Web services offer a promising approach to accomplish a loose coupling of processes across organizational boundaries. Several industry standards have been developed to describe process or service related information. Although these standards capture similar concepts, they nonetheless rely on diverging interpretations of processes and their components. In this paper, we present an approach to facilitate the search for services, where services and requests can be described using heterogeneous standards. To enable the mapping of a request to different service description standards, formal ontologies are used. Ontologies are related on the basis of similarity relations in order to translate between elements of different service descriptions. The resulting translation is used to process a request and find an adequate service. We present a top-down and a bottom-up method to implement this kind of request processing.
This chapter introduces the emerging technology of Semantic Web services. It concentrates on two dominant specifications in this domain, namely OWL-S (Web ontology language for services) and WSMO (Web services modeling ontology). We briefly introduce Web services and Semantic Web, two main technologies underlying the Semantic Web services technology and then explain most of the key features of this technology together with simplified examples. We discuss three aspects of Semantic Web services: specifications for semantic descriptions of services, intelligent discovery and selection of services using semantic descriptions, and finally, building more complex services by composing existing ones. Our main goal in this chapter is not only to present an abstract view of this technology but also the introduction of the technical details of the two existing specifications.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.