A formal language for describing ontologies, goals, Web services and mediators.
Published in Chapter:
On Modelling Non-Functional Properties of Semantic Web Services
Ioan Toma (University of Innsbruck, Austria), Flavio De Paoli (Universita degli studi di Milano – Bicocca, Italy), and Dieter Fensel (University of Innsbruck, Austria)
Copyright: © 2012
|Pages: 25
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61350-432-1.ch004
Abstract
Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) are a widespread solution for realizing distributed applications. Empowered by semantic technologies these architectures will evolve in what is known as Semantically Enabled Service Oriented Architectures (SESAs) providing automatic support for various service related tasks such as discovery, ranking, composition, etc. Services are the core building blocks of both SOA- and SESA- based systems and therefore modelling various aspects of services becomes a fundamental challenge to any enterprise building SOA solutions. Among these aspects, non-functional properties of a service need to be addressed given the high dynamism of any SOA-based system. Non-functional properties descriptions are highly relevant for many of the service related tasks such as discovery, ranking, selection, and negotiation. This chapter investigates several research problems which arise in the area of Semantic Web services, namely how to describe non-functional properties of services, what models are required, and what is the proper language support for describing Non-functional Properties. Our solution was developed, and is part of the Web Service Modelling Ontology, one of the major initiatives in Semantic Web services area. We present a comprehensive set of ontological models for non-functional properties, our approach to attach non-functional properties descriptions to services, and the language support needed to formalize non-functional properties descriptions.