Semantic Web Service Framework Research Articles

Design and Development of a Sharable Clinical Decision Support System Based on a Semantic Web Service Framework.

Clinical decision support (CDS) systems provide clinicians and other health care stakeholders with patient-specific assessments or recommendations to aid in the clinical decision-making process. Despite their demonstrated potential for improving health care quality, the widespread availability of CDS systems has been limited mainly by the difficulty and cost of sharing CDS knowledge among heterogeneous healthcare information systems. The purpose of this study was to design and develop a sharable clinical decision support (S-CDS) system that meets this challenge. The fundamental knowledge base consists of independent and reusable knowledge modules (KMs) to meet core CDS needs, wherein each KM is semantically well defined based on the standard information model, terminologies, and representation formalisms. A semantic web service framework was developed to identify, access, and leverage these KMs across diverse CDS applications and care settings. The S-CDS system has been validated in two distinct client CDS applications. Model-level evaluation results confirmed coherent knowledge representation. Application-level evaluation results reached an overall accuracy of 98.66 % and a completeness of 96.98 %. The evaluation results demonstrated the technical feasibility and application prospect of our approach. Compared with other CDS engineering efforts, our approach facilitates system development and implementation and improves system maintainability, scalability and efficiency, which contribute to the widespread adoption of effective CDS within the healthcare domain.

WSMO-Lite and HRESTS: Lightweight Semantic Annotations for Web Services and Restful APIs

Service-oriented computing has brought special attention to service description, especially in connection with semantic technologies. The expected proliferation of publicly accessible services can benefit greatly from tool support and automation, both of which are the focus of Semantic Web Service (SWS) frameworks that especially address service discovery, composition and execution. As the first SWS standard, in 2007 the World Wide Web Consortium produced a lightweight bottom-up specification called SAWSDL for adding semantic annotations to WSDL service descriptions. Building on SAWSDL, this article presents WSMO-Lite, a lightweight ontology of Web service semantics that distinguishes four semantic aspects of services: function, behavior, information model, and nonfunctional properties, which together form a basis for semantic automation. With the WSMO-Lite ontology, SAWSDL descriptions enable semantic automation beyond simple input/output matchmaking that is supported by SAWSDL itself. Further, to broaden the reach of WSMO-Lite and SAWSDL tools to the increasingly common RESTful services, the article adds hRESTS and MicroWSMO, two HTML microformats that mirror WSDL and SAWSDL in the documentation of RESTful services, enabling combining RESTful services with WSDL-based ones in a single semantic framework. To demonstrate the feasibility and versatility of this approach, the article presents common algorithms for Web service discovery and composition adapted to WSMO-Lite.

WSMO-Lite and hRESTS: Lightweight semantic annotations for Web services and RESTful APIs

Service-oriented computing has brought special attention to service description, especially in connection with semantic technologies. The expected proliferation of publicly accessible services can benefit greatly from tool support and automation, both of which are the focus of Semantic Web Service (SWS) frameworks that especially address service discovery, composition and execution. As the first SWS standard, in 2007 the World Wide Web Consortium produced a lightweight bottom-up specification called SAWSDL for adding semantic annotations to WSDL service descriptions. Building on SAWSDL, this article presents WSMO-Lite, a lightweight ontology of Web service semantics that distinguishes four semantic aspects of services: function, behavior, information model, and nonfunctional properties, which together form a basis for semantic automation. With the WSMO-Lite ontology, SAWSDL descriptions enable semantic automation beyond simple input/output matchmaking that is supported by SAWSDL itself. Further, to broaden the reach of WSMO-Lite and SAWSDL tools to the increasingly common RESTful services, the article adds hRESTS and MicroWSMO, two HTML microformats that mirror WSDL and SAWSDL in the documentation of RESTful services, enabling combining RESTful services with WSDL-based ones in a single semantic framework. To demonstrate the feasibility and versatility of this approach, the article presents common algorithms for Web service discovery and composition adapted to WSMO-Lite.

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.

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.

CONTEMPORARY SEMANTIC WEB SERVICE FRAMEWORKS: AN OVERVIEW AND COMPARISONS

The growing proliferation of distributed information systems, allows organizations to offer their business processes to a worldwide audience through Web services. Semantic Web services have emerged as a means to achieve the vision of automatic discovery, selection, composition, and invocation of Web services by encoding the specifications of these software components in an unambiguous and machine-interpretable form. Several frameworks have been devised as enabling technologies for Semantic Web services. In this paper, we survey the prominent Semantic Web service frameworks. In addition, a set of criteria is identified and the discussed frameworks are evaluated and compared with respect to these criteria. Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of the Semantic Web service frameworks can help researchers to utilize the most appropriate one according to their needs.

Contemporary Semantic Web Service Frameworks: An Overview and Comparisons

The growing proliferation of distributed information systems, allows organizations to offer their business processes to a worldwide audience through Web services. Semantic Web services have emerged as a means to achieve the vision of automatic discovery, selection, composition, and invocation of Web services by encoding the specifications of these software components in an unambiguous and machine-interpretable form. Several frameworks have been devised as enabling technologies for Semantic Web services. In this paper, we survey the prominent Semantic Web service frameworks. In addition, a set of criteria is identified and the discussed frameworks are evaluated and compared with respect to these criteria. Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of the Semantic Web service frameworks can help researchers to utilize the most appropriate one according to their needs.

CONTEMPORARY SEMANTIC WEB SERVICE FRAMEWORKS: AN OVERVIEW AND COMPARISONS

The growing proliferation of distributed information systems, allows organizations to offer their business processes to a worldwide audience through Web services. Semantic Web services have emerged as a means to achieve the vision of automatic discovery, selection, composition, and invocation of Web services by encoding the specifications of these software components in an unambiguous and machine-interpretable form. Several frameworks have been devised as enabling technologies for Semantic Web services. In this paper, we survey the prominent Semantic Web service frameworks. In addition, a set of criteria is identified and the discussed frameworks are evaluated and compared with respect to these criteria. Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of the Semantic Web service frameworks can help researchers to utilize the most appropriate one according to their needs.

A fuzzy matchmaking approach for Semantic Web Services with application to collaborative material selection

A critical step in the process of reusing existing WSDL-specified services for building web-based applications is the discovery of potentially relevant services. However, the category-based service discovery, such as UDDI, is clearly insufficient. Semantic Web Services, augmenting Web service descriptions using Semantic Web technology, were introduced to facilitate the publication, discovery, and execution of Web services at the semantic level. Semantic matchmaker enhances the capability of UDDI service registries in the Semantic Web Services architecture and it is able to recognize various degrees of matching for Web services. Based on the Semantic Web Service framework, semantic matchmaker, specification matching and probabilistic matching, this paper proposes a fuzzy matchmaking approach for Semantic Web Services to support a more automated and veracious service discovery process in collaborative manufacturing environments. In the proposed approach, the membership function is set up on the semantic information annotated on WSDL specification of a web service, and the similarity of service objects is evaluated by the similarity degree of service attributes. A collaborative material selection case study in the die casting process for thermoelectric fan housing is used to illustrate the proposed approach.

Deploying mutation impact text-mining software with the SADI Semantic Web Services framework.

BackgroundMutation impact extraction is an important task designed to harvest relevant annotations from scientific documents for reuse in multiple contexts. Our previous work on text mining for mutation impacts resulted in (i) the development of a GATE-based pipeline that mines texts for information about impacts of mutations on proteins, (ii) the population of this information into our OWL DL mutation impact ontology, and (iii) establishing an experimental semantic database for storing the results of text mining.ResultsThis article explores the possibility of using the SADI framework as a medium for publishing our mutation impact software and data. SADI is a set of conventions for creating web services with semantic descriptions that facilitate automatic discovery and orchestration. We describe a case study exploring and demonstrating the utility of the SADI approach in our context. We describe several SADI services we created based on our text mining API and data, and demonstrate how they can be used in a number of biologically meaningful scenarios through a SPARQL interface (SHARE) to SADI services. In all cases we pay special attention to the integration of mutation impact services with external SADI services providing information about related biological entities, such as proteins, pathways, and drugs.ConclusionWe have identified that SADI provides an effective way of exposing our mutation impact data such that it can be leveraged by a variety of stakeholders in multiple use cases. The solutions we provide for our use cases can serve as examples to potential SADI adopters trying to solve similar integration problems.

SADI, SHARE, and the in silico scientific method

BackgroundThe emergence and uptake of Semantic Web technologies by the Life Sciences provides exciting opportunities for exploring novel ways to conduct in silico science. Web Service Workflows are already becoming first-class objects in “the new way”, and serve as explicit, shareable, referenceable representations of how an experiment was done. In turn, Semantic Web Service projects aim to facilitate workflow construction by biological domain-experts such that workflows can be edited, re-purposed, and re-published by non-informaticians. However the aspects of the scientific method relating to explicit discourse, disagreement, and hypothesis generation have remained relatively impervious to new technologies.ResultsHere we present SADI and SHARE - a novel Semantic Web Service framework, and a reference implementation of its client libraries. Together, SADI and SHARE allow the semi- or fully-automatic discovery and pipelining of Semantic Web Services in response to ad hoc user queries.ConclusionsThe semantic behaviours exhibited by SADI and SHARE extend the functionalities provided by Description Logic Reasoners such that novel assertions can be automatically added to a data-set without logical reasoning, but rather by analytical or annotative services. This behaviour might be applied to achieve the “semantification” of those aspects of the in silico scientific method that are not yet supported by Semantic Web technologies. We support this suggestion using an example in the clinical research space.

Functional description of geoprocessing services as conjunctive datalog queries

Discovery of suitable web services is a crucial task in Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI). In this work, we develop a novel approach to the discovery of geoprocessing services (WPS). Discovery requests and Web Processing Services are annotated as conjunctive queries in a logic programming (LP) language and the discovery process is based on Logic Programming query containment checking between these descriptions. Besides the types of input and output, we explicitly formalise the relation between them and hence are able to capture the functionality of a WPS more precisely. The use of Logic Programming query containment allows for effective reasoning during discovery. Furthermore, the relative simplicity of the semantic descriptions is advantageous for their creation by non-logics experts. The developed approach is applicable in the Web Service Modeling Framework (WSMF), a state-of-the-art semantic web service framework.

Composing services on the grid using BPEL4SWS

Service composition on the Grid is a challenging task as documented in existing research work. Even though there are initial attempts to use the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) to compose services on the Grid, still there is a significant lack of flexibility and reusability needed in scientific applications. In this paper we present BPEL for Semantic Web Services (BPEL4SWS) - a language that facilitates the orchestration of Grid Services exposed as traditional Web Services or Semantic Web Services using a process-based approach. It is based on the idea of WSDL-less BPEL and incorporates semantic descriptions of process activity implementations which increases the flexibility of business workflows as well as scientific workflows. Following an approach that uses a set of composable standards and specifications, BPEL4SWS is independent of any Semantic Web Service framework and therefore can also utilize any kind of Semantic Grid services. The advantages of BPEL4SWS are: (1) compliance with standards, (2) independence on service technologies, (3) applicability for both business applications as well as scientific workflows that use Grid services, (4) improved flexibility of processes.

An weighted ontology-based semantic similarity algorithm for web service

A critical step in the process of reusing existing WSDL-specified services for building web-based applications is the discovery of potentially relevant services. However, the category-based service discovery, such as UDDI, is clearly insufficient. Semantic web services, augmenting web service descriptions using semantic web technology, were introduced to facilitate the publication, discovery, and execution of web services at the semantic level. Semantic matchmaker enhances the capability of UDDI service registries in the semantic web services architecture by applying some matching algorithms between advertisements and requests described in OWL-S to recognize various degrees of matching for web services. Based on semantic web service framework, semantic matchmaker and probabilistic matching approach, this paper proposes a weighted ontology-based semantic similarity algorithm for web service to support a more automated and veracious service discovery and rank process in the semantic web service framework.

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)).

The process mediation framework for semantic web services

The ability to deal with the incompatibilities of service requesters and providers is a critical factor for achieving interoperability in dynamic open environments. We focus on the problem of process mediation of the semantically annotated process models of the service requester and service provider. We propose an Abstract Process Mediation Framework (APMF) identifying the key functional areas that need to be addressed by process mediation components. Next, we present algorithms for solving the process mediation problem in two scenarios: (1) when the mediation process has complete visibility of the process model of the service provider and service requester (complete visibility scenario) and (2) when the mediation process has visibility only of the process model of the service provider, but not the service requester (asymmetric scenario). The algorithms combine planning and semantic reasoning with the discovery of appropriate external services such as data mediators. Finally, the Process Mediation Agent (PMA) is introduced, which realises an execution infrastructure for runtime mediation.

A New Framework for Intelligent Semantic Web Services Based on GAIVAs

The Semantic Web has been recently developed to provide end users with suitable tools and strategies to process information from their Web pages. The Intelligent Semantic Web Services is a new approach aimed at extending Semantic Web capabilities for Services by applying Artificial Intelligence techniques while maintaining the good properties of the standard Semantic Web schemes. However, many current Web services neither consider this approach nor include a powerful user-interface and, consequently, are very limited and difficult to use. This paper introduces a new framework for Intelligent Semantic Web Services that overcomes these drawbacks. Our approach is based on the Graphical Autonomous Intelligent Virtual Agents (GAIVAs), virtual agents that exhibit a human-like appearance and behaviour and are able to take intelligent decisions and perform actions without human intervention. To this purpose, the framework comprises a collection of powerful Artificial Intelligence techniques along with a natural and intuitive Graphical User Interface.

Improving Semantic Web Service Discovery

Semantic Web Services (SWS) propose to extend the traditional Web Services technologies on the way to consolidate ontologies and semantics. This makes it possible to select, integrate and invocate services dynamically. In this way, services are able to dynamically adapt themselves to changes without human intervention. The main purpose of this paper is to present an algorithm for matching SWS. The algorithm uses the description of the service capabilities to match the semantic values. The traditional matching has been improved using ontologies which constitute a step further in the matching algorithms. To implement the algorithm, an agent FIPA compliant architecture has been designed and developed. The results obtained are positive. The semantic web services framework developed in combination with the use of the matchmaking algorithm, which allows finding services based on their similarities.

Semantic Web and semantic Web services: father and son or indivisible twins?

The semantic Web is, without a doubt, gaining momentum in both industry and academia. The recent International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) attracted more than 500 researchers; major vendors including IBM, Oracle, and Software AG have released or announced products; and the forthcoming Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose, California, is poised to be an impressive showcase for executives and venture capitalists on the business potential of semantic technologies. Unfortunately, semantic Web services are underrepresented on the agenda, at least if we take the number of scientific publications about semantic Web services as a proxy. Most semantic Web researchers dedicate their attention to annotating Web content stored in static documents or database-driven applications. Semantic Web services (SWS) frameworks are mandatory components of the semantic Web, primarily because entities are more willing to expose functionality than data in business settings.

A semantic web service framework to support intelligent distributed manufacturing

As markets become unexpectedly turbulent with a shortened product life cycle and a power shift towards buyers, the need for methods to develop products, production facilities, and supporting software rapidly and cost-effectively is becoming urgent. The use of a loosely integrated virtual enterprise based framework holds the potential of surviving changing market needs. However, its success requires reliable and large-scale interoperation among trading partners via a semantic web of trading partners' services whose properties, capabilities, and interfaces are encoded in an unambiguous as well as computer-understandable form. This paper demonstrates a promising approach to integration and interoperation between a design house and a manufacturer that may or may not have prior relationship by developing semantic web services for business and engineering transactions. To this end, detailed activity and information flow diagrams are developed, in which the two trading partners exchange messages and documents. The properties and capabilities of the manufacturer sites are defined using DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) ontology definition language. The prototype development of semantic webs shows that enterprises can interoperate widely in an unambiguous and autonomous manner. This contributes towards the realization of virtual enterprises at a low cost.