Design, development and implementation of a tool for construction of declarative functional descriptions of semantic web services based on WSMO methodology

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive software tool for creating and maintaining Semantic Web Services based on the WSMO framework, featuring a user-friendly graphical interface and ontology-driven logical expression construction.

Contribution

It introduces a novel full-life-cycle toolset for WSMO-based SWS, including a graphical editor and mechanisms ensuring semantic consistency, tailored for non-expert users.

Findings

Developed a Java-based tool with graphical editing capabilities.

Ensured semantic consistency of logical expressions.

Facilitated ontology-driven construction of service capabilities.

Abstract

Semantic web services (SWS) are self-contained, self-describing, semantically marked-up software resources that can be published, discovered, composed and executed across the Web in a semi-automatic way. They are a key component of the future Semantic Web, in which networked computer programs become providers and users of information at the same time. This work focuses on developing a full-life-cycle software toolset for creating and maintaining Semantic Web Services (SWSs) based on the Web Service Modelling Ontology (WSMO) framework. A main part of WSMO-based SWS is service capability - a declarative description of Web service functionality. A formal syntax and semantics for such a description is provided by Web Service Modeling Language (WSML), which is based on different logical formalisms, namely, Description Logics, First-Order Logic and Logic Programming. A WSML description of a Web service capability is represented as a set of complex logical expressions (axioms). We develop a specialized user-friendly tool for constructing and editing WSMO-based SWS capabilities. Since the users of this tool are not specialists in first-order logic, a graphical way for constricting and editing axioms is proposed. The designed process for constructing logical expressions is ontology-driven, which abstracts away as much as possible from any concrete syntax of logical language. We propose several mechanisms to guarantees the semantic consistency of the produced logical expressions. The tool is implemented in Java using Eclipse for IDE and GEF (Graphical Editing Framework) for visualization.