Chinese Journal of Computers   Full Text
Title	Reasoning About Semantic Web Services with an Approach Based on Dynamic Description Logics
Authors	SHI Zhong-Zhi CHANG Liang
Address	(Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190)
Year	2008
Issue	No.9(1599—1611)
Abstract &   Background	Abstract The semantic Web services vision is to enable effective automation of various Web service related activities, such as Web service discovery, composition and execution. An obvious concern about the semantic Web service is to combine in some way the static descriptions of the information provided by ontologies with the dynamic descriptions of Web services‘ capabilities. Based on the dynamic description logic DDL(SHOIN(D)), this paper presents an approach to model and reason about semantic Web services. With this approach, the OWL-S ProcessModel of Web services will be firstly translated into an action theory which is based on the DDL(SHOIN(D)). This action theory allows for modeling atomic processes with their inputs, outputs, local variables, preconditions and results. It also offers considerable expressive power for modeling not only data flows of composite processes but also control flows such as the Sequence, Choice, Any-Order, If-Then-Else, Iterate, Repeat-While and Repeat-Until. Based on the action theory, the realizability, executability, projection and planning problems on semantic Web services can be reasoned about. These mechanisms provide effective supports for the discovery and composition of semantic Web services. Keywords semantic Web service; OWL-S; dynamic description logic; reasoning about Web services; discovery and composition of services Background In order to represent and process the knowledge about semantic Web services, an obvious concern is to combine in some way the static description of the information provided by ontologies with the dynamic description of computations provided by Web services. In the authors' previous work, by embracing actions into description logics, a family of dynamic description logics named DDL(X) was proposed, where X represents description logics ranging from the ALC to the SHOIQ(D). The DDL(X) offers considerable expressive power for representing knowledge about dynamic application domains; it also provides effective mechanisms and algorithms for related reasoning tasks. Based on the dynamic description logic DDL(SHOIQ(D)), this paper presents a framework for modeling and reasoning about semantic Web services.With this framework, the OWL-S description of Web services will be firstly translated into an action theory which is based on the DDL(SHOIQ(D)); then the realizability, executability, projection and planning problems on semantic Web services can be defined and reasoned about. These mechanisms provide effective support for the discovery and composition of semantic Web services. This research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant No.60775035, with the title "Logical Foundation for the Semantic Web Service". It was also partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China unde grant No.90604017, the National High-Tech Research and Development Plan of China under grant No.2007AA01Z132, and the National Basic Research Program of China under grant No.2007CB311004.