The ICENI Semantic Service Adaptation Framework

With the advent of web services standards and a service-oriented Grid architecture, it is foreseeable that competing as well as complimenting computational services will proliferate. Current efforts in standardising service interface focuses on how one can execute these services in terms of their syntactic descriptions. Their capabilities and relations with other service types are only articulated through natural language in the form of documentation. In this paper, we present the ICENI semantic service adaptation framework. We seek to capture the capability of services by annotating their programmatic interface using the Web Ontology Language (OWL)[2] in relation to some domain concepts thereby allowing services to be semantically matched based on their ontological annotation. By inferences on this metadata, syntactically different but semantically equivalent service implementations may be autonomously adapted and substituted. Combining it with familiar high-level programming language, we demonstrate a practical service-oriented programming model.