MATCHING SEMANTICALLY DESCRIBED WEB SERVICES USING ONTOLOGIES

Abstract

The theme for this article is Semantic Web Services. The motivation is the propagation of web services and the demand for dynamically exchanging web services in business processes (BPs). To achieve such dynamic exchange, it is necessary to be able to easily find web services that match a given set of requirements. Such requirements are best described with semantics, so it is necessary to develop a semantic UDDI repository (from now on denoted Sem-UDDI) for publishing of and searching for semantically described web services. Sem-UDDI is UDDI V2 compliant and uses a common interface based on UDDI categoryBags for publishing both OWL-S and WSDL-S described web services, and has a similar interface for searching. In order to sort the returned web services with respect to the search requirements, Sem-UDDI uses match score calculation rules based on commonalities between object properties in an OWL ontology concept hierarchy. Sem-UDDI is implemented as a layer to be put on top of a conventional UDDI repository, which gives companies the possibility of getting semantic functionality, while conti-nuing to use their existing UDDI repository.