A Multi-Level Framework for Validation of Ontology-Driven and Community-Based Web Services Composition

Abstract

This paper proposes an Ontology-driven and Community-based Web Services (OCWS) framework which aims at automating discovery, composition and execution of web services. The purpose is to validate and to execute a user’s request built from the composition of a set of OCWS descriptions and a set of user constraints. The defined framework separates clearly the OCWS external descriptions from internal realistic implementations of e-services. It identifies three levels: the knowledge level, the community level and e-services level and uses different participant agents deployed in a distributed architecture. First, the reasoner agent uses a description logic extended for actions in order to reason about: (i) consistency of the pre-conditions and post-conditions of OCWS descriptions and the user constraints with ontologies semantics, (ii) consistency of the workflow matching assertions and the execution dependency graph. Then the execution plan model is generated automatically to be run by the composer agents using the dynamic execution plan algorithm (DEPA), according to the workflow matching and the established execution order. The community composer agents invoke the appropriate e-services and ensure that the non functional constraints are satisfied. DEPA algorithm works dynamically without a priori information about e-services states and has interesting properties such as taking into account the non-determinism of e-services and reducing the search space.