. Other researchers reporton extending parts of DAML-S, e.g. by enriching the Process/Profile ontologies.Finally, some papers do mention use of complete DAML-S as is, but their purposewas to describe other research work therefore ignoring any details about their ex-periences with the language. Common to all the existing papers is that none ofthem describe the process of writing the DAML-S markup.We sought to fill this gap by providing a set of complete, real web servicedescriptions and sharing our modelling experiences.1All services available at http://www.cs.vu.nl/˜marta/services/12 Using DAML-SWe marked up a set of web services which are used to build web-portals fromsemantically annotated bibliographic information. An agent based configurationservice uses these descriptions to configure the suit of services depending on thecharacteristics of the input data. Based on our modelling experiences we havedistilled some general observations about DAML-S.We have concluded that DAML-S is superior to existing WS languages asit allows use of formally defined domain knowledge. It goes beyond syntacticdescription of a service by providing a semantic description. Semantics allowreasoning about a service and move us towards the ultimate goal of dynamicservice discovery and usage. The other key strength of DAML-S is that it linksto an industry standard, namely WSDL. In this way, it indeed fulfills its role as alink between the Semantic Web community and industry.However, we also encountered a set of shortcomings.A) Imprecise conceptual model. While it is commendable that DAML-Sseeks to provide flexibility and thus has not fully defined a number of its concepts,this flexibility comes at the expense of clarity. The result of this imprecision isthat DAML-S has an imprecise underlying conceptual model. We base this on thefollowing facts. First, the three parts of DAML-S employ different metaphors todescribe the same service: a program metaphor, an action metaphor and a viewbased on network endpoints. Second, several links exist between the conceptualmodels however they are often unclear. Our paper demonstrates that the linkbetween the Profile and Process ontologies leads to inconsistencies in the finaldescriptions. Third, there is no clear correspondence of DAML-S concepts withsoftware engineering (SE) concepts therefore it is often ambiguous how to modelwell-accepted software paradigms.B) Mapping to WSDL limits DAML-S expressivity. We have experi-enced that the mapping to WSDL often limits the expressivity of DAML-S. Justby modelling a simple service we conflicted with two out of three basic assump-tions that underlie the mapping. This forced us to revise our descriptions so thata grounding was possible at the expense of giving up specification of parametricpolymorphism or an accurate specification of a complex internal structure. Wefeel that DAML-S is influenced too much by the actual grounding details.C) Difficult to learn. One of our major comments (and worries) is that itwas quite difficult to get started with writing DAML-S. The previously mentionedlack of conceptual model played a fair role in this. Other inhibiting factors werethe limited tool support and the low number of provided examples.We hope that both our observations and actual examples will contribute to thedevelopment and large scale usage of DAML-S and move our community closer torealizing the Semantic Web.References[1] DAML Services Coalition. DAML-S: Semantic Markup for Web Services.DAML-S v. 0.7 White Paper, October 2002.

An Experience report on using DAML-S

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An Experience report on using DAML-S

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