Model-Driven Semantic Web Services

Abstract

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 semantically-rich description languages such as OWL-S can be steep, especially given the current state of tool support for the language. This chapter 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 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 chapter describes both tools and demonstrates how the use of lightweight interactive tools facilitates creation of OWL-S specifications.