Meta web service: building web-based open decision support system based on web services

Web services are currently one of the trends in network-based business services, which intuitively will be applied to build a semantic web-based decision support system (DSS). Since web services are self-contained, modular business process applications, based on open standards, enable integration models for facilitating program-to-program interactions. Decision modules in a semantic web-based DSS can be viewed as a web service. However, according to the current features, web services know only about themselves, they are neither autonomous, nor are they designed to use ontologies; they are passive until invoked, and they do not provide for composing functionalities. These lead to the motivation on building a sophisticated web service to contain these features and to utilize web services on behalf of the user. This paper aims to propose a new concept of Meta Web Service, a web service-based DSS. The meta web service understands the user's problem statement with ontology, performs web service discovery, web service composition, and automatically generates codes for composite web service execution. Case-based reasoning is applied to quickly find past histories of successful service compositions. A prototype of research web service has been developed to show the feasibility of the proposed idea.