Semantic Enhancement of a Web Service Integration Gateway

This paper reports on a technology enabling bidirectional semantic interoperability between FIPA compliant agents and Web services, using OWL-S as a common service description language. This is an an extension of previously reported work consisting of a gateway for WSDL encoded Web service descriptions. This paper reports on the enhanced model, a semantic integration gateway, its architecture and operation. We discuss how the Gateway allows agents and Web clients to invoke both atomic services and composition patterns consisting of both agent services and Web services represented as unified workflow patterns. This is achieved by using OWL-S to express the service descriptions of both agent and Web services, with JADE agents engineered to facilitate the service composition process.