Toward automatic discovery and invocation of information-providing web services

Abstract

Semantic Web makes the automatic discovery and invocation of Web Services become possible. But existing methods perform the capability matching, which is crucial for service discovery, either only according to inputs and outputs (IO), which results in a not very precise matching, or trying to tackle arbitrary services, which results in an undecidable reasoning. In this paper, targeting merely the information-providing type of Web Services, we present a precise and decidable matching method based on the Description Logic reasoner. An outstanding property of our method is that it can determinate the accurate binding of IO between requested and advertised services, which is necessary for automatic invocation yet rarely addressed in previous work. Besides, this paper also describes a useful use case for automatic Web Services discovery and invocation. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.