Composing Semantic Web Services Online and an Evaluation Framework

Abstract

This article presents an approach for semantic web service composition using Artificial Intelligence planning techniques. Our research prototype, MADSWAN, is able to support various stages of web service composition, both manually and automatically. It comprises a semantic web service registry, an editor of semantic description files, as well as manual and automatic web service composition modules. The system adheres to the reusable nature of web services, by utilizing existing open source projects as sub-elements. Furthermore, it tackles the problem’s inherent nondeterminism through the use of planning techniques, particularly contingency planning. Finally, we designed a set of evaluation benchmarks for web service composition systems, based on an existing collection of semantically annotated web services, and applied it in part to MADSWAN with very encouraging results.