Generating semantic descriptions of web and grid services

Abstract

Web Service Resource Framework (WSRF) is a recent effort of the grid community to facilitate modeling of the stateful services [11]. Design and development of the WSRF service based systems is quite common and there are several emerging WS initiatives, which tries to automate the process of discovery, composition and invocation of such services. The semantic web services are a typical example, showing the potential of how ontological modeling can improve the shortcomings of the service oriented computing. One of the major obstacles in the process is the development of the ontologies, which describe web and grid services. Although, there are numerous standards for modeling semantic services, there are very few frameworks and tools, which can help automate the process of generating the semantic descriptions of services. This article presents a tool, which can semi-automatically generate the OWL-S descriptions for both stateful and stateless services based on the Web Service Description Language (WSDL) and corresponding annotations. Such functionality is inevitable in the grid environment hosting a vast number of services, which have to be semantically described in order to enable automated discovery, composition and invocation.