基于语义描述的Web服务工作流集成

Web服务是可以由其它软件在Internet上访问的一种软件接口。Web服务工作流则是一组按一定顺序执行的Web服务的集合。如何集成一个Web服务工作流，特别是如何运用对Web服务的语义描述来为一个工作流来自动寻找和匹配Web服务，这是目前所急需解决的问题。介绍如何用语义Web服务本体论来集成工作流，同时提出一个基于语义Web服务工作流集成的模型。     

Semantic web service composition testbed

A huge amount of web services are deployed on the Web, nowadays. These services can be used to fulfill online requests. Requests are getting more and more complicated over time. So, there exists a lot of frequent request that cannot be fulfilled using just one web service. For using web services, composing individual services to create the added-value composite web service to fulfill the user request is necessary in most cases. Web services can be composed manually but it is a too tedious and time consuming task. The ability of automatic web service composition to create a new composite web service is one of the key enabling features for the future for the semantic web. There are some successful methods for automatic web service composition, but the lack of standard, open, and lightweight test environment makes the comparison and evaluation of these composition methods impossible. In this paper we propose an architecture for a light weight and scalable testbed to execute, test and evaluate automatic web service composition algorithms. The architecture provides mandatory components for implementing and evaluation of automatic web service composition algorithms. Also, this architecture provides some extension mechanisms to extend its default functionalities. We have also given reference implementations for web service matchmaking and composition. Also, some scenarios for testing and evaluating the testbed are given. We have found that the performance of the composition method will dramatically decrease as the number of web services increases.     

Extensible soft semantic web services agent

Web services technology is critical for the success of business integration and other application fields such as bioinformatics. However, there are two challenges facing the practicality of Web services: (a) efficient location of the Web service registries that contain the requested Web services and (b) efficient retrieval of the requested services from these registries with high quality of service (QoS). The main reason for this problem is that current Web services technology is not semantic-oriented. Several proposals have been made to add semantics to Web services to facilitate discovery and composition of relevant Web services. Such proposals are being referred to as semantic Web services (SWS). However, most of these proposals do not address the second problem of retrieval of web services with high QoS. In this paper, we propose a framework called soft semantic Web services agent (soft SWS agent) for providing high QoS Semantic Web services using soft computing methodology. Since different application domains have different requirement for QoS, it is impractical to use classical mathematical modeling methods to evaluate the QoS of semantic Web services. We use fuzzy neural networks with Genetic Algorithms (GA) as our study case. Simulation results show that the soft computing methodology is practicable to handle fuzzy and uncertain QoS metrics effectively.     

Frame Logic-based specification and discovery of semantic web services with application to medical appointments

Matching web services and client requirements in the form of goals is a significant challenge in the discovery of semantic web services. The most common but unsatisfactory approach to matching is set-based, where both the client and web services declare what objects they require and what objects they can provide. Matching then becomes the simple task of comparing sets of objects. This approach is inadequate because it says nothing about the functionality required by the client or the functionality provided by the web service. As an alternative, we use the Frame Logic as implemented in Flora-2 to specify web service capabilities and client requirements, including their preconditions, postconditions, and ontologies, implement a logic-based discovery agent using Flora-2, demonstrate its usefulness in a medical appointment making scenario, and show its efficiency both theoretically and by benchmarking. The result is an expressive yet concise representation scheme for semantic web services, and a practical, efficient, powerful, and fully implemented matching engine based purely on logical inference for web service discovery, with direct applicability to Web Service Modeling Ontology and Web Service Modeling Language, because both are based on Frame Logic.     

Synthy: A system for end to end composition of web services

The demand for quickly delivering new applications is increasingly becoming a business imperative today. However, application development is often done in an ad hoc manner resulting in poor reuse of software assets and longer time-to-delivery. Web services have received much interest due to their potential in facilitating seamless business-to-business or enterprise application integration. A web service composition system can help automate the process, from specifying business process functionalities, to developing executable workflows that capture non-functional (e.g. Quality of Service (QoS)) requirements, to deploying them on a runtime infrastructure. Intuitively, web services can be viewed as software components and the process of web service composition similar to software synthesis. In addition, service composition needs to address the build-time and runtime issues of the integrated application, thereby making it a more challenging and practical problem than software synthesis. However, current solutions based on business web services (using WSDL, BPEL, SOAP, etc.) or semantic web services (using ontologies, goal-directed reasoning, etc.) are both piecemeal and insufficient. We formulate the web service composition problem and describe the first integrated system for composing web services end to end, i.e., from specification to deployment. The proposed solution is based on a novel two-staged composition approach that addresses the information modeling aspects of web services, provides support for contextual information while composing services, employs efficient decoupling of functional and non-functional requirements, and leads to improved scalability and failure handling. We also present Synthy, a prototype of the service composition system, and demonstrate its effectiveness with the help of an application scenario from the telecom domain.     

An experience report on developing an automated web services platform

Web services have attracted significant industry interest as a low-cost and flexible technology alternative to distributed object and proprietary message-oriented methods for delivery of on-demand business processes, enabling intra-organizational systems integration, and in the long term, development of dynamic inter-organizational process networks that may revolutionize B2C and B2B e-commerce. Exploiting this latent potential of web services technology requires the development of automated techniques for scalable and reliable service composition and execution in web service platforms. In this paper, we summarize our experience in developing an architectural framework for web services platforms, called Integrated Service Planning and Execution architecture (ISP & E). The use of recent advances in AI planning, learning and semantic web technologies for service composition, reliable service execution, transaction synthesis, and model-driven deployment of services is discussed. Furthermore, we discuss implications for and research issues in the development of web services based systems to aid e-business.     

基于时间Petri网的Web服务建模技术研究

Web服务是微软和IBM公司为能够解决当前的信息的整合而提出的,是一种部署在Web上、面向Intemet的、基于XML的对象/组件技术;其目标是能够自动和统一地封装服务信息、服务行为、数据表示以及商务流程.商务流程的建立对于Web服务是至关重要的,因为Web服务之间的信息协调是以商务流程为基础的.因此IBM为解决该问题,提出了Web服务流程语言（web services flow language,WSFL）.但是IBM提出的WSFL没有能够从并发协调的角度来阐述商务流程的建模方法,所以提出利用Petri网为模型描述工具,用于描述与分析商务流程模型,同时给出Petri网与WSFL之间的转换算法,并以实例证明了该模型用于商务流程的建模方法是切实可行的.