Semantic Web Services

Web Services (WSs) are a recent paradigm for describing and discovering processes over the web to enable computers to interoperate with each other, based on standards like UDDI, WSDL and SOAP. WS orchestration allows applications to be built purely via the composition of services and is being implemented for plain WS in WS-BPEL based on earlier efforts in WSFL and XLANG.

Semantic Web Services (SWSs) extend the idea of the Semantic Web to WS. They aim to complement the current knowledge-poor syntactic industry standards with semantic metadata in order to facilitate automation of WS related tasks such as discovery, matchmaking, and composition. The pioneering standards in this area were DAML-S and OWL-S. The most recent developments are related to WSMO, its language modelling language WSML and the reference implementation WSMX developed mostly in the scope of SWWS and DIP projects. The metadata creation problem persists also in the context of SWSs – tools to facilitate the creation of Web Service ontologies and the generation of SWS descriptions are required as the number of available services increases.

SWS Tools: There are a number of relevant SWS tools and the first task of the integration workpackage will be to provide a critical review and comparison, in relation to the TAO requirements. Among the most promising ones for adoption in TAO are those from the SWWS project and the mainly DIP-driven WSMO Studio, which look set to provide necessary support for semantic-based Web services (e.g., ontology manager; WSMO editor: goals, web services; web service repository browsing). An added advantage of WSMO Studio is that it was designed to be extensible at all levels: functional (called runtime in wsmo4j), new user interface components (e.g., concept-based search), and UI customisations (e.g., connecting the ontology editor to the ontology learning modules). The main innovative aspect of the transitioning environment is the introduction of automation when supporting the developer in creating SWS definitions, based on the semantic analysis of existing application documentation and legacy content. The TAO Suite will support users to transform existing applications into Service-Oriented Applications (SOAs) powered by Semantic Web Services technology.

Related Publications

Payne, T. "Web Services from an Agent Perspective", IEEE Intelligent Systems, 23(2), April, 2008.

Tamma, Valentina and Payne, Terry. "Is a Semantic Web Agent a Knowledge-Savvy Agent?", IEEE Intelligent Systems, 23(4), April, 2008.

Wang, Hai H., Payne, Terry R., Gibbins, Nicholas, Saleh, Ahmed, "A Formal Model of Semantic Web Service Ontology (WSMO) Execution", In Proceedings of the 13th IEEE International Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems (ICECCS'08) , April, 2008.

Wang, Hai H., Gibbins, Nick, Payne, Terry R., Saleh, Ahmed, "Transitioning Applications to Semantic Web Services: An Automated Formal Approach", Journal of Interoperability in Business Information Systems, Vol. 3/6, ISSN 1862-6378, January, 2008. Link.

Wang, Hai H., Dong, in-Song, Sun, Jing, Payne, Terry, Gibbins, Nick, Li, Yuan-Fang and Pan, Jeff. "An Integrated Formal Approach to Semantic Work Environments Design". Chapter in the forthcoming book: "Emerging Technologies for Semantic Work Environments: Techniques, Methods, 2007. Link.

Wang, Hai H., Payne, Terry, Gibbins, Nick and Saleh, Ahmed. "Formal specification of OWL-S with Object-Z: the Dynamic Aspect". In proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering, 2007. Link.

Wang, Hai H., Saleh, Ahmed, Payne, Terry and Gibbins, Nick. "Formal specification of OWL-S with Object-Z: the Static Aspect". In proceedings of the 2007 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence, 2007. Link.

Wang, Hai H., Li, Yuan Fang, Sun, Jing, Zhang, Hongyu and Pan, Jeff. "Verifying Feature Models using OWL". Journal of Web Semantics, June 2007. Link.

Wang, Hai H., Gibbins, Nick, Payne, Terry, Saleh, Ahmed and Sun, Jun. "A Formal Semantic Model of the Semantic Web Service Ontology (WSMO)". In 12th IEEE International Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems (ICECCS'07), July, 2007.

Wang, Hai H., Win, Shengchao, Sun, Jun and Dong, Jin Song. "Realizing Live Sequence Charts in SystemVerilog". The 1st IEEE and IFIP International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Software Engineering (TASE '07), June, 2007.