ECAI 2004 Conference Paper

[full paper]

Configuration of web-services as parametric design

Annette ten Teije, Frank van Harmelen, Bob Wielinga

The configuration of web-services is particularly hard given the noisy, unreliable and open nature of the Web. Furthermore, such composite Web services are likely to be complex services, that will require adapation for each specific use. Current approaches to web-service configuration are almost exclusively based on pre/post-condition-style reasoning, resulting in a planning-style approach to service configuration, configuring a composite web service ``from scratch'' every time. In this paper, we propose instead a knowledge intensive brokering approach to the creation of composite web-services. In our approach, we (i) identify a specific vocabulary of web service categories to be used in a specific service configuration task; (ii) we use fixed process model to combine these service categories; this fixed process model can be re-used between multiple configurations of similar composite services; (iii) we exploit detailed knowledge about how to configure such service categories to obtain the required composite web service. We illustrate our proposal by applying it to a specific family of web-services, namely ``classification services'', and we describe a specific implementation and execution of our approach.

Keywords: Web Services, Semantic Web, Design, Configuration, Reuse of Knowledge, Knowledge-Based Systems

Citation: Annette ten Teije, Frank van Harmelen, Bob Wielinga: Configuration of web-services as parametric design. In R.López de Mántaras and L.Saitta (eds.): ECAI2004, Proceedings of the 16th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2004, pp.1097-1098.