Reasoning about the Behavior of Semantic Web Services with Concurrent Transaction Logic

The recent upsurge in the interest in Semantic Web services and the high-profile projects such as the WSMO, OWLS, and SWSL, have drawn attention to the importance of logic-based modeling of the behavior of Web services. In the context of Semantic Web services, the logic-based approach has many applications, including service discovery, service choreography, enactment, and contracting for services. In this paper we propose logic-based methods for reasoning about service behavior, including the aforementioned choreography, contracting, and enactment. The formalism underlying our framework is Concurrent Transaction Logic—a logic for declarative specification, analysis, and execution of database transactions. The new results include reasoning about service behavior under more general sets of constraints and extension of the framework towards conditional control and data flow—two crucial aspect that were missing in previous logical formalizations.