A Bottom-Up Approach to Automating Web Service Discovery, Customization, and Semantic Translation

The ultimate goal for the Web services effort is seamless interoperation among networked devices and programs through the development of distributed computing infrastructure and Web standards. Industry has been fast off the mark with the development of computing infrastructure such as .NET and J2EE, Web service protocols such as SOAP, and a communication-level description language in WSDL. Likewise, orchestration and process modeling languages such as XLANG, WSFL, and most recently BPEL4WS, have been developed to represent Web service interactions through process models. Unfortunately, we are still a long way from seamless interoperation. Researchers in the Semantic Web community have taken up this challenge proposing top-down approaches to achieve aspects of Web Service interoperation based on techniques from artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, many of these efforts have been disconnected from emerging industry standards, particularly in process modeling. In this paper we take a bottom-up approach to integrating Semantic Web technology into Web services. Building on BPEL4WS, we present integrated Semantic Web technology for automating customized, dynamic discovery of Web services together with interoperation through semantic translation. We discuss the value of semantically enriched service interoperation and demonstrate its use in a practically motivated example. Finally, we provide an analysis of the forward-looking limitations of frameworks like BPEL4WS, and suggest that Web service interoperation specifications embrace semantic technology at a fundamental level to work towards fully automated Web service interoperation.