Dynamic Adaptation, Composition and Orchestration of Web Services in Virtual Environments

To solve interaction and discovery problems, Web services need to be unambiguously described. Existing technologies, such as WSDL describe the functional aspects of Web services, network service end points and interfaces. The semantic aspects are more difficult to handle, as different organizations operate in different ways, and may use different information models and domain specific vocabularies. This paper explores how ontologies can be used to orchestrate dynamic Web service compositions. A shared ontology is developed that exchanges data and meaning. By adding "smarts" to the service description and not including within the applications’ processing of the data, the descriptions are able to move freely between domains. Examples from a bookshop service are used indicate that the proposed method’s is well suited to virtual environments.