Semantic Web Service Composition

Flexible and dynamic interoperation of autonomous information systems often requires automated or semiautomated combination of several highly distributed and heterogeneous web services. Web service composition aims to accelerate rapid application development and service reuse as well as to provide access to a variety of complex services. There are several approaches developed for the web service composition. This paper describes the overall process of designing composite services and the semantic web service composition approach. The goal of semantic web service composition is to provide machine-readable descriptions of web services which will be used for automated discovery, composition, enactment and monitoring of these services. OWL-S (former DAML-S) is an ontology language for describing web services in terms of their inputs, outputs, preconditions, effects and their process model[HuS05]. OWL-S is still under development. First version of DAML-S was released in May 2001 and the latest version of OWL-S was pre-released in March 2006. Practical applicability of OWL-S was investigated by several research groups. Even though some problematic aspects of OWL-S were pointed out during applicability studies, OWL-S demonstrates its potential concerning the integration of proprietary data on the basis of ontologies.