A Description Logic Based Method For Semantic Web Service Composition

Web service is one category of resources that are of great importance in Internet. So it is of great importance that the integration of large numbers of web services can be carried out efficiently. Web service composition is one of the issues that are keys to the integration of web services. Most of the research on web service composition methods has focused on the behaviours of web services, while the users of Internet tend to focus on the functions of web services, causing a semantic gap between the understandings of user and the solutions presented by the researchers.Coming in with the development of semantic web technologies, standards for semantic web service description are taking their shapes. Researchers shift the focus to the challenge of function-oriented methods of semantic web service composition. In this thesis, a description of current methods for semantic web service composition and an analysis of the difficulties confronted by those methods are presented, preceding a thorough discussion on the description logic based method for semantic web service composition. Taking accounts of the compatibility between semantic web service description and the semantic web architecture and the limitation of automated reasoning in formal systems, the method relies on semantic web marked up language DAML+OIL and the DAML-S descriptions of semantic web services as starting points, resorts to description logics as a theoretic tool to formalize the semantic description of web services. Description logic reasoners are also utilized to support the reasoning process of semantic web service composition.There is inherent compatibility between the method proposed in the thesis and the semantic web architecture as well as the IO characteristics of web services. The method proposed effectively reduces the semantic gap between the understandings of user and itself, and provides strong supports for a automated and intelligent integration of web services.