Matching semantic service descriptions with local closed-world reasoning

Abstract

Semantic Web Services were developed with the goal of automating the integration of business processes on the Web. The main idea is to express the functionality of the services explicitly, using semantic annotations. Such annotations can, for example, be used for service discovery - the task of locating a service capable of fulfilling a business request. In this paper, we present a framework for annotating Web Services using description logics (DLs), a family of knowledge representation formalisms widely used in the Semantic Web. We show how to realise service discovery by matching semantic service descriptions, applying DL inferencing. Building on our previous work, we identify problems that occur in the matchmaking process due to the open-world assumption when handling incomplete service descriptions. We propose to use autoepistemic extensions to DLs (ADLs) to overcome these problems. ADLs allow for non-monotonic reasoning and for querying DL knowledge bases under local closed-world assumption. We investigate the use of epistemic operators of ADLs in service descriptions, and show how they affect DL inferences in the context of semantic matchmaking. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.