A component of the METEOR-S system on Semantic Web Services and Processes
Keywords: Web Services
Composition, Semantic Web Process, Semantic Web Service Discovery, Semantic
Process Templates, Process Generation, Process Composition
Web services
have been recognized to have the potential to revolutionize e-commerce. The
potential for businesses to be able to interact with each other on the fly is
very appealing. To date, however, the activity of creating Web processes using
Web services has been handled mostly at the syntactic level. Current composition
standards focus on building the process based on the interface description of
the participating services. The limitation of a rigid approach is that it does
not allow businesses to dynamically change partners and services. We enhance the
current process composition techniques by using Semantic Process Templates to
capture the semantic requirements of the process. The semantic process templates
can act as configurable modules for common industry practices maintaining the
semantics of the participating activities, control flow, data flow, intermediate
calculations and exposing it in a industry accepted interface. The templates are
instantiated to form executable processes according to the semantics of the
corresponding templates. The use of ontologies in template definition allows
much richer description of activity requirements and more effective way of
locating services to carry out the activities in the executable Web process.
During discovery of services we consider not only functionality, but also the
QoS of the services. Our unique approach combines the expressive power of the
present Web service composition standards and the advantages of the semantic Web
techniques for template definition and service discovery. The prototype
implementation of the framework for building the templates and generating the
processes is discussed in the publication.
Status