Web services composition based on ontology and workflow

Abstract

An approach to compose Web services with ontologies and workflow is presented in this paper, it is illustrated by a travel plan application scenario. Domain-specific ontologies are used to guide and facilitate the interaction among a set of Web services in terms of service utilization scopes with verifiable consistency properties. Through supporting semantic consistency for Web services refinement and reuse, the current technologies are complemented for Web services description, discovery, and composition. Aggregation, specialization, and instantiation are three main operations to support the composition of Web services in the approach. Through the approach, the mechanisms to select Web services according to their utilization scopes are provided, automated means to check if compositions of Web services are semantically correct with respect to these scopes are enabled. The process control logic directed by domain-specific ontologies is combined to our system at both the data level and workflow activity level.1 © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.