Accessing and Manipulating Ontologies Using Web Services

Ontologies and Semantic Web Services are the two core technologies of the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web hinges on the ability of computer programs to perform some task involving the autonomous resolution of semantic issues. This ability requires providing standard access for software to ontologies. Moreover, for the Semantic Web to gain widespread acceptance, it needs to reach a critical mass of applications that can interact. This last point requires providing standard access to functionalities for manipulating ontologies. Therefore, it is relevant to bring ontologies and Web Services together by providing access to ontologies through Semantic Web Services. We analyse different kinds of ontology-manipulation functionalities that could be implemented as ontology Web Services (OWS). We then propose an architecture allowing programs to insert calls to ontology Web Services into the more general framework of Web Services. We show that this architecture is a necessary complement to OWL-S for Semantic Web applications to perform dynamic discovery and invocation of Web Services, thus addressing a key requirement of the Semantic Web. We then demonstrate the scalability of our architecture as it allows the composition of (ontology) Web Services for performing complex tasks. 1 Web Service Access to Ontologies Ontologies and Semantic Web Services are arguably the two core technologies of the Semantic Web. Ontologies provide the backbone of the Semantic Web, defining the semantics of the data and Web resources. Web Services enable programs to call functions provided by a remote server. The structure of the parameters and of the result of the function are represented in an explicit way so that the service can be invoked by any client. Web Services, albeit not yet Semantic Web Services, have become important components of business applications. Currently however, most examples of Web Services (and in fact Semantic Web Services) operate on data that conforms to some schema or ontology. At the same time, ontologies themselves are first-class objects on the Semantic Web. Therefore, we believe that any infrastructure for Semantic Web Services will be incomplete without components to access and manipulate ontologies themselves through Web Services. Such access and manipulation include query of ontology