Declarative Data Grounding Using a Mapping Language

2003

The relation between DAML-S, a language for the description of Web services grounded in the Semantic Web, and the growing Web services infrastructure based on WSDL is, by an large, still an open question. In this paper we describe a mapping from WSDL to DAML-S whose contribution is twofold: on the theoretical side it clearly shows what information is contributed by the DAML-S specification, on a more practical side it facilitates the compilation of DAML-S descriptions.

2005

Web services have become the predominant paradigm for the development of distributed software systems. Web services provide the means to modularize software 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). The representation of web services by current industrial practice is predominantly syntactic in nature lacking the fundamental semantic underpinnings required to fulfill the goals of the emerging Semantic Web. This paper proposes a framework aimed at (1) modeling the semantics of syntactically defined web services through a process of interpretation, (2) scoping the derived concepts within domain ontologies, and (3) harmonizing the semantic web services with the domain ontologies. The framework was validated through its application to web services developed for a large financial system. The worked example presented in this paper is extracted from the semantic modeling of these financial web services.

2008

One major challenge for businesses today is the openning of their Information Systems (IS), making them accessible to their partners over the Internet. To this aim, they expose interfaces of their IS via Web Service technology which consists in loosely coupled components using XML documents and commonly agreed standards to communicate. But this component set is heterogeneous and changing despite new technologies like Web Services which assure a minimum level of interoperability. As such, the automation of Web Service composition is a key enabler for rapid deployment of new composite services. Past work on the semantic Web provides several high level solutions to discover potential connections and interactions between heterogeneous Web Services. However, few or none of these tackle implementations issues related to XML messages management at the syntactic level. This article focuses on adapting some XML database solutions, specifically XML Schema matching, to leverage the semantic matching analysis by providing a data transformation that enables data integration of exchanged messages. Our approach requires no semantic addition to already existing industrial engines to execute the resulting compositions. The preliminary evaluation results, provided by an implementation in an industrial project, shows the effectiveness of the proposed solution.

International Journal of Web Services Research, 2007

With the rising popularity of Web services, both academia and industry have invested considerably in Web service description standards, discovery, and composition techniques. The standards-based approach utilized by Web services has supported interoperability at the syntax level. However, issues of structural and semantic heterogeneity between messages exchanged by Web services are far more complex and crucial to interoperability. It is for these reasons that we recognize the value that schema/data mappings bring to Web service descriptions. In this article, we examine challenges to interoperability; classify the types of heterogeneities that can occur between interacting services, and present a possible solution for data interoperability using the mapping support provided by WSDL-S, a key driver behind SAWSDL. We present a data mediation architecture using the extensibility features of WSDL and the popular SOAP engine, Axis 2.

… Resource Retrieval in …, 2007

Semantic Web Services are a research effort to automate the usage of Web services, a necessary component for the Semantic Web. Traditionally, Web service discovery depends on detailed formal semantic descriptions of available services. Since a complete detailed service description is not always feasible, the client software cannot select the best service offer for a given user goal only by using the static service descriptions. Therefore the client needs to interact automatically with the discovered Web services to find information about the available concrete offers, after which it can select the best offer that will fulfill the user's goal. This paper shows when and why complete semantic description is unfeasible, it defines the role and position of offer discovery, and it suggests how it can be implemented and evaluated.

2006

The Web Service Modeling Language (WSML) is a language for the specification of different aspects of Semantic Web Services. It provides a formal language for the Web Service Modeling Ontology WSMO which is based on well-known logical formalisms, specifying one coherent language framework for the description of Semantic Web Services, starting from the intersection of Datalog and the Description Logic SHIQ. This core language is extended in the directions of Description Logics and Logic Programming in a principled manner with strict layering. WSML distinguishes between conceptual and logical modeling in order to facilitate users who are not familiar with formal logic, while not restricting the expressive power of the language for the expert user. IRIs play a central role in WSML as identifiers. Furthermore, WSML defines XML and RDF serializations for inter-operation over the Semantic Web.

Handbook of Service Description, 2012

The research area of Semantic Web Services investigates the annotation of services, typically in a SOA, with a precise mathematical meaning in a formal ontology. These annotations allow a higher degree of automation. The last decade has seen a wide proliferation of such approaches, proposing different ontology languages, and paradigms for employing these in practice. The next chapter gives an overview of these approaches. In the present chapter, we provide an understanding of the fundamental techniques, from Artificial Intelligence and Databases, on which they are built. We give a concise, ontology-language independent, overview of the techniques most frequently used to automate service discovery and composition.

Semantic web services hold the promise of greatly increasing interoperability among software agents and web services by enabling content-based (as opposed to format-based) automated service discovery and interaction. However, as different services may well use different, only partly compatible ontologies to describe their capabilities, some amount of ontology mapping or translation will be required during the various stages of service discovery and utilization. In this paper, we reexamine some of the processing assumptions that were made in the development of semantic web service models like DAML-S in order to uncover the very different roles of semantic translation in the subprocesses of service discovery, service process model interpretation, task negotiation, service invocation and response interpretation. We present examples and arguments showing how several different styles of translation will be required based on the informational context and perspectives of agents in each of these stages.

Current industry standards for describing Web Services focus on ensuring interoperability across diverse platforms, but do not provide a good foundation for automating the use of Web Services. Representational techniques being developed for the Semantic Web can be used to augment these standards. The resulting Web Service specifications enable the development of software programs that can interpret descriptions World Wide of unfamiliar Web Services and then employ those services to satisfy user goals. OWL-S ("OWL for Services") is a set of notations for expressing such specifications, based on the Semantic Web ontology language OWL. It consists of three interrelated parts: a profile ontology, used to describe what the service does; a process ontology and corresponding presentation syntax, used to describe how the service is used; and a grounding ontology, used to describe how to interact with the service. OWL-S can be used to automate a variety of service-related activities involving service discovery, interoperation, and composition. A large body of research on OWL-S has led to the creation of many open-source tools for developing, reasoning about, and dynamically utilizing Web Services.