Semantic Web Services Technology Research Articles

Quality model and metrics of ontology for semantic descriptions of web services

An ontology is a conceptualisation of domain knowledge. It is employed in semantic web services technologies to describe the meanings of services so that they can be dynamically searched for and composed according to their meanings. It is essential for dynamic service discovery, composition, and invocation. Whether an ontology is well constructed has a tremendous impact on the accuracy of the semantic description of a web service, the complexity of the semantic definitions, the efficiency of processing messages passed between services, and the precision and recall rates of service retrieval from service registrations. However, measuring the quality of an ontology remains an open problem. Works on the evaluation of ontologies do exist, but they are not in the context of semantic web services. This paper addresses this problem by proposing a quality model of ontology and defining a set of metrics that enables the quality of an ontology to be measured objectively and quantitatively in the context of semantic descriptions of web services. These metrics cover the contents, presentation, and usage aspects of ontologies. The paper also presents a tool that implements these metrics and reports a case study on five real-life examples of web services.

A semantic web services discovery approach based on a mobile agent using metadata

PurposeThe success of web services involved the adoption of this technology by different service providers through the web, which increased the number of web services, as a result making their discovery a tedious task. The UDDI standard has been proposed for web service publication and discovery. However, it lacks sufficient semantic description in the content of web services, which makes it difficult to find and compose suitable web services during the analysis, search, and matching processes. In addition, few works on semantic web services discovery take into account the user’s profile. The purpose of this paper is to optimize the web services discovery by reducing the search space and increasing the number of relevant services.Design/methodology/approachThe authors propose a new approach for the semantic web services discovery based on the mobile agent, user profile and metadata catalog. In the approach, each user can be described by a profile which is represented in two dimensions: personal dimension and preferences dimension. The description of web service is based on two levels: metadata catalog and WSDL.FindingsFirst, the semantic web services discovery reduces the number of relevant services through the application of matching algorithm “semantic match”. The result of this first matching restricts the search space at the level of UDDI registry, which allows the users to have good results for the “functional match”. Second, the use of mobile agents as a communication entity reduces the traffic on the network and the quantity of exchanged information. Finally, the integration of user profile in the service discovery process facilitates the expression of the user needs and makes intelligible the selected service.Originality/valueTo the best knowledge of the authors, this is the first attempt at implementing the mobile agent technology with the semantic web service technology.

An Overview of Semantic Web Service Description based on Model Driven Approaches

In this study, formal MDA approaches for describing Semantic Web Services (SWS) are discussed. Although syntactic approach is used for fulfill the web service task, the main concentration of this study is on SWS. Basically, MDA approaches for SWS are divided into four categories such as software methodology based, UML formalist based, formal-based and query-based. Each of these SWS approaches uses OWL-S, SAWSDL, or WSMO to construct the SWS description. Therefore, each MDA approach is fully discussed to provide comprehensive overview on SWS technology.

SQUIREL: Semantic Querying Interlinked OWL-S traveling Process Models

With the advent of new forms of information and communication technologies, the consumer needs to combine and customize different travel components as a complete travel package, namely: Dynamic Packaging Technology. Nevertheless, disparate tourist offers and services make it difficult for consumer to use them effectively. Therefore, our paper presents an intelligent querying framework of OWL-S travel services, called SQUIREL composition engine. It uses Semantic Web Services (SWSs) technologies combined with the useful of Linked e-tourism Data concept to fulfill the preferences and constraints of the e-tourist any time. This purpose supports SWSs pre-selection through the valuation of the rewritten SPARQL consumer query at runtime that manages dynamic service dependencies extracted from Linked e-tourism Data and returns the SWSs endpoint. Then, SQUIREL catches this endpoint and makes the necessary optimizations to refine it to its relevant atomic processes needed to be composed using matrix computation. However, the experimental results indicate that this method owns both lower computation cost and higher success ratio of fine-grained discovery- based atomic processes composition. Index Terms—Linked e-tourism data, Dynamic Packaging Technology, Automatic discovery-based composition, Semantic Web Service, OWL-S Traveling Process Model, Semantic Query (P)SPARQL.

Novel Semantic Model for Intelligent Discovery of Web Services

Main challenges to the current semantic web service technologies are exponential continuous growth in the number of services on the Internet, syntax based discovery, lack of common agreed upon semantic service standards and heterogeneity of ontologies. In this paper, a service discovery approach independent of semantic service description models is proposed to solve the challenges of the current web service discovery. The idea is to combine principles from machine learning, data mining, statistical techniques and measures of semantic relatedness to make the semantic web service discovery process more intelligent, efficient and effective. The proposed approach exploits the use of semantic as well as syntactic information present within the service description profiles. Our approach is unique in terms of its application to any web service description language and the use of Omiotis measure of semantic relatedness for service discovery. The proposed approach has been implemented on OWL-S based service descriptions profiles and is able to find semantic relationship between the services which were otherwise discarded by the OWL-MX matchmaker. Empirical analysis shows that the proposed method out performs the

Research on Dynamic Assembled Algorithm of Component based on Semantic Web Service

In development of service-oriented software systems based on component technology, dynamic assembling of service components is research issues, but many dynamic assembled algorithms based on keywords have some limits such as low successful rate and so on, it is necessary that research dynamic assembled algorithm. To analyze semantic web service and component technology, some correlative definitions of web service components are given by markup language of web service, the theory of domain ontology is cited, a dynamic assembled algorithm for components of semantic web service based on domain ontology is provided, the dynamic assembled ideal of service component is given according to semantic relationship, the algorithm is realized with pseudo codes. Finally, the feasibility and efficiency about algorithm are demonstrated by experiment and contrast analysis.

Integrating distributed sources of information for construction cost estimating using Semantic Web and Semantic Web Service technologies

Abstract A construction project requires collaboration of several organizations such as owner, designer, contractor, and material supplier organizations. These organizations need to exchange information to enhance their teamwork. Understanding the information received from other organizations requires specialized human resources. Construction cost estimating is one of the processes that requires information from several sources including a building information model (BIM) created by designers, estimating assembly and work item information maintained by contractors, and construction material cost data provided by material suppliers. Currently, it is not easy to integrate the information necessary for cost estimating over the Internet. This paper discusses a new approach to construction cost estimating that uses Semantic Web technology. Semantic Web technology provides an infrastructure and a data modeling format that enables accessing, combining, and sharing information over the Internet in a machine processable format. The estimating approach presented in this paper relies on BIM, estimating knowledge, and construction material cost data expressed in a web ontology language. The approach presented in this paper makes the various sources of estimating data accessible as Simple Protocol and Resource Description Framework Query Language (SPARQL) endpoints or Semantic Web Services. We present an estimating application that integrates distributed information provided by project designers, contractors, and material suppliers for preparing cost estimates. The purpose of this paper is not to fully automate the estimating process but to streamline it by reducing human involvement in repetitive cost estimating activities.

A semantic‐based federated cloud system for emergency response

SummaryCloud federation can be described through the concept of collaboration, where each organization has its own cloud(s) that deals with a different and independent domain but needs to work together with other organizations in order to fulfill a specific shared objective. According to this perspective, the federation is a collection of interacting clouds that collaborate with one another through the instantiation and management of shared subsets of resources (computation and storage resources as well as sensors and actuators). This idea could be profitably used in those scenarios in which different organizations have to share several resources (e.g., emergency response or disaster management scenario). On the other hand, when different independent organizations share their resources, several issues arise. One of them is related to interoperability problems. As a consequence, this work also introduces a framework for an ontology‐based resource life cycle management and provisioning in a federated cloud infrastructure. Therefore, The main contributions of this work consists of redesigning a cloud infrastructure architecture from the ground up, leveraging Semantic Web and Semantic Web Service Technologies, and natively supporting a federated provisioning of any kind of resource. This paper exploits, as a motivating scenario, a flood emergency response system. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Multi-Strategy Web Service Discovery for Smart Government

Semantic Web Service technology is the solution to system integration and business collaboration for smart government which is cross-border and heterogeneous on a large scale. However the tremendous Web services search space caused by the wide range, large scale and complex e-government business systems is one of the great challenges for smart government. The paper focuses on researches about service discovery in e-government business integration for smart government. In accordance with the application environment and the current technical status of e-government, the author proposes a multi-strategy Web service discovery method on the basis of the proposed semantic model. The discovery process comprises three stages: keyword query with semantic enhancement, IO semantic matching and PE semantic matching. Finally similarity calculating method is proposed to evaluate the matching degree of each candidate service for service selection as well as the conclusions.

How semantic technologies transform e-government domain

Purpose – In e-government domain, an efficient semantic interoperability of services is a big challenge. In this context, semantic technologies play a fundamental role in numerous e-government programs. Indeed, these technologies enable enriching the public service description provided by different public administrations with additional semantic information, which allows automatic services processing and information exchange between involved members in comprehensive and interpretable manner, thus facilitating service integration and cooperation. The most frequently used technologies in this area are semantic web services (SWS) technology and ontology. Thus, for modelling efficiently public services, the authors have exploring, studying and analyzing some of e-government researches and projects that applied semantic technologies. Design/methodology/approach – In this paper, the authors address how semantic technologies transform the e-government domain through exploring and studying the use of SWS and ontology in numerous researches and projects applying these technologies in this area. Then, the authors have compared them through a set of criteria defined according to e-government requirements such as the SWS modelling approach for describing semantically public services, ontologies for representing governmental specific features (e.g. regulation and organizational structures) and developed portal for supporting user ' s perspectives. Based on this study, the authors have identified the appropriate standards, frameworks, and models for developing the framework. Findings – The authors have developed a framework for public services which enhances existing approaches with additional aspects. Thus, the approach comparing to other works improves the service ontology with a cognitive semantic approach to support the multiple usage contexts and situations of services. This semantic is developed in form of a Sit/Ctx ontology developed based on CSs model represented through conceptual graphs theory. The authors have used this model besides OWL-S, improving thus the level of automation of discovery and composition process of public services, which become more efficient with taken into consideration their interrelations and situations. Originality/value – The approach comparing to other works improves the service ontology with a cognitive semantic approach to support the multiple usage contexts and situations of public services, providing thus the end-users (people and enterprises) a better orientation in discovery process.

A Structured P2P-based Approach to Semantic Web Services Publication and Discovery

Semantic Web Service (SWS) technology is developed to overcome the shortcomings of traditional standards, such as WSDL and UDDI, and enable maximal automation in all aspects of Web Service provision and use. But great improvement of capability in SWS-based service discovery is still desired. To address this issue, we present a distributed approach for Semantic Web Service publication and discovery by leveraging structured P2P technology. In this paper, first, we introduce a semantics-based service matching method. Then, in order to apply the method to our approach, we propose several concepts and algorithms. Next, we present a method to publish SWS and implement it as a SWS registry. Finally, we design an approach to organize the nodes with the registry into a structured P2P network to cooperatively publish and discover SWS. We also conduct experiments to validate our approach and the results demonstrate its scalability and effectiveness.

An e-government knowledge model: 'e-customs' case study

In e-government domain, an efficient semantic interoperability of services is a big challenge. Thus, for modelling semantically the public services, we have adopted semantic web services (SWS) technology. However, this technology allows only semantic description of services without giving a cognitive semantic representation of them. It allows modelling the relationships between services with their different situations through conceptual structures (CSs). In this paper, we develop an approach for modelling efficiently the public services based on SWS and CSs technologies. For this purpose, we extend OWL-S ontology with an e-government knowledge represented through a set of ontologies. Besides OWL-S ontology, we use the conceptual graphs theory as implemented in AminePlatform for structuring and organising the cognitive knowledge about services. Thus, for our application domain, that is, ‘e-customs’, we extend this platform to support simultaneous use of multiple domain-specific ontologies. Our approach enables as well enhancing service discovery and composition.

Automatic composition of WSMO based geospatial semantic web services using artificial intelligence planning

Geospatial web services are widely utilised to disseminate spatial data and processing capability over the internet. Combining geospatial web services and generating composite web services out of atomic services can provide users with a higher level of functionality. This paper presents a solution for the automatic composition of geospatial web services. The solution relies on semantic web services technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI) planning techniques to generate composite geospatial web services. Web Service Modelling Ontology (WSMO) is selected as the underlying semantic web service framework. A neoclassical planning algorithm called Graphplan is used as the AI planner. The applicability of the proposed solution for composing web services is illustrated in a case study. The result shows that the proposed approach is well suited for the automatic composition of web services. The future requirements for adaptation of the approach in real world problems are broadly described.

Clever generation of rich SPARQL queries from annotated relational schema: application to Semantic Web Service creation for biological databases

BackgroundIn recent years, a large amount of “-omics” data have been produced. However, these data are stored in many different species-specific databases that are managed by different institutes and laboratories. Biologists often need to find and assemble data from disparate sources to perform certain analyses. Searching for these data and assembling them is a time-consuming task. The Semantic Web helps to facilitate interoperability across databases. A common approach involves the development of wrapper systems that map a relational database schema onto existing domain ontologies. However, few attempts have been made to automate the creation of such wrappers.ResultsWe developed a framework, named BioSemantic, for the creation of Semantic Web Services that are applicable to relational biological databases. This framework makes use of both Semantic Web and Web Services technologies and can be divided into two main parts: (i) the generation and semi-automatic annotation of an RDF view; and (ii) the automatic generation of SPARQL queries and their integration into Semantic Web Services backbones. We have used our framework to integrate genomic data from different plant databases.ConclusionsBioSemantic is a framework that was designed to speed integration of relational databases. We present how it can be used to speed the development of Semantic Web Services for existing relational biological databases. Currently, it creates and annotates RDF views that enable the automatic generation of SPARQL queries. Web Services are also created and deployed automatically, and the semantic annotations of our Web Services are added automatically using SAWSDL attributes. BioSemantic is downloadable at http://southgreen.cirad.fr/?q=content/Biosemantic.

Semantic Web and service computation in GIScience applications: a perspective and prospective

Semantic Web and Web services have been two prominent themes in the computer science and IT mainstream for more than a decade. While both of these themes have been evolving, some geographers and GIScientists have been trying to introduce and adopt such new technologies into GIScience research and development. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art and the main constraints of semantic Web and Web services technologies and their applications in GIScience. Unless some fundamental problems within both semantic Web and Web services can be resolved, such technologies will be difficult to match the needs in the GIScience community. Besides logics, more sciences and theories have to be introduced into this research front in order to break through the long-term bottleneck in semantic Web and service computation in general.

Effet de la précontrainte des transplants dans la reconstruction du ligament croisé antérieur, une étude en microscopie électronique à balayage

Recently there has been much interest in electronic commerce applications that use data mining techniques to explore datasets in the social media context. However, most of the applications have already been developed in an ad hoc manner, mainly, due to the lack of adequate tools, yielding difficulties in customizing applications and requesting high time consuming for constructing and maintaining these applications. This work addresses these problems and proposes a software framework for building Web mining applications in the blog world. The architecture of the proposed framework combines the use of blog crawling and data mining algorithms, in order to provide a complete and flexible solution for building general-purpose Web mining applications. The framework flexibility allows some important customizations, such as the construction of adapters for reading text from different blogs, and the use of different pre-processing techniques and data mining algorithms. In order to improve the efficacy of information extraction from blogs, ontology is used in the blog’s description. For this, there are software agents responsible for tracking and indexing blogs related to a specific tag and for mining blog datasets. Moreover, web services are used for encapsulating existing tools and maximize reuse.This framework has been instantiated in order to be applied for helping the blog users to effectively find out relevant information in the blog world. The focus of this paper is on describing the novel software architecture of the general framework (blog crawling and data mining) providing detailed information about the data mining sub-framework, which uses the semantic web services technology for automating service composition and consists on the main research contribution. A case study of an e-commerce application for analyzing the user’s sentiment regarding specific products is reported and its results considers the effort reduction when creating a web mining application by using the proposed integrated frameworks and existing data mining tools, as well as a qualitative analysis related to quality aspects of the developed application, such as the evolution impact.

A Semantically Automated Protocol Adapter for Mapping SOAP Web Services to RESTful HTTP Format to Enable the Web Infrastructure, Enhance Web Service Interoperability and Ease Web Service Migration

Semantic Web Services (SWS) are Web Service (WS) descriptions augmented with semantic information. SWS enable intelligent reasoning and automation in areas such as service discovery, composition, mediation, ranking and invocation. This paper applies SWS to a previous protocol adapter which, operating within clearly defined constraints, maps SOAP Web Services to RESTful HTTP format. However, in the previous adapter, the configuration element is manual and the latency implications are locally based. This paper applies SWS technologies to automate the configuration element and the latency tests are conducted in a more realistic Internet based setting.

Guest Editors' Introduction: Special Section on ISIP 2011

This special section comprises of nine selected papers from the fourth International Symposium on Intelligent Information Technology and Security Informatics (ISIP 2011). The conference received 310 paper submissions from 11 countries and regions, of which 157 papers were selected for presentation after a rigorous review process. From these 157 research papers, through two rounds of reviewing, the guest editors selected nine as the best papers on the Multimedia track of the Conference. The candidates of the Special Issue are all the authors, whose papers have been accepted and presented at the ISIP 2011, with the contents not been published elsewhere before. The ISIP 2011 was co-sponsored by Henan Polytechnic University, China; Peoples' Friendship University of Russia, Russia; Feng Chia University, Taiwan; Jiangxi University of Science and Technology, China;Fudan University, China; South China University of Technology, China; Nanchang Hang Kong University, China; Jiaxing University, China; Academy Publisher of Finland, Finland and took place on August 19-22, 2011, in Jiaozuo, China. “Speech Separation in the Vehicle Environment Based on FastICA Algorithm”, by Jindong Zhang, Guihe Qin and Ye Liu. In this paper, the FastICA algorithm in signal process and statistics was studied and used to separate the driver’s speech in the vehicle environment, and realizes the pretreatment in recognizing driver’s speech. “Semantic Analysis of Traffic Video Using Image Understanding”, by Jian Wu, Zhi-ming Cui, Heng-jun Yue, and Guang-ming Zhang. This paper introduces the methods of image understanding and proposes a video semantic analysis framework using scene analysis for recognizing some semantic events in the traffic video. “Research on Video Quality Assessment”, by Chunting Yang, Yang Liu and Jing Yu. In this paper, research has been focused on developing novel objective evaluation metrics which enable prediction of the perceived quality level. The temporal correlations of video frames and the visual interest feature are considered in this method. Meanwhile the metrics are capable of capturing spatial distortions in video sequences. “Tele-Immersive Interaction with Intelligent Virtual Agents Based on Real-Time 3D Modeling”, by Shujun Zhang and Wan Ching Ho. In this paper author explored the combination of real-time 3D modelling and HAI and proposed a prototype of mixed reality system for tele-immersion. Image-based real-time 3D modeling techniques offer essential ways to support tele-immersion and natural HAI. “The Research of Image Encryption Algorithm Based on Chaos Cellular Automata”, by Shuiping Zhang and Huijune Luo, In this paper, the Research puts forwards an image encryption algorithm based on chaos cellular automata , to take full use of the two-dimensional chaotic system's extreme sensitivity to initial conditions and the features with parallelism, complexity and randomness of two-dimensional reversible cellular automata, to make the encrypted key, encrypted image and original image much more have complexity, randomness and unpredictability. “Improved MFCC Feature Extraction Combining Symmetric ICA Algorithm for Robust Speech Recognition”, by Huan Zhao, Kai Zhao, He Liu and Fei Yu.This paper proposed using symmetric orthogonalization in ICA for projecting log Mel spectrum into a new feature space as a substitute in extracting speech features to solve the problem of cumulative error and unequal weights that deflation orthogonalization brings, so as to improve the robustness of speech recognition systems, and increase the efficiency of estimation at the same time. “A Watermarking Technique based on the Frequency Domain”, by Huang-Chi Cheni, Yu-Wen Chang and Rey-Chue Hwang. In this paper, a modified algorithm is presented to improve the defect of the JPEG quantification in order to reduce the bit error rate (BER) of the retrieved watermark. “Image Copy-Move Forgery Detecting Based on Local Invariant Feature”, Li Jing, and Chao Shao. This paper firstly analyzes and summarizes block matching technique, then introduces a copy-move forgery detecting method based on local invariant feature matching. “OWL-S based Service Composition of Three-dimensional Geometry Modeling”, by Jiangning Yu, Hongming Cai and Ailing Liu. This paper proposes an OWL-S framework for distributed CAD system based on the combination of semantic web service and CAD technology. We would like to take this opportunity to thank the authors for the efforts they put in the preparation of the manuscripts and for their valuable contributions. We wish to express our deepest gratitude to the program committee members for their help in selecting papers for this issue and especially the referees of the extended versions of the selected papers for their thorough reviews under a tight time schedule. Last, but not least, our thanks go to the Editorial Board of the Journal of Multimedia for the exceptional effort they did throughout this process. In closing, we sincerely hope that you will enjoy reading this special issue.

OWL-S based Service Composition of Three-dimensional Geometry Modeling

T his paper proposes an OWL-S framework for distributed CAD system based on the combination of semantic web service and CAD technology . S ervice ontology mapping mechanism is analyzed in detail and semantic model is built with the study of the correlation across the geometry modeling service . On the purpose of accommodat ing the design pattern of network modeling, this framework supports the service composition of three-dimensional geometry modeling and achieves further integration of service information. At last , a case study from the developed prototype system shows the feasibility and flexibility of this method under distributed CAD environment.

Semantic web services publication and OCT-based discovery in structured P2P network

Semantic web services (SWS) technology is developed to overcome the shortcomings of traditional standards, such as WSDL and UDDI, and enable maximal automation in all aspects of web service. But great improvement of capability in SWS-based service discovery is still desired. To address this issue, we present a distributed and semantic-matching-based approach for SWS publication and discovery by leveraging structured P2P technology. In this paper, first, we present our service matching rule which focuses on the inputs and outputs of SWS. Then, to realize this rule in open distributed environment and achieve the optimal match between a query and its qualified services, we propose not only a concept of ordered-concept-tree (OCT) to semantically sort the relevant concepts for service matching, but also a method to publish ontologies on structured P2P network to freely share and make full use of the concepts defined in different ontologies for OCT construction. Finally, we present a method for SWS publication on P2P network and an algorithm for service discovery. We also conduct experiments to evaluate our approach and the experimental results demonstrate its scalability, effectiveness, and callback capability to discover semantic web services.