Research On Web Application Component Composition Based On Semantics

With the rapid development of Internet, more and more web applications begin to appear in various walks of life. These standalone web applications are scattered on the internet, implement specific business functions, and can be accessed easily through browser. When developing new web applications, if we reuse existing web applications to build target system, we will achieve application-level software reuse and improve the efficiency of software development. In the development process of target system, web applications to be reused will be encapsulated with unified standards, so that we can build new web applications by unified process. However, existing technologies don’t support composition and interaction of web applications.Component composition is a technology to compose the existing and reusable components into a larger granularity component or an application system according to specific rules. It is important in software reuse, and has been playing a significant role in the traditional software developments. However, existing technologies can hardly compose automatically web application components, which involve many online human interactions.To solve above problems, we put forward the concept of web application component and propose an OWL-S extension to support the semantic description of web application component and its composition. Web application can be encapsulated into web application component with unified standards, and web application component can be annotated by above semantic description mechanism so that web application component is semantic. Appropriate web application components, which meet the customer’s requirements, can be selected from numerous components according to the matching rules.To optimize the development process and promote the development efficiency of composite web applications, we propose an approach for web application component composition based on semantics. These appropriate web application components can be selected by above approach, and the mapping from OWL-S to BPMN2.0 is proposed to map the OWL-S into the BPMN2.0. The jBPM workflow engine can load the BPMN2.0 file and interpret it to run the composed web application component automatically. Finally, an experimental example of trip-planning is offered to validate the usability and effectiveness of the approach.