Semantic Annotation for Web Service Processes in Pervasive Computing

In this chapter, we propose a new approach to the discovery, the selection, and the automated composition of distributed processes, in a pervasive computing environment, described as semantic web services through a new semantic annotation. In our approach, we map a process in a pervasive computing environment into a State Transition System and we semantically annotate it with a minimal set of ontological descriptions. This novel approach allows us to separate reasoning about processes and reasoning about ontologies. As a consequence, we can perform a limited, but efficient and still useful semantic reasoning for verifying, discovering, selecting, and composing web services, at the process level. The key idea is to keep separate the procedural and the ontological descriptions, and to link them through semantic annotations. We define the formal framework, and propose a technique that can exploit simple reasoning mechanisms at the ontological level, integrated with effective reasoning mechanisms devised for procedural descriptions of web services.