A rule-based approach for reasoning about collaboration between smart web services

Abstract

We present a vision of smart, goal-oriented web services that reason about other services' policies and evaluate the possibility of future interactions. We assume web services whose behavioural interface is specified in terms of reactive rules. Such rules can be made public, in order for other web services to answer the following question: "is it possible to inter-operate with a given web service and achieve a given goal?". In this article we focus on the underlying reasoning process, and we propose a declarative and operational abductive logic programmingbased framework, called WAVe. We show how this framework can be used for a-priori verification of web services interaction. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.