Semantic Web Service Composition

We present SAscha, a web browser-based application for authoring semantic Web Service descriptions by the SAWSDL standard. Even though it was conceived in a specific real domain scenario, i.e. the Italian framework for service interoperability, it is in fact a generalpurpose SAWSDL tool that showcases a singular feature set including, but not limited to, simplicity of use, availability as an infrastructural service and XML Schema support. Although upper-level ontologies are expected to be stored in an ad-hoc repository, SAscha allows for OWL ontologies being stored anywhere locally or on the web. 1

Service-oriented architectures, and notably Web Services, are becoming an incontrovertible paradigm for the development of applications in pervasive computing environments, as they enable publishing and consuming heterogeneous networked software and hardware resources. Combined with Semantic Web technologies, in particular ontologies, Web services' descriptions can be unambiguously and automatically interpreted in open pervasive computing environments, where agreement on a single common syntactic standard for identifying service semantics cannot be assumed. Nevertheless, efficient matching of semantic Web services to effectively automate the discovery and further consumption of networked resources remains an open issue, which is mainly attributable to the costly underlying semantic reasoning. After analyzing the cost of ontology-based semantic reasoning, which is at the heart of the matching process, we propose a solution towards efficient matching of semantic Web services. We have further incorporated our solution into a service discovery protocol aimed at open pervasive computing environments that integrate heterogeneous wireless network technologies (i.e., ad hoc and infrastructure-based networking). Experimental results show that our solution enables better response times than of classical syntactic-based service discovery protocols.

Pervasive computing environments are populated with networked software and hardware resources providing various functionalities that are abstracted, thanks to the Service Oriented Architecture paradigm, as services. Within these environments, service discovery enabled by service discovery protocols (SDPs) is a critical functionality for establishing ad hoc associations between service providers and service requesters. Furthermore, the dynamics, the openness and the usercentric vision aimed at by the pervasive computing paradigm call for solutions that enable rich, semantic, context-and QoS-aware service discovery. Although the Semantic Web paradigm envisions to achieve such support, current solutions are hardly deployable in the pervasive environment due to the costly underlying semantic reasoning with ontologies. In this article, we present EASY to support efficient, semantic, context-and QoS-aware service discovery on top of existing SDPs. EASY provides EASY-L, a language for semantic specification of functional and non-functional service properties, as well as EASY-M, a corresponding set of conformance relations. Furthermore, EASY provides solutions to efficiently assess conformance between service capabilities. These solutions are based on an efficient encoding technique, as well as on an efficient organization of service repositories (caches), which enables both fast service advertising and discovery. Experimental results show that the deployment of EASY on top of an existing SDP, namely Ariadne, enhancing it only with slight changes to EASY-Ariadne, enables rich semantic, context-and QoS-aware service discovery, which furthermore performs better than the classical, rigid, syntactic matching, and improves the scalability of Ariadne.

A Service Orientated Architecture will allow organisations to enhance interoperability and encourage reuse of components and interfaces. In this paper, the application of semantic descriptions to services is advocated with the aim of further improving the SOA and enabling scalability. An application of Semantic Web Services for the Telecommunications Industry is described. It shows how services components forming part of a Service Orientated Architecture can be described semantically in terms of shared data and process ontologies. The potential benefits of this approach are explored. A use case is presented that illustrates how the efficiency of a telecommunications system designer can be improved with the use of Semantic Web Services.

La composition automatique ou assistee de workflows est un domaine d'intense recherche avec des applications au "world wide web" et a la modelisation de processus metiers (BPM), traditionnellement envisagee en utilisant des techniques de programmation logique et de demonstration automatique. L'originialite de cette recherche provient de l'observation que la construction d'un workflow composite est un probleme de recherche de modeles finis, et que la plupart des languages de workflows peuvent etre definis par des metamodeles objets contraints, comme UML ou YAWL. Cela conduit a envisager l'application de techniques de configuration a base de contraintes a ce probleme, ce dont nous montrons la faisabilite. Nous presentons un modele objet contraint pour la composition de workflows, s'appuyant sur un metamodele contraint ainsi que des ontologies de processus et de flots de donnees. Des resultats experimentaux sont donnes pour une implantation qui genere ...

We present the SmartWeb Demonstrator for multimodal and mobile querying of semantic resources and the open WWW. The end-user interface consists of a Pocket Data Assistant which accepts written or spoken questions as input and delivers answers based on a multitude of resources including a semantic knowledge base, semantically annotated online web services, and semi-automatically created knowledge from text-based web pages. If answers cannot be found using these structured resources, then the system returns answers based on linguistic query-answering techniques on the open WWW.

The Web lacks support for explaining information provenance. When web applications return answers, many users do not know what information sources were used, when they were updated, how reliable the source was, or what information was looked up versus derived. The Web also lacks support for explaining reasoning paths used to derive or retrieve answers. The Inference Web (IW) aims to take opaque query answers and make the answers more transparent by providing explanations. The explanations include ...

Nowadays, the evaluation of the accessibility of Enterprise Web Information Systems is based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0), created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 2008 and adopted in 2012 by the International Organization of Standardization (ISO) as ISO/IEC 40500 standard. Web accessibility evaluation tools are software programs or online services that help developers determine if web content meets the accessibility guidelines. This paper shows the extension of an existing online tool, with the aim of exposing its functionality also as an Application Program Interface (API). The original tool is used through a Web user interface, and this extension exposes functionality through web services based on REST technology, so that developers can invoke them from their own applications for accessibility testing.

Existing approaches to Semantic Web Services (SWS) require a domain ontology and a semantic description of the service. In the case of lightweight SWS approaches, such as SAWSDL, service description is achieved by semantically annotating existing web service interfaces. Other approaches such as OWL-S and WSMO describe services in a separate ontology. So, existing approaches separate service description from domain description, therefore increasing design efforts. We propose EXPRESS a lightweight approach to SWS that requires the domain ontology definition only. Its simplicity stems from the similarities between REST and the Semantic Web such as resource realization, self describing representations, and uniform interfaces. The semantics of a service is elicited from a resource's semantic description in the domain ontology and the semantics of the uniform interface, hence eliminating the need for ontologically describing services. We provide an example that illustrates EXPRESS and then discuss how it compares to SA-REST and WSMO.

Collaborative Filtering (CF) recommender systems use opinions of people for filtering relevant information. The accuracy of these applications depends on the mechanism used to filter and combine the opinions (the feedback) provided by users. In this paper we propose a mechanism aimed at using semantic relations extracted from Wikipedia in order to adaptively filter and combine the feedback of people. The semantic relatedness among the concepts/pages of Wikipedia is used to identify the opinions which are more significant for predicting a rating for an item. We show that our approach improves the accuracy of the predictions and it also opens opportunities for providing explanations on the obtained recommendations.

Existing work on workflow mining ignores the dataflow aspect of the problem. This is not acceptable for service-oriented applications that use Web services with typed inputs and outputs. We propose a novel algorithm WIT (Workflow Inference from Traces) which identifies the context similarities of the observed actions based on the dataflow and uses model merging techniques to generalize the control flow and the dataflow simultaneously. We identify the class of workflows that WIT can learn correctly. We implemented WIT and tested it on a real world medical scheduling domain where WIT was able to find a good approximation of the target workflow.

Pervasive computing environments are populated with networked software and hardware resources providing various functionalities that are abstracted, thanks to the Service Oriented Architecture paradigm, as services. Within these environments, service discovery enabled by service discovery protocols (SDPs) is a critical functionality for establishing ad hoc associations between service providers and service requesters. Furthermore, the dynamics, the openness and the usercentric vision aimed at by the pervasive computing paradigm call for solutions that enable rich, semantic, context-and QoS-aware service discovery. Although the Semantic Web paradigm envisions to achieve such support, current solutions are hardly deployable in the pervasive environment due to the costly underlying semantic reasoning with ontologies. In this article, we present EASY to support efficient, semantic, context-and QoS-aware service discovery on top of existing SDPs. EASY provides EASY-L, a language for semantic specification of functional and non-functional service properties, as well as EASY-M, a corresponding set of conformance relations. Furthermore, EASY provides solutions to efficiently assess conformance between service capabilities. These solutions are based on an efficient encoding technique, as well as on an efficient organization of service repositories (caches), which enables both fast service advertising and discovery. Experimental results show that the deployment of EASY on top of an existing SDP, namely Ariadne, enhancing it only with slight changes to EASY-Ariadne, enables rich semantic, context-and QoS-aware service discovery, which furthermore performs better than the classical, rigid, syntactic matching, and improves the scalability of Ariadne.

Multimedia service providers on the web need their services to be well protected and easily accessible worldwide. This has initiated several lines of research to provide semantically rich policy-aware web services. However, the existence of various technologies to define and protect services has made the communication of services questionable. Currently, it is ambiguous how a broker agent looking for a special object would communicate to an online service provider, with different policy and service definition languages, to obtain the appropriate object. Here, we propose a solution to such problems by introducing an interchange framework to transform business rules and policies between different enterprises using REWERSE Rule Markup Language.

Simplifying the discovery of web services on one hand and protecting them from misuse on the other hand has initiated several lines of research in the area of policyaware semantic web services. However, the diversity of approaches, ontologies and languages chosen for defining Semantic Web services and policies has made the research area cluttered. It is now ambiguous how different registries and agents with different policy languages and Semantic Web service ontologies would share their information. In this ...

Recent technology developments in the area of services on the Web are marked by the proliferation of Web applications and APIs. The implementation and evolution of applications based on Web APIs is, however, hampered by the lack of automation that can be achieved with current technologies. Research on semantic Web services is therefore trying to adapt the principles and technologies that were devised for traditional Web services, to deal with this new kind of services. In this paper we show that currently more than 80% of the Web APIs require some form of authentication. Therefore authentication plays a major role for Web API invocation and should not be neglected in the context of mashups and composite data applications. We present a thorough analysis carried out over a body of publicly available APIs that determines the most commonly used authentication approaches. In the light of these results, we propose an ontology for the semantic annotation of Web API authentication information and demonstrate how it can be used to create semantic Web API descriptions. We evaluate the applicability of our approach by providing a prototypical implementation, which uses authentication annotations as the basis for automated service invocation.

SweetDeal is a rule-based approach to representation of business contracts that enables software agents to create, evaluate, negotiate, and execute contracts with substantial automation and modularity. It builds upon the situated courteous logic programs knowledge representation in RuleML, the emerging standard for Semantic Web XML rules. Here, we newly extend the SweetDeal approach by also incorporating process knowledge descriptions whose ontologies are represented in DAML+OIL (emerging standard for Semantic Web ontologies) thereby enabling more complex contracts with behavioral provisions, especially for handling exception conditions (e.g., late delivery or non-payment) that might arise during the execution of the contract. This provides a foundation for representing and automating deals about servicesin particular, about Web Services, so as to help search, select, and compose them. Our system is also the first to combine emerging Semantic Web standards for knowledge representation of rules (RuleML) with ontologies (DAML+OIL) for a practical ebusiness application domain, and further to do so with process knowledge. This also newly fleshes out the evolving concept of Semantic Web Services. A prototype (soon public) is running.

This paper presents an ontology-based conceptual mapping framework that translates a formal and visually rich business process modeling (BPM) language, Fundamental Business Process Modelling Language (FBPML) to a Semantic Web-based language, the Web Services Ontology (OWL-S). The translation aims to narrow the gap between Enterprise Modelling methods and Semantic Web services, thus bringing the two communities closer. Another significant contribution of the translation is that it allows more mature technologies such as BPM methods to be utilised within emerging fields that are constantly evolving, such as the Semantic Web. The framework is divided into a data model translation and a process model translation. An implementation and an evaluation of the process model translation are demonstrated and discussed.

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.

We introduce CiteSeer-API, a public API to CiteSeer-like services. CiteSeer-API is SOAP/WSDL based and allows for easy programmatical access to all the specific functionalities offered by CiteSeer services, including full text search of documents and citations and citation-based document discovery. In order to enable operability and interlinking with arbitrary software agents and digital library systems, CiteSeer-API uses digital content signatures to create system-independent handles for the Document, Citation and Group resources of CiteSeer servers. We discuss specific functionalities of CiteSeer-API that take advantage of these handlers in order to enable seamless location of CiteSeer resources. Finally we argue that the digital signature scheme used by CiteSeer-API is well suited for the creation of machine-usable semantic descriptions of digital library services which is the key toward seamless discovery and integration of services such as CiteSeer-API. CiteSeer-API is currently showcased on CiteSeer.IST, the CiteSeer server of the

CiteSeer is currently a very large source of meta-data information on the World Wide Web (WWW). This meta-data is the key material for the Semantic Web. Still, CiteSeer is not yet a Semantic-enabled service and therefore its meta-data, although potentially usable by Semantic Web agents, is not yet reachable using the Semantic Web mechanisms. The complexity of CiteSeer, that is the range of tasks it supports, make the transition to a Semantic-enabled service a non-trivial task. While human users tend to perceive CiteSeer as a single well-integrated service, we believe it is best seen-from a machine perspective-as a collection of services, each service performing a specific task. In this paper we show our approach to enable CiteSeer on the Semantic Web in order to allow the use of its meta-data through the Semantic Web. We first introduce an intuitive Application Programming Interface (API) to the CiteSeer software, then show that an efficient integration of CiteSeer in the Semantic Web can be best achieved by independently integrating the services that comprise it. We believe the effort presented here towards the Semantic-integration of a complex Information Retrieval system could be used as an integration model for arbitrary systems.

One of the challenges in Service Oriented Computing consists in supporting service discovery and composition according to the so-called non functional properties (NFP). In this paper we propose a linguistic framework to describe NFPs of services independently of the grounding technology by means of semantic Web technologies. In particular, the approach is based on an extension of the Web Service Modeling Language (WSML). The linguistic framework supports flexible NFP representations by allowing (i) to reuse existent models and ontologies, (ii) to represent both the definition of single NFPs and clusters of NFPs grouped into policies. A policy collects a set of related and possibly interdependent properties to form a single entity that can be referenced and discovered. As a result, definitions of NFPs can be independent of specific services, and vice versa, so to support flexible associations.

The Semantic Web Service Challenge is one of the major initiative dedicated to work on Semantic Web Service (SWS) discovery and selection. It represents an effective manner for evaluating the functionality of SWS technologies. In this paper, we provide a new SWS-Challenge scenario proposal with new interesting problems to be solved on the basis of an analysis of a real world shipment scenario in the logistic operators domain. In the discussion a number of aspects concerning the discovery and selection processes are emphasized. In particular, we focus on the problem of considering the heterogeneity between the provider and the requester perspectives, and on the differences between functional and non functional specifications both on the requester and provider side.

In this paper we present the architecture and design of an extended BPEL engine that implements the operational semantics of BPEL4SWS. BPEL4SWS is an extension of the BPEL language with support for Semantic Web Service concepts like mediation and semantic descriptions of activity implementations. We describe the basic communication scenarios of processes with services and the interaction between the engine components involved in the execution of BPEL4SWS processes. The presented prototype is based on the open source BPEL engine Apache ODE, features improved configurability and facilitates the definition of additional BPEL extensions with minimal development effort.

Armadillo is a tool that provides automatic annotation for the Semantic Web using unannotated resources like the existing Web for information harvesting, that is: combining a crawling mechanism with an extensible architecture for ontology population. The latter is achieved via largely unsupervised machine learning, boot-strapped from oracles, such as web-site wrappers. It is backed up by 'evidential reasoning', which allows evidence to be gained from the redundancy in the Web as well as inaccuracies in information, also characteristic of today's Web, to be circumvented. In this paper we sketch how the architecture of Armadillo has now been reinterpreted as workflow templates that compose semantic web services and show how the porting of Armadillo to new domains, and furthermore the application of new tools, has thus been simplified and benefits from semantic discovery and automatic orchestration.

Developing a Service-Oriented Architecture to Harvest Information for the Semantic Web Barry Norton, Sam Chapman and Fabio Ciravegna Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield Regent Court, 211 Portobello Street, Sheffield S1 4DP, UK {B. Norton, S. ...

Armadillo is a tool that provides automatic annotation for the Semantic Web using unannotated resources like the existing Web for information harvesting, that is: combining a crawling mechanism with an extensible architecture for ontology population. The latter is achieved via largely unsupervised machine learning, boot-strapped from oracles, such as web-site wrappers. It is backed up by 'evidential reasoning', which allows evidence to be gained from the redundancy in the Web as well as inaccuracies in information, also characteristic of today's Web, to be circumvented. In this paper we sketch how the architecture of Armadillo has now been reinterpreted as workflow templates that compose semantic web services and show how the porting of Armadillo to new domains, and furthermore the application of new tools, has thus been simplified and benefits from semantic discovery and automatic orchestration.

The entities participating in a context-aware service platform need to establish and manage trust relationships in order to assert different trust aspects including identity provisioning, privacy enforcement, and context information provisioning. Current trust management models address these trust aspects individually when in fact they are dependent on each other. In this paper we identify and analyze the trust relationships in a context-aware service platform and propose an integrated trust management model that supports quantification of trust for different trust aspects. Our model addresses a set of trust aspects that is relevant for our target context-aware service platform and is extensible with other trust aspects. We propose to calculate a resulting trust value for contextaware services, which considers the dependencies between the different trust aspects, and aims to support the users in the selection of the more trustworthy services. In this calculation we target two types of user goals: one with high priority in privacy enforcement (privacy concerned) and one with high priority in the service adaptation (service concerned). Based on our trust model we have designed a distributed trust management architecture and implemented a proof of concept prototype.

Recently, Semantic Web Services have been increasingly adopted to search, access and manipulate information made available from autonomous and heterogeneous systems interacting in a P2P environment. Platform independency is obtained and the possibility of integrating different information sources over the Web is augmented. In P2P networks, characteristic aspects are the highly dynamicity and the absence of a common resource conceptualization. A centralized structure, where providers publish available services and requesters search for them, constitutes a performance bottleneck and a single point of failure; in P2P environments each provider acts as a peer on the network that supplies its own services and it is able to reply to incoming service requests. A semantic infrastructure to organize and support the automatic location of services without a centralized service registry is required. In this paper we present experimental evaluation of a reference architecture to support service-based semantic search, by means of a distributed service registry, DSR, composed of peers providing semantic-enriched services and semantic links between peers holding similar services; each service provider is also equipped with a service knowledge evolution manager, apt to update peer knowledge, and a semantic search assistant, apt to find services satisfying a user's requested search.

Abstract. The paper presents the main results of the IST FP6 INFRAWEBS project. The project has developed an easy and effective way of constructing and using semantic descriptions for existing and new Web services. INFRAWEBS has adopted the WSMO (Web Service Modeling Ontology) and WSML (Web Service Modeling Language) specifications and has imposed no additional requirements to them. Therefore, the advanced software components developed during the project are of interest to the whole WSMO community. INFRAWEBS offers a SOA framework – INFRAWEBS Integrated Framework (IIF), based on the ESB integration paradigm, which can be easily used by different groups of users (application providers, designers of SWS, etc.). The IIF enables integration of components of different technologies. Furthermore, it can be considered as one of the first frameworks for semantic service engineering that covers the whole SWS life-cycle and allows for creation of complex, semantically-enabled applications.

The paper presents the main results of the IST FP6 INFRAWEBS project. The project has developed an easy and effective way of constructing and using semantic descriptions for existing and new Web services. INFRAWEBS has adopted the WSMO (Web Service Modeling Ontology) and WSML (Web Service Modeling Language) specifications and has imposed no additional requirements to them. Therefore, the advanced software components developed during the project are of interest to the whole WSMO community. INFRAWEBS offers a SOA framework-INFRAWEBS Integrated Framework (IIF), based on the ESB integration paradigm, which can be easily used by different groups of users (application providers, designers of SWS, etc.). The IIF enables integration of components of different technologies. Furthermore, it can be considered as one of the first frameworks for semantic service engineering that covers the whole SWS life-cycle and allows for creation of complex, semantically-enabled applications.

Abstract: In the current Learning Management Systems the allocation of learning resources is done at design-time, relying on expertises of the institutional designer only, and there are not many capabilities to reuse existing blocks. A possible approach to increase the ...

The current INFRAWEBS European research project aims at developing ICT framework enabling software and service providers to generate and establish open and extensible development platforms for Web Service applications. One of the concrete project objectives is developing a full-life-cycle software toolset for creating and maintaining Semantic Web Services (SWSs) supporting specific applications based on Web Service Modelling Ontology (WSMO) framework. According to WSMO, functional and behavioural descriptions of a ...

Geospatial Web services allow to access and to process Geospatial data. Despite significant standardisation efforts, severe heterogeneity and interoperability problems remain. The SWING environment 1 leverages the Semantic Web Services (SWS) paradigm to address these problems. The environment supports the entire life-cycle of Geospatial SWS. To this end, it integrates a genuine end-user tool, a tool for developers of new Geospatial Web services, a commercial service Catalogue, the Web Service Execution Environment platform (WSMX), as well as an annotation tool. The demonstration includes three usage scenarios of increasing complexity, involving the semantic annotation of a legacy service, the semantic discovery of a Geospatial SWS, as well as the composition of a new Geospatial SWS. 1 Developed in the SWING project (Semantic Web services INteroperability for Geospatial decision making), funded by the European Commission (FP6-26514).

The term "Web services" has been used very often nowadays. According to W3C, "A Web service is a software system identified by a URI (Berners-Lee, Fielding, and Masinter ,1998), whose public interfaces and bindings are defined and described using XML. Its definition can be discovered by other software systems. These systems may then interact with the Web service in a manner prescribed by its definition, using XML based messages conveyed by Internet protocols "(Austin, Barbir, Ferris, and Garg, 2004). Currently, an increasing number of companies and organizations implement their applications over Internet. Thus, the ability to select and integrate inter-organizational and heterogeneous services on the Web efficiently and effectively at runtime is an important step towards the development of the Web service applications. Recent researches study how to specify (in a formal and expressive enough language), compose (automatically), discover and ensure the correctness of Web services. In this chapter, a significant portion of the work has been dedicated to scenarios aimed at both automating Web service discovery and composition functionality. As W3C defined (Booth et al.), "Discovery is the act of locating a machine-processable description of a Web servicerelated resource that may have been previously unknown and that meets certain functional criteria". Indeed, Web service discovery is the process of finding a suitable Web service for a given task. When no atomic Web service can fulfill the user's requirements, there should be a possibility to combine existing services together in order to satisfy the request requirement. This trend has inaugurated a considerable number of research efforts on the Web service composition (WSC) both in academia and industry. Most of current approaches related to WSC applied following techniques:

Ontology is a building block of the semantic Web. Ontology building requires a detailed domain analysis, which in turn requires financial resources, intensive domain knowledge and time. Domain models in industry are frequently stored as relational database schemas in relational databases. An ontology base underlying such schemas can represent concepts and relationships that are present in the domain of discourse. However, with ever increasing demand for wider access and domain coverage, public databases are not static and their schemas evolve over time. Ontologies generated according to these databases have to change to reflect the new situation. Once a database schema is changed, these changes in the schema should also be incorporated in any ontology generated from the database. It is not possible to generate a fresh version of the ontology using the new database schema because the ontology itself may have undergone changes that need to be preserved. To tackle this problem, this paper presents a generic framework that will help to generate and synchronize ontologies with existing data sources. In particular we address the translation between ontologies and database schemas, but our proposal is also sufficiently generic to be used to generate and maintain ontologies based on XML and object oriented databases.

Bridging the semantic gap between business process models and semantic Web services becomes increasingly important in order to help automating business process integration in large organizations. Traditional workflow languages (such as BPEL4WS) support the modeling of business processes as syntax based compositions of Web services. When such processes are exported as Web services they as well expose syntactical interfaces. These syntactical interfaces allow only static composition and hence limit interactions between ...

BPEL4WS is one of the most utilized business process development languages. It can be used to develop executable business processes as a combination of Web Services interactions in a specific sequence called process flow. But still BPEL4WS lacks sufficient representation of business process semantics required for business processes automation. On the other hand OWL-S (OWL for Web Services) is designed to present such kind of semantic information. There exists similarity in the conceptual model of OWL-S and ...

We present a prototype multi-agent system whose goal is to support a 3D application for e-retailing. The prototype demonstrates how the use of agent environments can be amongst the most promising and flexible approaches to engineer e-retailing applications. We illustrate this point by showing how the agent environment GOLEM uses semantic web concepts to develop the e-retailing application. In this context we describe the features of GOLEM that allow a user to become an avatar and explore the environment by searching and dynamically discovering new products and services.

Identity verification is now a days a crucial task for security applications. In the near future organizations dedicated to store individual biometric information will emerge in order to determine individual identity. Biometric authentication is currently information intensive. The volume and diversity of new data sources challenge current database technologies. Biometric identity heterogeneity arises when different data sources interoperate. New promising application fields such as the Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services can leverage the potential of biometric identity, even though heterogeneity continues rising. Semantic Web Services provide a platform to integrate the lattice of biometric identity data widely distributed both across the Internet and within individual organizations. In this paper, we present a framework for solving biometric identity heterogeneity based on Semantic Web Services. We use a multimodal fusion recognition scenario as a test-bed for evaluation.

A Service Orientated Architecture will allow organisations to enhance interoperability and encourage reuse of components and interfaces. In this paper, the application of semantic descriptions to services is advocated with the aim of further improving the SOA and enabling scalability. An application of Semantic Web Services for the Telecommunications Industry is described. It shows how services components forming part of a Service Orientated Architecture can be described semantically in terms of shared data and process ontologies. The potential benefits of this approach are explored. A use case is presented that illustrates how the efficiency of a telecommunications system designer can be improved with the use of Semantic Web Services.

Abstract. The paper presents the main results of the IST FP6 INFRAWEBS project. The project has developed an easy and effective way of constructing and using semantic descriptions for existing and new Web services. INFRAWEBS has adopted the WSMO (Web Service Modeling Ontology) and WSML (Web Service Modeling Language) specifications and has imposed no additional requirements to them. Therefore, the advanced software components developed during the project are of interest to the whole WSMO community. INFRAWEBS offers a SOA framework – INFRAWEBS Integrated Framework (IIF), based on the ESB integration paradigm, which can be easily used by different groups of users (application providers, designers of SWS, etc.). The IIF enables integration of components of different technologies. Furthermore, it can be considered as one of the first frameworks for semantic service engineering that covers the whole SWS life-cycle and allows for creation of complex, semantically-enabled applications.

Integrated e-government in the European Union requires good conceptual and technological foundations. Aligned with the European e-government strategy, we present how infrastructure for national as well as cross-country e-government services can be facilitated by the Semantic Web Services concepts and technologies. With respect to this infrastructure, we identify key topics for our research.

Word sense disambiguation (abbr. WSD) is very important to the semantic web/web 2.0. However, there is still no easy-to-use tool available. As a remedy, here a simple and very efficient tool called oWSD is demonstrated. It disambiguates the senses of words in their ontological contexts, and obtains the right word senses from WordNet. It is very helpful to applications involving ontologies and natural language processing as well.

In a global context of sharing information, such as Big Data and cloud computing paradigms, researchers are developing many means to deal with new data models and algorithms. However, the development and reuse of these ones is complex because of the heterogeneity of environments, data formats and contexts of use all around of the world. That's why a way to share and reuse algorithms and treatments through a common formalism is needed, for both machines and computers. The ultimate goal of our work is to provide a collaborative platform for not only experts but also machines automatically develop, reuse and chain treatments, computations and models. For this, we rely on a goal-oriented approach which is associated with the Semantic Web, to establish a common formalism to design models for worldwide researchers. In this article, we propose the formalization of our approach thanks to an algebra which is linked to the Semantic Web standards. Finally, we provide a high-level language ...

Despite much research into Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Intelligent Agents (IA) over the past few years little 'intelligent' behaviour is displayed by modern computer systems. AI planning and intelligent systems are failing to be generally used. The intellectual abilities such as learning, analysing, problem solving, planning and abstracting are features that we do not entirely associate with today's computer systems. In AI we recognise that although machines are beginning to overtake the human brain in terms of sheer processing power and perhaps storage capacity, they still cannot approach the level of human intelligence in terms of general purpose cognitive capability. Part of the reason for this is that software technology that supports general intelligent processes is difficult to use, understand and maintain. With the advent of the Internet, the Web as we know it is an enormous collection of information stored in a variety of formats and held loosely together by hyperlinks. This is adequate for humans who are able to understand natural languages, but it is of no use if we want machines to be able to process as well as understand the information. To deal with this issue, the next Web generation promise to deliver Semantic Web Services; services that are self-described and amenable to automated discovery, composition and choreography. They can be utilised by application or other services without human assistant or protocols; where information is encoded according to well defined vocabularies, often known as Ontologies. In this research, we aim to create the infrastructure to enable intelligent software to be recast as semantic web services, and lead the way to "Service Oriented Intelligence"distributed software intelligence using the Internet.