Web Service Contracting: Specification and Reasoning with SCIFF

Alberti, Marco; Chesani, Federico; Gavanelli, Marco; Lamma, Evelina; Mello, Paola; Montali, Marco; Torroni, Paolo

doi:10.1007/978-3-540-72667-8_7

Cited by 11 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Alberti et al [2007] present SCIFF, an abductive reasoning framework for reasoning about the policies of services with the purpose of verifying if a goal might be reached. In that sense, SCIFF is similar to specifying agents in C+ [Giunchiglia et al, 2004], and running queries in CCalc, which is the reasoning tool that implements C+.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

- Beta Distribution

2016

Handbook of Statistical Distributions With Applications

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Current service-oriented architectures lack business-level software abstractions. As a result, existing implementations are unnecessarily rigid. This dissertation takes as its point of departure the idea that agents who offer and consumer business services enter into commitments with one another. These commitments give meaning to the interaction among the agents. Commitments support a semantic notion of compliance and enable flexible enactment of business processes.Interoperability refers to the ability of agents to engage in interaction with oneanother. In open systems, where agents are autonomous and heterogeneous, ensuring interoperability is critical. Traditionally, interoperability has been formulated in low-level terms. This dissertation presents commitment alignment as a key form of business-level interoperability. Agents are aligned if whenever the creditor of a commitment infers the commitment, the debtor infers it too. A misalignment precludes any possibility of successful engagement among agents-their interaction would break down.This dissertation formally characterizes alignment in multiagent settings. It presents the causes of misalignment, namely, autonomy, distribution, and heterogeneity. Autonomy means that agents communicate asynchronously; distribution refers to the fact that in distributed systems, some agents may have more information than others; and heterogeneity refers to the fact that agents may have incompatible interfaces.To address autonomy and distribution, we propose a formalization of commitments that consists of three elements: a semantics of the commitment operations; messaging patterns that implement the commitment operations; and weak constraints on agents' behaviors to ensure the propagation of vital information. The constraints result in messages that are critical to alignment. We prove that under our formalization, no misalignment occurs because of autonomy or distribution. To address heterogeneity, we propose a language for agent interfaces, formulate a decision procedure that checks for interface compatibility, and prove its correctness. By addressing all three causes, we guarantee that no misalignment occurs.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

- Beta Distribution

2016

Handbook of Statistical Distributions With Applications

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“…In the next section, we briefly recall the SCIFF-based contracting framework [1], and show how the policies of alice and eShop2 (called simply eShop in the following) can be represented in it. The policies of eShop1 and eShop3 can be represented in an analogous way.…”

Section: An Example Scenariomentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The solution proposed, called SCIFF Reasoning Engine (SRE), is a framework able to establish if a given SWS and a requester can fruitfully inter-operate, taking as input the behavioural interfaces of both the participants, and producing as output a sort of a contract (a plan). Building on the contracting framework extensively described in [1], in this paper we present the implemented application framework that encompasses both the discovery and the contracting steps, in a unified search process. In particular, we accommodate service discovery by ontologybased reasoning, specifically by matching the user inputs, outputs and effects, with "similar" inputs, outputs and effects of potentially suitable services.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Integrating Abductive Logic Programming and Description Logics in a Dynamic Contracting Architecture

Alberti

Cattafi

Chesani

et al. 2009

2009 IEEE International Conference on Web Services

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In Semantic Web technologies, searching for a service means to identify components that can potentially satisfy the user needs in terms of outputs and effects (discovery), and that, when invoked by the customer, can fruitfully interact with her (contracting). In this paper, we present an application framework that encompasses both the discovery and the contracting steps, in a unified search process. In particular, we accommodate service discovery by ontologybased reasoning, and contracting by automated reasoning about policies published in a formal language. To this purpose, we consider a formal approach grounded on Computational Logic, and Abductive Logic Programming in particular. We propose a framework, called SCIFF Reasoning Engine, able to establish, by ontological and abductive reasoning, if a semantic web service and a requester can fruitfully inter-operate, taking as input the behavioural interfaces of both the participants, and producing as output a sort of a contract.

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“…Alberti et al (2006bAlberti et al ( , 2007a and Chesani et al (2007) have applied social expectations to the specification of individual services and choreographies, to the formal study of the conformance of services to choreographies and of the interoperability of services. Further, expectations have been used to study goal reachability in the context of service contracting (Alberti et al 2007b).…”

Section: Future Research Directionsmentioning

confidence: 99%