Approaches to Semantic Web Services: an Overview and Comparisons

Abstract

The next Web generation promises to deliver Semantic Web Services (SWS); services that are self-described and amenable to automated discovery, composition and invocation. A prerequisite to this, however, is the emergence and evolution of the Semantic Web, which provides the infrastructure for the semantic interoperability of Web Services. Web Services will be augmented with rich formal descriptions of their capabilities, such that they can be utilized by applications or other services without human assistance or highly constrained agreements on interfaces or protocols. Thus, Semantic Web Services have the potential to change the way knowledge and business services are consumed and provided on the Web. In this paper, we survey the state of the art of current enabling technologies for Semantic Web Services. In addition, we characterize the infrastructure of Semantic Web Services along three orthogonal dimensions: activities, architecture and service ontology. Further, we examine and contrast three current approaches to SWS according to the proposed dimensions. Service Registry Service Requester Service Provider Service Description Web Service Publish Find Bind HTTP XML-S XML SOAP WSDL UDDI BEPL4 WS URIthe meaning of the interface description (typically through the use of meaningful label or variable names, comments, or additional documentation) and binds to (i.e. includes a call to invoke) the discovered service within the application they are developing. This application is known as the service requester. At this point, the service requester can automatically invoke the discovered service (provided by the service provider) using Web service communication protocols (i.e. SOAP). Key to the interoperation of Web services is an adoption of a set of enabling standard protocols. Several XML-based standards ( fig. 2) have been proposed to support the usage scenario previously described.

An overview of current ontology meta-matching solutions

“…Originally SWS alignment was based on exact string matching of parameters, but nowadays researchers deal with heterogeneous and constrained data matching (Cabral et al, 2004).…”

A Flexible Tool for Web Service Selection in Service Oriented Architecture

“…Matchmaking is the process of finding an appropriate provider for a requester through a middle agent. Consequently, Semantic matchmaking is used by semantic Web services to find valuable service candidates and selecting the most suitable service(s) that best match user request [5,6]. In this work we use OWL-S [7] for describing the used services.…”

Computing of applied digital ecosystems

“…Service clients (end-user organisations that use some service) and service aggregators (organisations that consolidate multiple services into a new, single service offering) utilise service descriptions to achieve their objectives [25]. One of the most important and continuing developments in SOAs is Semantic Web Services (SWS), which make use of semantic descriptions for service discovery, so that a client can discover the services semantically [7].…”