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Semantic Web Services and Service Composition
Semantic Web Services and Service Composition
Eakan Gopalakrishnan
School of Electronics and Computer
Science, University of Southampton,
Southampton, Hampshire, SO17 1BJ
+4407760912219
eg5g09@ecs.soton.ac.uk
ABSTRACT exchange. After XML became the next big thing, many other
Semantic Web is the evolution of the existing machine readable languages were created based on XML to overcome its
World Wide Web into a machine intelligible information space. limitations. Resource Description Framework, DARPA Agent
Web Services could create a network of programs that produce Markup Language, DAML + Ontology Interface Language which
and consume this information autonomously, thereby later evolved into OWL (Web Ontology Language) are some of
revolutionizing the way we use the Web today. The future of the the languages developed for Knowledge representation purpose.
web is highly promising, where our queries would be answered by OWL has now matured into OWL 2.0, which is a W3C
agents communicating with each other using the most appropriate Recommendation and is supported by many ontology editors and
web services required to fulfil our queries by automatically reasoners.
composing web services when required. This would be possible Meanwhile Service Oriented Architecture, a key technology for
only when the existing web is completely machine- the development of loosely coupled services over the internet, that
understandable. This paper reviews some of the research done in uses messages as the basic unit of communication between
automating computer to computer interactions and web service processes became widely used in the form of Web Services [2]
invocation based on ontologies and different web service [3]. The Web Services standards are developed based on XML
composition methods that have been proposed so far. and some of them are: Simple Object Access Protocol [4], Web
Services Description Language, Universal Description Discovery
Categories and Subject Descriptors and Integration [3]. Concurrently AI research had been focused
C.2 [Computer Systems Organization]: Computer on the exploration of the science of agent systems in both
Communication Networks; C.2.4 [Distributed Systems] – theoretical and experimental results [5]. Agent Based systems
[Distributed Applications]; D.2.12 [Interoperability] – Interface were developed because of rapid changes in the requirements of
Definition Languages. the software market, to reduce the maintenance cost of developed
software [6]. An agent can be described as “a computer system
that is situated in some environment and that is capable of
General Terms autonomous action in that environment in order to meet its design
Automated Semantic Web Service Composition. objectives” [7].
Enabling agents to automatically use web services based on
Keywords semantics in its description is a challenging task. Web services are
Semantic Web, intelligent agents, web services, automated independent components; to fulfil a complex user requirement
composition. several of them must be invoked in a particular sequence. There is
no pre-defined execution plan for this purpose, because it would
1. INTRODUCTION depend completely on the user requirement. In other words, to
The Semantic Web was Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the web create a composite web service using simple atomic web services
being a universal medium of information and knowledge is called web service composition. Thus in the next section the
exchange, in machine readable and intelligible format which paper focuses on web service composition, the issues in
would enable computers to analyze all the data in the web by itself composition and research so far.
and change the way computers solve problems by a series
machine to machine interactions [1]. Some parts of the Semantic 2. WEB SERVICE COMPOSITION
Web specification are yet to be implemented, but some of them Web Services are platform independent software components that
have been formally accepted and recommended by the W3C. The are available in a distributed system, usually the internet. Soon
web initially, just a set of linked documents, later evolved into a applications will be assembled from a set of web services
collection of all sorts of information including multimedia integrated seamlessly. This process is called Web Service
content. The earlier documents on the web were basically in Composition. In other words it can be seen as a software synthesis
Hyper Text Markup Language that mainly focuses on the format problem or a planning and execution problem. There are two
of displaying the documents on the web. This did not provide the approaches to web service composition at present. One way is to
capability for machines to interpret it. After the development of manual composition using low level process modeling and
Extensible Markup Language, description of the represented execution languages like BPEL4WS [8]. The other approach is
information started to be used between computers for information
what is being researched in the Semantic Web Community, using execute the internal processes. The work was mainly an
a top-down description of the capabilities of the web services application of [20] in web service composition.
using standardized languages for specifying semantics like
During the emerging standards of the semantic web, [21]
DAML-S [9] or OWL-S [10]. The first approach requires a
demonstrated a conversational model of the clients and web
programmer to do all the work, whereas the second approach
services without imposing any explicit conversational context.
enables automated reasoning of the web services using the
The work is based on the assumption that service matching and
semantic information provided by the languages used for their
identification has already been completed, thus focused mainly on
description [11].
the execution of the web service.
2.1 Problems in Web Service Composition Another similar endeavour, that avoided low level programming
[12] describes the various issues in automating web service and use ontology for semantic representation was [22]. Ontology
composition. Some of them are: Co-ordination, Transaction, in simple terms would be a shared conceptualization of some term
Context of the service, the model of conversation between the based on semantic proximity of terms in a specific domain of
services, monitoring the execution and the infrastructure based on interest [22]. The authors focussed on two important aspects:
which service composition is done. Standards have been emerging composability model of the web service and automatic generation
to address these issues by different vendors. of the composition; where the former emphasizes on checking if
The interaction between web services is highly important for the web services to be composed can actually interact with each
automated composition; WS Coordination [27] and WS-CF [28] other and the latter focuses on generating composite services
are some of the attempts of standardizations to simplify web automatically. The approach defines message, purpose, category,
service development. quality, operation and web service as tuples; then checks for
composability based on several rules and further checks if the
To add reliability to transactions, transaction protocols like WS- composition is sound. The paper also comes up with a
Transaction [29] were standardized; they define protocols for matchmaking algorithm. The authors have combined the research
centralized and peer to peer transactions, both required for going on in automatic service composition, service matching and
coordination. some of the standardizations at that time to develop their method.
In web services terminology context means information utilized Waldinger’s approach in [23] is based on automated deduction
by the services to adjust execution and output to provide the client and program synthesis which is based on his earlier work [25].
with customized and personalized behaviour [30]. Similarly for Available services are first described in first-order logic and
other issues other standards like WS-Conversation Language, constructive proof generation is done using SNARK theorem
Web Service Choreography Interface, etc came up. prover from which service composition descriptions are extracted.