Enabling Semantic Mapping in Web Services Modeling Framework

Abstract

Web services and service-oriented architectures share a common goal of making software components and business applications available via standardized interfaces, within or across enterprise boundaries. Web services aim to employ the Web as a global infrastructure for distributed computation, for integrating various applications, and for the automation of business processes. The Web will be not only the place where human- readable information is published, but also the place where global computing is realized . The Semantic Web is a vision of a new architecture for the World Wide Web, characterized by the association of machine-accessible formal semantics with traditional Web content. Web Services and the Semantic Web are transforming the World-Wide Web from a large collection of information into an intelligent distributed computational device. The Semantic Web allows the representation and exchange of information in a meaningful way. Adding machine-processable semantics to web services bring Services Oriented Architectures to their full potential as critical subtasks can be automated by integrating web services with Semantics. This paradigm shift in the intended purpose of the Web, calls for transforming the Web from being people-centric to software applications-centric. It leaves humans to focus on problem only. The emerging concept of Semantic Web Services (SWS) develops techniques for the automated discovery, composition, and execution of Web services. The technology of Semantic Web Services envisions the easy access to various systems, seamless integration of heterogeneous entities, ad-hoc cooperation between various business communities and dynamic collaborations on the Web. The Semantically Enabled Service- Oriented Architectures (SESA) aims at automated support for the complete life-cycle and production cycle of Service-Oriented Architectures. For this, the SWS approach is extended with additional, semantically described elements: goals as formally described client objectives, and mediators for handling potentially occurring heterogeneities. The Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO) is a comprehensive framework for SESA that defines a conceptual model along with a specification language, and provides a reference implementation with additional tool support. WSMO considers four main elements; these are ontology, goal, web service, mediators. Web Service Modeling Execution (WSMX) acts as middleware between the client and endpoint Web Services. Semantic Execution Environment creates an environment capable of managing all the aspects related to semantically enhanced Web services, to enable their discovery, selection, mediation and execution. In this thesis the intent is to work on web service toolkit, which provides various tool supports for WSMO. Ontologies are viewed in graphical form. Both services and goals are conceptualized as ontologies. Queries are made to the ontologies by WSML reasoner. Mappings are done with both inbuilt and imported ontologies and mapping results are taken. Goals and web services are added and discovered through WSMX.