Detecting Ontological Conflicts in Protocols between Semantic Web Services

TL;DR

This paper addresses the challenge of detecting ontological conflicts in web service protocols by proposing verification methods that consider independent ontologies and database states, enhancing semantic compatibility checks.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach for verifying potential semantic conflicts in web services using ontologies and relational algebra-based decision procedures.

Findings

Developed a relational algebra-based decision procedure.

Identified the importance of database states in conflict detection.

Enhanced verification of semantic compatibility in web services.

Abstract

The task of verifying the compatibility between interacting web services has traditionally been limited to checking the compatibility of the interaction protocol in terms of message sequences and the type of data being exchanged. Since web services are developed largely in an uncoordinated way, different services often use independently developed ontologies for the same domain instead of adhering to a single ontology as standard. In this work we investigate the approaches that can be taken by the server to verify the possibility to reach a state with semantically inconsistent results during the execution of a protocol with a client, if the client ontology is published. Often database is used to store the actual data along with the ontologies instead of storing the actual data as a part of the ontology description. It is important to observe that at the current state of the database the semantic conflict state may not be reached even if the verification done by the server indicates the possibility of reaching a conflict state. A relational algebra based decision procedure is also developed to incorporate the current state of the client and the server databases in the overall verification procedure.