Ontology Support for Managing Top-Down Changes in Composite Services

We present a foundational framework to manage changes in composite services. The framework takes as input a change specification and reacts to the change in an automatic and efficient manner. We propose a service ontology that provides systematic support for the change management process. We also propose a set of algorithms that enable us to efficiently query the proposed service ontology. With the ontology support, desired service functionalities can be accurately, efficiently retrieved and composed to react to changes. We use a Service-Oriented Enterprise (SOE) as an application of composite services to motivate and illustrate the proposed solution. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms with a set of experiments.