In a dynamic service oriented environment it is desirable for service consumers and providers to offer and obtain guarantees regarding their capabilities and requirements. WS-Agreement defines a language and protocol for establishing agreements between two parties. The agreements are complex and expressive to the extent that the manual matching of these agreements would be expensive both in time and resources. It is essential to develop a method for matching agreements automatically. This work presents the framework and implementation of an innovative tool for the matching providers and consumers based on WSAgreements. The approach utilizes Semantic Web technologies to achieve rich and accurate matches. A key feature is the novel and flexible approach for achieving user personalized matches.

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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.

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Spatial and temporal data are critical components in many applications. This is especially true in analytical domains such as national security and criminal investigation. Often, the analytical process requires uncovering and analyzing complex thematic relationships between disparate people, places and events. Fundamentally new query operators based on the graph structure of Semantic Web data models, such as semantic associations, are proving useful for this purpose. However, these analysis mechanisms are primarily intended for thematic relationships. In this paper, we describe a framework built around the RDF metadata model for analysis of thematic, spatial and temporal relationships between named entities. We discuss modeling issues and present a set of semantic query operators. We also describe an efficient implementation in Oracle DBMS and demonstrate the scalability of our approach with a performance study using a large synthetic dataset from the national security domain.

Urban land-use allocation is a complicated problem due to the variety of land-uses, a large number of parcels, and different stakeholders with diverse and conflicting interests. Various approaches and techniques have been proposed for the optimization of urban land-use allocation. The outputs of these approaches are almost optimum plans that suggest a unique, appropriate land-use for every land unit. However, because of some restrictions, such stakeholder opposition to a specific land-use or the high cost of land-use change, it is not possible for planners to propose a desirable land-use for each parcel. As a result, planners have to identify other priorities of the land-uses. Thus, ranking land-uses for parcels along with optimal land-use allocation could be advantageous in urban land-use planning. In this paper, a parcel-level model is presented for ranking and allocating urban land-uses. The proposed model benefits from the capabilities of geographic information systems (GIS), fuzzy calculations, and Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) methods (fuzzy TOPSIS), intends to improve the capabilities of existing urban land-use planning support systems. In this model, as a first step, using fuzzy calculations and spatial analysis capabilities of GIS, quantitative and qualitative evaluation criteria are estimated based on physical characteristics of the parcels and their neighborhoods. In the second step, through the fuzzy TOPSIS method, urban land-uses are ranked for each of the urban land units. In the third step, using the proposed land-use allocation process and genetic algorithm, the efficiency of the model is evaluated in urban land-use optimal allocation. The proposed model is tested on spatial data of region 7, district 1 of Tehran. The implementation results demonstrate that, in the study area, the land-use of 77.2% of the parcels have first priority. As such, the land-use of 22.8% of the parcels do not have first priority, and are prone to change.