An Ontology and Indexation based Management of Services and Workflows Application to Geological Modeling

Management of IT services in general and Web Services (WS) in particular currently relies on syntactic descriptions of service interfaces using languages such as WSDL (Web Service Description Language), BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) or XPDL (XML Process Definition Language). As a consequence, complex management tasks such as WS discovery, interoperability or adaptability can not be performed with the level of precision expected by users. As a solution, ontologies have been used in several approaches to provide a semantic description of WS. However, most of these approaches do not distinguish syntactic descriptions of WS, useful for their storage and execution, from their semantic description, useful for their discovery and composition. Moreover, these approaches do not provide a hierarchical classification of WS according to the semantic functions they perform. To solve these problems, we propose a semantic description of WS based on the definition of ontologies of services and semantic indexations. This approach consists in enriching WS with an abstraction level that will leverage the management capabilities of WS without overloading their descriptions on the one hand and provide a hierarchical relationship between the semantic descriptions of the services on the other hand. Our proposition relies on an ontology based database for the representation and persistence of WS and their semantic characterizations represented by the created ontologies of services. To validate our approach we show its application to the geological modeling field and the specific tools we have developed.