Automatically grounding semantically-enriched conceptual models to concrete Web services

Abstract

The paper provides a conceptual framework for designing and executing business processes using semantic Web services. We envision a world in which a designer defines a "virtual" Web service as part of a business process, while requiring the system to seek actual Web services that match the specifications of the designer and can be invoked whenever the virtual Web service is activated. Taking a conceptual modeling approach, the relationships between ontology concepts and syntactic Web services are identified. We then propose a generic algorithm for ranking top-K Web services in a decreasing order of their benefit vis-á-vis the semantic Web service. We conclude with an extention of the framework to handle uncertainty as a result of concept mismatch and the desired properties of a schema matching algorithm to support Web service identification. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.