Surfing the service web

Abstract

The way that web services are currently being developed places them beside rather than within the existing World Wide Web. In this paper we present an approach that combines the strength of the World Wide Web, viz. interlinked HTML pages for presentation and human consumption, with the strength of semantic web services, viz. support for semi-automatic composition and invocation of web services that have semantically heterogeneous descriptions. The objective we aim at eventually is that a human user can seamlessly surf the existing World Wide Web and the emerging web services and that he can easily compose and invoke Web services on the fly without being a software engineer. This paper presents our framework, OntoMat-Service, which trades off between having a reasonably easy to use interface for web services and the complexity of web service workflows. It is not our objective that everybody can produce arbitrarily complex workflows of web services with our tool, the OntoMat-Service-Surfer. However, OntoMat-Service aims at a service web, where simple service flows are easily possible - even for the persons with not much technical background, while still allowing for difficult flows for the expert engineer. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.