Semantic Indexation of Web Services for Collaborative Expert Activities

In many research domains, scientists have to cope with large amounts of data issued from multiple sources, looking for regular patterns in raw data that may suggest models. The extraction of knowledge from data in general is widely used in fields such as biology, economics, etc. For this, they develop models in their respective area of research. The efficiency of the experts depend on their ability to cooperate: they share data and models. Indeed, each domain is both consumer of treatments provided by another team, and provider for the benefit of other areas. Each team of experts have to make available and publish business processes for the benefit of other teams, that allows them to have the most up to date treatments. In this work, we propose a work environment based on semantic web services indexation whose benefits will offer (1) a platform to publish and reuse treatments, accessible through the Internet, (2) services composition to chain treatments and assisted and/or automated selection of useful services. For this, we define two kinds of services: knowledge services, that provide business processes and data services that are wrappers that provide the relevant data from heterogeneous data sources. They will be accompanied with an existing OWL ontology, used by the experts of the considered domain. As a result, experts will be able to operate and cooperate through heterogeneous application environments and all around the world. An example on modeling farm durability indicators will be presented.