Visualizing and simulating semantic web services ontologies

Abstract

The development of Web Services has transformed the World Wide Web into a more application-aware information portal. The various standards ensure that Web Services are interpretable and extensible, opening up possibilities for simple services to be combined to build complex ones. The Semantic Web presents a new mechanism for users and software agents to discover, describe, invoke, compose and monitor Web services. For these purposes the Semantic Web Services (OWL-S) ontologies have been developed to provide vocabularies to describe Web Services in a precise and machine-understandable way. It is necessary to ensure the ontological descriptions of the services capture the intended meaning as erroneous description may cause invocation of wrong services, with wrong parameters, resulting in undesired outcome. In this paper, we propose to apply software engineering method and tools to visualize, simulate and verify OWL-S process models. Namely, Live Sequence Charts (LSCs) is used to model services, capturing the inner workings of services, and its tool support Play-Engine is used to perform automated visualization, simulation and checking. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.