Visual modeling of OWL-S services

Abstract

The Semantic Web is slowly gathering interest and becoming a reality. More people are becoming aware of this and are trying to embed Semantic Web technologies into their applications. This involves the use of tools that can handle rapid ontology building and validation in an easy and transparent manner. In the area of Semantic Web Web Services (SWWS) an OWL-S specification defines a set of ontologies through which a semantic description of the service can be created. At times this is not an easy task and could result in an incorrect specification of the description or even lead the fainthearted user to resort to some other type of description language. This paper describes the OWL-S editor tool that provides two methodologies in which such a web services description can be developed without exposing the developer to the underlying OWL-S syntax. These methodologies are based on a mapping from WSDL to OWL-S and on modeling a composite service using standard UML Activity Diagrams.