The Semantic Web should enable greater access not only to content but also to services on the Web. Users and software agents should be able to discover, invoke, compose, and monitor Web resources offering particular services and having particular properties. As part of the DARPA Agent Markup Language program, we have begun to develop an ontology of services, called DAML-S, that will make these functionalities possible. In this paper we describe the overall structure of the ontology, the service profile for advertising services, and the process model for the detailed description of the operation of services. We also compare DAML-S with several industry efforts to define standards for characterizing services on the Web.

/pdf/daml-s-semantic-markup-for-web-services-2bz2kpfwet.pdf

DAML-S: semantic markup for web services

The Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) is an upper level ontology that has been proposed as a starter document for The Standard Upper Ontology Working Group, an IEEE-sanctioned working group of collaborators from the fields of engineering, philosophy, and information science. The SUMO provides definitions for general-purpose terms and acts as a foundation for more specific domain ontologies. In this paper we outline the strategy used to create the current version of the SUMO, discuss some of the challenges that we faced in constructing the ontology, and describe in detail its most general concepts and the relations between them.

Towards a standard upper ontology

In this paper we present DAML-S, a DAML+OIL ontology for describing the properties and capabilities of Web Services. Web Services - Web-accessible programs and devices - are garnering a great deal of interest from industry, and standards are emerging for low-level descriptions of Web Services. DAML-S complements this effort by providing Web Service descriptions at the application layer, describing what a service can do, and not just how it does it. In this paper we describe three aspects of our ontology: the service profile, the process model, and the service grounding. The paper focuses on the grounding, which connects our ontology with low-level XML-based descriptions of Web Services.

/pdf/daml-s-web-service-description-for-the-semantic-web-5b6ckz32xg.pdf

DAML-S: Web Service Description for the Semantic Web

Web services -- Web-accessible programs and devices - are a key application area for the Semantic Web. With the proliferation of Web services and the evolution towards the Semantic Web comes the opportunity to automate various Web services tasks. Our objective is to enable markup and automated reasoning technology to describe, simulate, compose, test, and verify compositions of Web services. We take as our starting point the DAML-S DAML+OIL ontology for describing the capabilities of Web services. We define the semantics for a relevant subset of DAML-S in terms of a first-order logical language. With the semantics in hand, we encode our service descriptions in a Petri Net formalism and provide decision procedures for Web service simulation, verification and composition. We also provide an analysis of the complexity of these tasks under different restrictions to the DAML-S composite services we can describe. Finally, we present an implementation of our analysis techniques. This implementation takes as input a DAML-S description of a Web service, automatically generates a Petri Net and performs the desired analysis. Such a tool has broad applicability both as a back end to existing manual Web service composition tools, and as a stand-alone tool for Web service developers.

/pdf/simulation-verification-and-automated-composition-of-web-1actugf451.pdf

Simulation, verification and automated composition of web services

http://www.wsmo.org/papers/publications/wsmf.paper.pdf

The Web Service Modeling Framework WSMF

This document describes Version 1.0 of the Process Specification Language (PSL). PSL is an interchange format designed to help exchange process information automatically among a wide variety of manufacturing applications such as process modeling, process planning, scheduling, simulation, workflow, project management, and business process re-engineering tools. These tools would interoperate by translating between their native format and PSL. Then, any system would be able to automatically exchange process information with any other system via PSL.

/pdf/the-process-specification-language-psl-overview-and-version-rixvf1an8b.pdf

Florence Tissot

Papers

The Process Specification Language (PSL) Overview and Version 1.0 Specification