| The concept of Web services as a means of dynamically discovering, negotiating, composing, executing and managing services to materialize enterprise-scale workflow is an active research topic; however, its realization has thus far been elusive. Existing approaches involve many disparate concepts, frameworks and technologies that typically address isolated aspects of the functionality necessary to support the enterprise as a whole. What is needed is a comprehensive and overarching framework that handles the processing and workflow requirements of Virtual Organizations, maps them to a collection of service-oriented tasks, dynamically configures these tasks from available services, and manages the choreography and execution of these services. The goal is to specify, and add semantics to, Web services to endow them with capabilities currently lacking in the literature, but necessary for their successful deployment in future systems.; This thesis introduces such a framework, called the Knowledge-based Dynamic Semantic Web Services (KDSWS) Framework, that addresses in an integrated end-to-end manner, the life-cycle of activities involved in preparing, publishing, requesting, discovering, selecting, configuring, deploying, and delivering Semantic Web Services. In particular, the following issues are addressed: (1) semantic specification of services capabilities including quality of service, trust, and security; (2) transaction control and workflow management; and (3) resource management, interoperation and evolution of the Virtual Organization.; The KDSWS Framework consists of three major viewpoints: KDSWS Processes, KDSWS Specifications, and KDSWS Functional Architecture. The KDSWS Processes establishes tasks as well-delineated steps to deliver functionality via Web services and threads as global layers of functionality to address specialized issues within the enterprise. KDSWS Specifications focus on two models and their associated languages are introduced to specify the features for these enhanced services: (1) the KDSWS Meta-Model, and (2) the KDSWS Process Model. Both of which are based on the Knowledge/Data Model. The concepts in the KDSWS Functional Architecture represent the implementation components necessary to support the Framework. A central component of the KDSWS Functional Architecture is the KDSWS Functional Agent Services Architecture to organize agents into specialized responsibilities.; This integrated and comprehensive approach provides a unified end-to-end approach to enable dynamically-composable, semantically-rich, service-oriented systems that use Semantic Web Services as the primary technology to enable Virtual Organizations to interoperate. The KDSWS Framework establishes a foundation that establishes a consistent base to quickly adapt to the constantly changing protocol base of Web services technologies via objects that specialize in mapping with internal and external components. |
