Semantic web services composition

Abstract

Web services are becoming the most predominant paradigm for distributed computing and electronic business. They are self-contained Internet accessible applications that are capable not only of performing business activities on their own, but they also possess the ability to engage with other Web services in order to build new value-added services. Both academic and industrial bodies have been investigating issues regarding service descriptions, discovery and invocation, but automated service composition was somewhat neglected. The latter involves automated methods for constructing a sequence of Web services to achieve a desired goal. In this work we present initial research that focuses on the issue of automated service composition in conjunction with the Semantic Web. In this report we propose a composition engine that will automatically handle the integration of Web services through the use of a Web service description language such as DAML-S, the planning of workflow definitions, scheduling of tasks, status monitoring of the execution process, handling of faults and communication with other entities such as user agents, service registries and other composition engines.