Semantic Web Services and Service Composition
Eakan Gopalakrishnan
School of Electronics and Computer
Science, University of Southampton,
Southampton, Hampshire, SO17 1BJ
+4407760912219
eg5g09@ecs.soton.ac.uk
ABSTRACT
Semantic Web is the evolution of the existing machine readable
World Wide Web into a machine intelligible information space.
Web Services could create a network of programs that produce
and consume this information autonomously, thereby
revolutionizing the way we use the Web today. The future of the
web is highly promising, where our queries would be answered by
agents communicating with each other using the most appropriate
web services required to fulfil our queries by automatically
composing web services when required. This would be possible
only when the existing web is completely machine-
understandable. This paper reviews some of the research done in
automating computer to computer interactions and web service
invocation based on ontologies and different web service
composition methods that have been proposed so far.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
C.2 [Computer Systems Organization]: Computer
Communication Networks; C.2.4 [Distributed Systems] –
[Distributed Applications]; D.2.12 [Interoperability] – Interface
Definition Languages.
General Terms
Automated Semantic Web Service Composition.
Keywords
Semantic Web, intelligent agents, web services, automated
composition.
1. INTRODUCTION
The Semantic Web was Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the web
being a universal medium of information and knowledge
exchange, in machine readable and intelligible format which
would enable computers to analyze all the data in the web by itself
and change the way computers solve problems by a series
machine to machine interactions [1]. Some parts of the Semantic
Web specification are yet to be implemented, but some of them
have been formally accepted and recommended by the W3C. The
web initially, just a set of linked documents, later evolved into a
collection of all sorts of information including multimedia
content. The earlier documents on the web were basically in
Hyper Text Markup Language that mainly focuses on the format
of displaying the documents on the web. This did not provide the
capability for machines to interpret it. After the development of
Extensible Markup Language, description of the represented
information started to be used between computers for information
exchange. After XML became the next big thing, many other
languages were created based on XML to overcome its
limitations. Resource Description Framework, DARPA Agent
Markup Language, DAML + Ontology Interface Language which
later evolved into OWL (Web Ontology Language) are some of
the languages developed for Knowledge representation purpose.
OWL has now matured into OWL 2.0, which is a W3C
Recommendation and is supported by many ontology editors and
reasoners.
Meanwhile Service Oriented Architecture, a key technology for
the development of loosely coupled services over the internet, that
uses messages as the basic unit of communication between
processes became widely used in the form of Web Services [2]
[3]. The Web Services standards are developed based on XML
and some of them are: Simple Object Access Protocol [4], Web
Services Description Language, Universal Description Discovery
and Integration [3]. Concurrently AI research had been focused
on the exploration of the science of agent systems in both
theoretical and experimental results [5]. Agent Based systems
were developed because of rapid changes in the requirements of
the software market, to reduce the maintenance cost of developed
software [6]. An agent can be described as “a computer system
that is situated in some environment and that is capable of
autonomous action in that environment in order to meet its design
objectives” [7].
Enabling agents to automatically use web services based on
semantics in its description is a challenging task. Web services are
independent components; to fulfil a complex user requirement
several of them must be invoked in a particular sequence. There is
no pre-defined execution plan for this purpose, because it would
depend completely on the user requirement. In other words, to
create a composite web service using simple atomic web services
is called web service composition. Thus in the next section the
paper focuses on web service composition, the issues in
composition and research so far.
2. WEB SERVICE COMPOSITION
Web Services are platform independent software components that
are available in a distributed system, usually the internet. Soon
applications will be assembled from a set of web services
integrated seamlessly. This process is called Web Service
Composition. In other words it can be seen as a software synthesis
problem or a planning and execution problem. There are two
approaches to web service composition at present. One way is to
manual composition using low level process modeling and
execution languages like BPEL4WS [8]. The other approach is
what is being researched in the Semantic Web Community, using
a top-down description of the capabilities of the web services
using standardized languages for specifying semantics like
DAML-S [9] or OWL-S [10]. The first approach requires a
programmer to do all the work, whereas the second approach
enables automated reasoning of the web services using the
semantic information provided by the languages used for their
description [11].
2.1 Problems in Web Service Composition
[12] describes the various issues in automating web service
composition. Some of them are: Co-ordination, Transaction,
Context of the service, the model of conversation between the
services, monitoring the execution and the infrastructure based on
which service composition is done. Standards have been emerging
to address these issues by different vendors.
The interaction between web services is highly important for
automated composition; WS Coordination [27] and WS-CF [28]
are some of the attempts of standardizations to simplify web
service development.
To add reliability to transactions, transaction protocols like WS-
Transaction [29] were standardized; they define protocols for
centralized and peer to peer transactions, both required for
coordination.
In web services terminology context means information utilized
by the services to adjust execution and output to provide the client
with customized and personalized behaviour [30]. Similarly for
other issues other standards like WS-Conversation Language,
Web Service Choreography Interface, etc came up.
2.2 Previous Research
J Rao and X Su in [13] did a detailed survey on different types of
web service composition techniques in the past. They suggest a 5
step model for web service composition: service presentation,
translation, process generation, evaluation and execution. They
classify composition techniques into two main categories:
Composition using workflow techniques, composition using AI
planning. Various methods used for service composition within
the AI planning technique are also classified as: those methods
using situational calculus, using Planning Domain Definition
Language which is demonstrated in [14], rule based planning [21]
and theorem proving [23] [24].
In [15], which is one of the earliest attempts at automating the
composition problem, the authors present an agent technology
based on a logic programming language Golog [16], which is a
situation calculus based programming language, a customized
Golog interpreter made possible with the help of DAML-S, and
succeeded in implementing and testing a simple service that was
generic, customizable and usable. The aim of the method was to
enable software agents to reason about web services.
M. Pistore et.al [17] attempts something similar by using Business
Process Execution Language for Web Services and “Planning as
Model Checking” Framework [18]. They attempt to deal with the
three main challenges that arise during planning under
uncertainty: Non-determinism, Partial observability and extended
goals. The protocol specification for the problem is represented as
a finite state machine and requirements are expressed in EaGLe
[19], in order to search the domain and synthesize a plan to
execute the internal processes. The work was mainly an
application of [20] in web service composition.
During the emerging standards of the semantic web, [21]
demonstrated a conversational model of the clients and web
services without imposing any explicit conversational context.
The work is based on the assumption that service matching and
identification has already been completed, thus focused mainly on
the execution of the web service.
Another similar endeavour, that avoided low level programming
and use ontology for semantic representation was [22]. Ontology
in simple terms would be a shared conceptualization of some term
based on semantic proximity of terms in a specific domain of
interest [22]. The authors focussed on two important aspects:
composability model of the web service and automatic generation
of the composition; where the former emphasizes on checking if
the web services to be composed can actually interact with each
other and the latter focuses on generating composite services
automatically. The approach defines message, purpose, category,
quality, operation and web service as tuples; then checks for
composability based on several rules and further checks if the
composition is sound. The paper also comes up with a
matchmaking algorithm. The authors have combined the research
going on in automatic service composition, service matching and
some of the standardizations at that time to develop their method.
Waldinger’s approach in [23] is based on automated deduction
and program synthesis which is based on his earlier work [25].
Available services are first described in first-order logic and
constructive proof generation is done using SNARK theorem
prover from which service composition descriptions are extracted.
Structural Synthesis of Programs, a deductive approach for
program synthesis from structural properties using intuitional
propositional logic is elaborated in [24]. Classical logic
disjunctions are used to describe exceptions thrown during service
composition using this method.
3. CONCLUSION
Several different standards and a variety of approaches have been
proposed to create a service composition platform. New software
applications are being built mostly on web services, thus research
on web service composition has a huge impact on several other
areas of research. And service composition if made completely
automated would reduce development time of services, integration
and testing. The different approaches of dealing with web service
composition are for different contexts. For example the workflow
model is used in cases where the request already has a pre-defined
process model, where as AI planning methods are used when
there is a lack of process models but there are a specific set of
constraints and preferences.
Due to the complexity of the web services environment, it is quite
difficult to generate them automatically. But an ideal web service
composition should provide ontology addition for planning
problem, web services indexing which would make web services
searchable and accessible, should use intelligent algorithms to do
service composition; the user should be given the flexibility to
change the execution plan if required [31]. A web service
composition method that combines all these features is yet to be
implemented. Probably with the growth of research in AI many of
these issues will be addressed.
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