Semantic Web Service Description Research Articles

A multifaceted semantic web service description of the pervasive information system

The technique of adapting the web service allows the user to establish reusable, interoperable, flexible and context-aware applications. In fact, the pervasive system specification is provided by the context-aware applications since it is dynamically adapted. Furthermore, we seek to offer a dynamic description of the web services. This objective, however, can be achieved by adding contextual information structures to the web service description. In the literature, more research works strive to combine the contextual description with the web service description using the OWL-S structure.In fact, the main objective of this paper is to propose structures with two levels for the contextual description of the pervasive system. This description is based on the generic model for the pervasive system design. We, also, suggest integrating such a description into the OWL-S structure.

Semantic Web service discovery using natural language processing techniques

This paper proposes a semantic Web service discovery framework for finding semantic Web services by making use of natural language processing techniques. The framework allows searching through a set of semantic Web services in order to find a match with a user query consisting of keywords. By specifying the search goal using keywords, end-users do not need to have knowledge about semantic languages, which makes it easy to express the desired semantic Web services. For matching keywords with semantic Web service descriptions given in WSMO, techniques like part-of-speech tagging, lemmatization, and word sense disambiguation are used. After determining the senses of relevant words gathered from Web service descriptions and the user query, a matching process takes place. The performance evaluation shows that the three proposed matching algorithms are able to effectively perform matching and approximate matching.

The PORSCE II framework: using AI planning for automated Semantic Web service composition

AbstractThis paper presents PORSCE II, an integrated system that performs automatic Semantic Web service composition exploiting artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, specifically planning. Essential steps in achieving Web service composition include the translation of the Web service composition problem into a solver-ready planning domain and problem, followed by the acquisition of solutions, and the translation of the solutions back to Web service terms. The solutions to the problem, that is, the descriptions of the desired composite service, are obtained by means of external domain-independent planning systems, they are visualized and finally evaluated. Throughout the entire process, the system exploits semantic information extracted from the semantic descriptions of the available Web services and the corresponding ontologies, in order to perform composition under semantic awareness and relaxation.

Discovering Semantic Web Services Using SPARQL and Intelligent Agents

This paper describes a novel approach to the description and discovery of Semantic Web services. We propose SPARQL as a formal language to describe the preconditions and postconditions of services, as well as the goals of agents. In addition, we show that SPARQL query evaluation can be used to check the truth of preconditions in a given context, construct the postconditions that will result from the execution of a service in a context, and determine whether a service execution with those results will satisfy the goal of an agent. We also show how certain optimizations of these tasks can be implemented in our framework.

Knowledge-based personalized search engine for the Web-based Human Musculoskeletal System Resources (HMSR) in biomechanics

Human musculoskeletal system resources of the human body are valuable for the learning and medical purposes. Internet-based information from conventional search engines such as Google or Yahoo cannot response to the need of useful, accurate, reliable and good-quality human musculoskeletal resources related to medical processes, pathological knowledge and practical expertise. In this present work, an advanced knowledge-based personalized search engine was developed. Our search engine was based on a client–server multi-layer multi-agent architecture and the principle of semantic web services to acquire dynamically accurate and reliable HMSR information by a semantic processing and visualization approach. A security-enhanced mechanism was applied to protect the medical information. A multi-agent crawler was implemented to develop a content-based database of HMSR information. A new semantic-based PageRank score with related mathematical formulas were also defined and implemented. As the results, semantic web service descriptions were presented in OWL, WSDL and OWL-S formats. Operational scenarios with related web-based interfaces for personal computers and mobile devices were presented and analyzed. Functional comparison between our knowledge-based search engine, a conventional search engine and a semantic search engine showed the originality and the robustness of our knowledge-based personalized search engine. In fact, our knowledge-based personalized search engine allows different users such as orthopedic patient and experts or healthcare system managers or medical students to access remotely into useful, accurate, reliable and good-quality HMSR information for their learning and medical purposes.

SEMI-AUTOMATIC ANNOTATION OF WEB SERVICES: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS AND RESEARCH AGENDA

Semantic web services (SWS) have recently attracted much attention because of their potential to automate all common service tasks such as discovery, composition, invocation and execution. The successful implementation of SWS is profoundly based on the availability of appropriate methods for SWS description. There is, however, no consensus in the SWS arena on the significant service elements that make SWS description comprehensive. Furthermore, semantic annotation of those elements is still a manual process where human involvement is a must. Therefore, automating the annotation process is highly desired as the manual annotation is a difficult, costly and time-consuming process. Few approaches exist aiming to semi-automate the annotation task. These approaches have limitations preventing their wide adoption by the research and practice communities. This paper contributes by analysing and comparing those existing semi-automatic Web service annotation approaches in order to highlight the major challenges and provide fruitful guidelines to aid future research. Particularly, a synthesis of service elements that require semantic annotation is provided and then used to assess the completeness of semi-automated approaches. The comparison leads to significant implications for theory and practice.

Capturing the functionality of Web services with functional descriptions

Many have left their footprints on the field of semantic RESTful Web service description. Albeit some of the propositions are even W3C Recommendations, none of the proposed standards could gain significant adoption with Web service providers. Some approaches were supposedly too complex and verbose, others were considered not RESTful, and some failed to reach a significant majority of API providers for a combination of the reasons above. While we neither have the silver bullet for universal Web service description, with this paper, we want to suggest a lightweight approach called RESTdesc. It expresses the semantics of Web services by pre- and postconditions in simple N3 rules, and integrates existing standards and conventions such as Link headers, HTTP OPTIONS, and URI templates for discovery and interaction. This approach keeps the complexity to a minimum, yet still enables service descriptions with full semantic expressiveness. A sample implementation on the topic of multimedia Web services verifies the effectiveness of our approach.

A Framework for Automatic Web Service Discovery Based on Semantics and NLP Techniques

As a greater number of Web Services are made available today, automatic discovery is recognized as an important task. To promote the automation of service discovery, different semantic languages have been created that allow describing the functionality of services in a machine interpretable form using Semantic Web technologies. The problem is that users do not have intimate knowledge about semantic Web service languages and related toolkits. In this paper, we propose a discovery framework that enables semantic Web service discovery based on keywords written in natural language. We describe a novel approach for automatic discovery of semantic Web services which employs Natural Language Processing techniques to match a user request, expressed in natural language, with a semantic Web service description. Additionally, we present an efficient semantic matching technique to compute the semantic distance between ontological concepts.

Mediation Spaces for Similarity-Based Semantic Web Services Selection

Semantic Web Services (SWS) aim at the automated discovery, selection and orchestration of Web services based on comprehensive, machine-interpretable semantic descriptions. The latter are, in principle, deployed by multiple possible actors (i.e., service providers and service consumers); thus, a high level of heterogeneity between distinct SWS annotations is expected. Therefore, mediation between concurrent semantic representations of services is a key requirement to fully implement the SWS vision. In this paper, the authors argue that “semantic-level mediation” is necessary to identify semantic similarities across distinct SWS representations. The authors formalize and implement a mediation approach based on “Mediation Spaces” (MS), which enables the implicit representation of semantic similarities among distinct SWS descriptions. As a result, given a specific SWS approach and the proposed MS, a general purpose algorithm is implemented to empower SWS selection with the automatic computation of semantic similarities between a given SWS request and a set of SWS offers. A prototypical application illustrates the approach and highlights the benefits w.r.t. current mediation approaches.

Discovering Semantic Web services using SPARQL and intelligent agents

This paper describes a novel approach to the description and discovery of Semantic Web services. We propose SPARQL as a formal language to describe the preconditions and postconditions of services, as well as the goals of agents. In addition, we show that SPARQL query evaluation can be used to check the truth of preconditions in a given context, construct the postconditions that will result from the execution of a service in a context, and determine whether a service execution with those results will satisfy the goal of an agent. We also show how certain optimizations of these tasks can be implemented in our framework.

ENGINEERING THE LIFE-CYCLE OF SEMANTIC SERVICES-ENHANCED LEARNING SYSTEMS

Service-oriented learning environments are the new paradigm for interoperability of learning management systems. They support a wider range of needs by integrating existing and emergent services, leading to an entirely new architectural design for such systems. The engineering life-cycle of resources and services can be enhanced and integrated in current and future virtual learning environments. This work defines a services-enhanced learning architecture and describes two levels of integration carried out to author, deploy and enact learning services from open web-based interaction protocols and semantic web service descriptions.

Structural and Role-Oriented Web Service Discovery with Taxonomies in OWL-S

In this paper, we describe and evaluate a Web service discovery framework using OWL-S advertisements, combined with the distinction between service and Web service of the WSMO discovery framework. More specifically, we follow the Web service discovery model, which is based on abstract and lightweight semantic Web service descriptions, using the service profile ontology of OWL-S. Our goal is to determine fast an initial set of candidate Web services for a specific request. This set can then be used in more fine-grained discovery approaches, based on richer Web service descriptions. Our Web service matchmaking algorithm extends object-based matching techniques used in structural case-based reasoning, allowing 1) the retrieval of Web services not only based on subsumption relationships, but exploiting also the structural information of OWL ontologies and 2) the exploitation of Web services classification in profile taxonomies, performing domain-dependent discovery. Furthermore, we describe how the typical paradigm of profile input/output annotation with ontology concepts can be extended, allowing ontology roles to be considered as well. We have implemented our framework in the OWLS-SLR system, which we extensively evaluate and compare to the OWLS-MX matchmaker.

Problem solving methods in a global networked age

AbstractWe believe that the future for problem solving method (PSM) derived work is very promising. In short, PSMs provide a solid foundation for creating a semantic layer supporting planetary-scale networks. Moreover, within a world-scale network where billions services are used and created by billions of parties inad hocdynamic fashion we believe that PSM-based mechanisms provide the only viable approach to dealing the sheer scale systematically. Our current experiments in this area are based upon a generic ontology for describing Web services derived from earlier work on PSMs. We outline how platforms based on our ontology can support large-scale networked interactivity in three main areas. Within a large European project we are able to map business level process descriptions to semantic Web service descriptions, to enable business experts to manage and use enterprise processes running in corporate information technology systems. Although highly successful, Web service-based applications predominately run behind corporate firewalls and are far less pervasive on the general Web. Within a second large European project we are extending our semantic service work using the principles underlying the Web and Web 2.0 to transform the Web from a Web of data to one where services are managed and used at large scale. Significant initiatives are now underway in North America, Asia, and Europe to design a new Internet using a “clean-slate” approach to fulfill the demands created by new modes of use and the additional 3 billion users linked to mobile phones. Our investigations within the European-based Future Internet program indicate that a significant opportunity exists for our PSM-derived work to address the key challenges currently identified: scalability, trust, interoperability, pervasive usability, and mobility. We outline one PSM-derived approach as an exemplar.

SSWAP: A Simple Semantic Web Architecture and Protocol for semantic web services.

BackgroundSSWAP (Simple Semantic Web Architecture and Protocol; pronounced "swap") is an architecture, protocol, and platform for using reasoning to semantically integrate heterogeneous disparate data and services on the web. SSWAP was developed as a hybrid semantic web services technology to overcome limitations found in both pure web service technologies and pure semantic web technologies.ResultsThere are currently over 2400 resources published in SSWAP. Approximately two dozen are custom-written services for QTL (Quantitative Trait Loci) and mapping data for legumes and grasses (grains). The remaining are wrappers to Nucleic Acids Research Database and Web Server entries. As an architecture, SSWAP establishes how clients (users of data, services, and ontologies), providers (suppliers of data, services, and ontologies), and discovery servers (semantic search engines) interact to allow for the description, querying, discovery, invocation, and response of semantic web services. As a protocol, SSWAP provides the vocabulary and semantics to allow clients, providers, and discovery servers to engage in semantic web services. The protocol is based on the W3C-sanctioned first-order description logic language OWL DL. As an open source platform, a discovery server running at (as in to "swap info") uses the description logic reasoner Pellet to integrate semantic resources. The platform hosts an interactive guide to the protocol at , developer tools at , and a portal to third-party ontologies at (a "swap meet").ConclusionSSWAP addresses the three basic requirements of a semantic web services architecture (i.e., a common syntax, shared semantic, and semantic discovery) while addressing three technology limitations common in distributed service systems: i.e., i) the fatal mutability of traditional interfaces, ii) the rigidity and fragility of static subsumption hierarchies, and iii) the confounding of content, structure, and presentation. SSWAP is novel by establishing the concept of a canonical yet mutable OWL DL graph that allows data and service providers to describe their resources, to allow discovery servers to offer semantically rich search engines, to allow clients to discover and invoke those resources, and to allow providers to respond with semantically tagged data. SSWAP allows for a mix-and-match of terms from both new and legacy third-party ontologies in these graphs.

Design Web Services: Towards Service Reuse at the Design Level

Service oriented software development has gained more and more importance in the area of e-business. Most researchers focus on the semantic description of Web services and automated composition but pay little attention to how to design Web services for supporting service reuse effectively, thus a substantial amount of modeling and programming is still required. In this paper, a pattern oriented service design method is presented by which all components of different abstraction levels are uniform in regard to their specifications and composition mechanism. Pattern oriented service design model provides a traceable and explicit link from business components to software components so that the top-down service reuse at design level is supported, and the service maintainer profits from the traceability because the impact of requirement or design modifications can be better assessed. The semantic information of component specification can support semantics based component reuse. The pattern oriented service design model can improve development productivity by offering a better chance of reuse through better modularity.

Semantic web services discovery based on structural ontology matching

In this paper, we present an approach to semantic-based web service discovery and a prototypical tool based on syntactic and structural schema matching. It is based on matching an input ontology, describing a service request, to web services descriptions at the 'syntactic level' through Web Services Description Language (WSDL) or, at the semantic level, through service ontologies described with languages such as Ontology Web Language for Services (OWL-S), Web Services Modelling Ontology (WSMO), Semantic Web Services Framework (SWSF) and Web Services Description Language Semantics (WSDL-S). The different input schemas, WSDL descriptions, Ontology Web Language (OWL) ontologies, OWL-S, WSMO, SWSF and WSDL-S components are represented in a uniform way by means of directed rooted graphs, where nodes represent schema elements, connected by directed links of different types, e.g., for containment and referential relationships. On this uniform internal representation, a number of matching algorithms operate, including structural-based algorithms (Children Matcher, Leaves Matcher, Graph and SubGraph Isomorphism) and syntactical ones (Edit Distance (Levenshtein Distance or LD) and Synonym Matcher (through the WordNet synonyms thesaurus)).

Pervasive Learning System Based on a Scenario Model Integrating Web Service Retrieval and Orchestration

We are interested in learning and working scenarios integrating web service retrieval and orchestration in pervasive TEL systems in a learning situation at workplace. This paper proposes a context-aware model of corporate learning and working scenarios in e-retail environment such as shops and hypermarkets. This scenario model enables us to select how to achieve activities according to the current situation. We outline the semantic description of web services to enable the selection, composition and execution of web services to achieve objectives specified by learning and working activities. We propose a context-aware and adaptive model for pervasive learning systems. This model enables the selection of the relevant methods or services to realize activities according to the current situation. Moreover, we also build and develop an Intelligent Selling Space (ISS) architecture that serves as an infrastructure for service management and execution in e-retail environment.

A search engine for QoS-enabled discovery of semantic web services

Directory services are a genuine constituent of any distributed architecture which facilitate binding attributes to names and then querying this information, that is, announcing and discovering resources. In such contexts, especially in a business environment, Quality of Service (QoS) and non-functional properties are usually the most important criteria to decide whether a specific resource will be used. To address this problem, we present an approach to the semantic description and discovery of web services which specifically takes into account their QoS properties. Our solution uses a robust trust and reputation model to provide an accurate picture of the actual QoS to user. The search engine is based on an algebraic discovery model and uses adaptive query-processing techniques to parallelise expensive operators. Architecturally, the engine can be run as a centralised service for small-scale environments or can be distributed among any number of cooperating registry providers.

Filtering and selecting semantic Web services with interactive composition techniques

To demonstrate the utility of semantic Web service descriptions for service composition, we've developed a goal-oriented, interactive composition approach that uses matchmaking algorithms to help users filter and select services while building the composition. filtering and selecting services helps the user drive the composition process. We've implemented composition. Indeed, it is the filtering and selection of services that helps the user drive these ideas in a prototype system that can compose the Web services deployed on the Internet and provide filtering capabilities where a large number of similar services might be available.

Semantic services

A hot topic at this year's World Wide Web conference was the convergence of Web services and the Semantic Web. What kind of formats can we reasonably expect? We want two things from our descriptive logic: fast computability and rich expressiveness. Unfortunately, these are incompatible goals; richer logics are the royal road to exponential complexity and noncomputability. Ultimately, semantic descriptions of Web services will arise through human processes, either because committees get together and create standards for particular subdomains or because a particular style used by some influential service providers comes to be commonly adapted.