A Rule-based Approach to Modeling of Semantically-enriched Web Services

Web services are usually defined as autonomous, platform-independent computational elements that can be described, published, discovered, orchestrated and programmed using standard protocols for the purpose of building networks of collaborating applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries. Semantic Web services present the augmentation of Web service descriptions through Semantic Web annotations (e.g., references to ontologies), to facilitate higher automation of service discovery, composition, invocation, and monitoring on the Web. Today, there is a need for effective mechanisms for modeling Web services where as creation of these mechanisms for Semantic Web services (SWS) modeling is especially challenging, as SWS are relatively new technology. In this paper, we propose a modeling approach that enables one to model Semantic Web services from the perspective of the underlying business logic regulating how Web services are used regardless of the context where they are used. This is done by modeling Semantic Web services in terms of message-exchange patters, where each service is described by a (set of) rule(s) regulating how Web services’ messages are exchanged. We show how our approach can be used with the recent W3C recommendation SAWSDL (Semantic Annotations for WSDL and XML Schema)