Significant progress has been made towards making Web services a pragmatic
solution for distributed computing on the scale of the World Wide Web.
However, there are a number of unresolved issues, which are hampering the wide
scale deployment of Web services. One such issue is the need to improve the
infrastructure for Web service discovery. We have investigated this
issue as part of the ongoing METEOR-S project. In
METEOR-S Web Services Discovery Infrastructure (MWSDI), we have created a
scalable infrastructure for semantic publication and discovery of Web services
using a peer-to-peer network.
A part of this project was intially code named as "Speed-R". It is going to appear in JXTA.org's university spotlight. Click here to see me in JXTA.org.
METEOR-S Dynamic Business Processes using Web Services
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, intermediate calculations, conditional branches 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.
Publication (s) Kaarthik Sivashanmugam, John Miller, Amit Sheth, and Kunal Verma,
Framework for Semantic Web Process Composition, Semantic Web Services and Their Role in Enterprise Application Integration and E-Commerce, Special Issue of the International Journal of Electronic Commerce (IJEC), Eds: Christoph Bussler, Dieter Fensel, Norman Sadeh, Feb 2004.
Kaarthik Sivashanmugam, Amit Sheth, John Miller, Kunal Verma, Rohit Aggarwal, Preeda Rajasekaran, Metadata and Semantics for Web Services and Processes, Book Chapter, Datenbanken und Informationssysteme: Festschrift zum 60- Geburtstag von Gunter Schlageter, Benn et al Eds., Praktische Informatik I, Hagen, October 2003, pp. 245-272.
Semantics for increasing value of applications: (Details later after publication)