Facilitating the Specification of Semantic Web Services Using Model-Driven Development

• Published in: International journal of web services research Vol. 3; no. 3; pp. 61 - 81
• Main Authors: Gannod, Gerald C, Timm, John T.E, Brodie, Raynette J
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Hershey IGI Global 01.07.2006
• Subjects: Analysis; Automation; Document markup languages; Internet service providers; Learning curves; Mathematical models; Programming languages; Semantic networks; Semantic web; Semantics; Software; Specification and description languages; Specifications; Web services; World Wide Web
• ISSN: 1545-7362; 1546-5004
• DOI: 10.4018/jwsr.2006070103

The Semantic Web promises automated invocation, discovery, and composition of Web services by enhancing services with semantic descriptions. An upper ontology for Web services called OWL-S has been created to provide a mechanism for describing service semantics in a standard, well-defined manner. Unfortunately, the learning curve for semantic-rich description languages such as OWL-S can be steep, especially given the current state of tool support for the language. This paper describes a suite of automated software tools that we have developed to facilitate the construction of OWL-S specifications. The tools operate in two stages. In the first stage, a model-driven architecture technique is used to generate an OWL-S description of a Web service from a Unified Modeling Language (UML) model. This allows the developer to focus on creating a model of the Web service in a standard UML tool, leveraging existing knowledge. In the second stage, an interactive approach for generating groundings is used. This paper describes both tools and demonstrates how the use of lightweight interactive tools facilitates creation of OWL-S specifications.